Chapter 13: The Jar

Cen Yu left before the dawn bell, with the Keeper's pass in his belt and nothing else.

He did not wake Pei Ruo.

He did not know what he would say to her, and he was not ready to hear her say it first.

The road to Willow Ford took half a day, and his left lung caught on every stair.

Three years ago he had run this road in two hours, with a pack, singing.

Now he stopped at each turning of the mountain and put his hand flat on his ribs until the breath came back.

He thought about the thirty-eight pills.

Thirty-eight bowls, drawn off his arm on the thirtieth, boiled down in a room he had never seen, and carried to his mother on the first.

He had been proud of them.

He had told Gao Tie that the Hall kept its word, and that no other employer on the mountain would send a pill to a poor woman for free.

At the foot of the mountain the lowland road began, and the villages along it smelled of river mud and wet charcoal.

Cen Yu could not smell any of it, so he watched instead.

A man sat on a doorstep with a wrapped chest, and a child fanned him with a cabbage leaf.

A woman in the next yard had a cloth tied across her mouth.

Every third house had a grey paper slip pinned above the door, the Hall's mark for a family that paid for its pills.

He had never counted them before.

He counted them now, and stopped at forty, because there were more every year.

His mother was at the washing stones when he came down the bank.

She knelt at the edge of the river with her sleeves tied back and a wet sheet in her arms.

She was thinner than the autumn before, and the sheet looked heavier than she was.

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