Chapter 20: The Elder's Table

"Sit," said Dan Qiu again, and poured three cups.

Cen Yu did not sit.

Pei Ruo stood at his shoulder with the cloth held to her mouth, and her scarred hands were shaking.

"You took her from the Insect House," Cen Yu said. "You burned the Pill Room."

"I burned an outer chamber and a shelf of tea water. The register was not in it."

The Elder smiled.

"I counted on that. I wanted it carried up to the Abbot, so the Council would sit and the Seat would be voted."

"You wanted the vote?"

"I wanted you in that chair. I could not open the Garden door myself, you see. Only a Seat can. For two hundred years there was none."

Cen Yu felt the thing come together in his head, piece by piece, and hated every piece.

The Seat, the Mother Gu, the Garden, and Pei Ruo as the lure that made him take all three.

"Seven Hall Seats ate the Mother Gu and died," said the Elder. "I have read how each one went. I have wanted a Seat who lived."

He set down his teapot.

Then he opened his robe.

Pei Ruo made a sound behind her cloth.

His chest was white and thin as old paper, and a seam of ancient stitches ran down the breastbone.

Under the skin, small shapes were moving.

They slid under his ribs and over his belly and along the muscles of his arms.

They stopped when a moth passed close, and the shapes shifted toward it, and turned away.

"I was seventy," said Dan Qiu. "A tea-picker's grandson, like you. I had the wasting cough, and I had a year."

"A man from the temple sold me a moth. It was the first Lung Moth, and it was dying, and so was I."

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