Chapter 23: The New Law

They carried Cen Yu up out of the Garden on a door, because his leg would not take his weight.

He told them it didn't hurt, and Gao Tie told him to stop saying that.

Before the sun went, the courier boy rode down the mountain on his mule.

He carried a spoon of Cen Yu's blood in a stoppered flask, and it would hold his mother's cough through the night.

Cen Yu would come himself at dawn.

The cure had to be given by hand, and his legs were not his own yet.

The Abbot's healers bound the thigh.

At dusk the Council sat in the courtyard again, on the dais.

The Hall's chair stood in the middle, and the crust of snow had been swept off it.

Cen Yu sat in it because he was told to, with his leg up on a stool.

"The Hall has no Elder," said Su Jingzhi. "It has a Master, chosen by its Seat."

"The Seat has chosen himself."

"I haven't," said Cen Yu.

"You will. Someone must sign the first law."

"You are the only one in this courtyard who cannot be bribed with a pill."

A few of the Medicine Brothers laughed, shakily.

Cen Yu looked at the six hundred faces.

He was nineteen, he could not read, and he had a hole in his thigh.

He thought of the fifty-one.

"Then here is the law," he said. "No more vessels."

"Every thumbprint in the Long Shed is void, and the Hall pays every debt on it."

"The grey pill is not made again. Not for a family, and not for a lowland lord."

"And the Garden is mine to keep. I will burn what must be burned."

"Every cough in the valley comes to me, and I cure it free."

He had never spoken so many words in front of so many people.

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