Chapter 36: Truce

On the night of the third she poled them out onto the lake. She didn't pole them across. She took the ferry away from the landing at the first watch, after Liulang's cup, which he'd come up for and drunk without a word and gone down again, and poled it out past the post and into the middle of the narrows where the lake was deepest and darkest and nobody ever went at night because there was nothing to go for. Then she shipped the pole and let the ferry drift. The lamp burned on its pole at the stern. Its light made a small gold room on the black water, with walls of dark. Outside it there was nothing but the stars, and the far shapes of the hills, and the frogs going on the north bank, small and far away. Fish sat in the bow and she sat…