Chapter 26: The Tutor

Ming started the petition before breakfast. She sat at the desk in her room on the morning of the twenty-fifth with the lamp still lit against the dark and a fresh sheet of the good paper, the white paper, the Dragon Spring paper that she had bought from her father two years ago and never had a reason to use. She ground the ink slowly. She wrote at the top, in her best hand, which was still not a good hand: A Petition for the Restoration of a Struck Name. Then she sat and looked at it, and smiled, and didn't know she was doing it until Nine said, from the corner, "You're smiling at a piece of paper." "It's a good piece of paper." "It's the best paper you own, and you've written six words on it." He was sitting against the bookshelf in his gray robe with the…