Chapter 28: Lianxiang

By the twenty-eighth, she could see the books through his shoulders. She noticed it at dawn, when he sat down in the corner of her room with the blanket falling away and the pale light coming in at the window behind him. The spines of her books were dark and soft-edged in the line of his collarbone, like the bottom of a well under still water. She looked at it. She made herself. Then she lit the brazier. She hadn't slept. At the fourth watch she had given up and gone down to the Hall, and he had come after her because he had to, and sat at the end of the reading table with the lamp. She took down the prefecture's yearly copy for the year of his striking. With the iron key from her sleeve she took the First Writing for the same year out of the cage,…