Chapter 57: A Lesson In Refinement
I woke before the first notch and I sat at the low table in the curriculum room with the lamp burning low, and I wrote the letter to Sun Ai.
The letter took me longer than I had expected it to take. I wrote it twice. The first draft was too formal, the second draft was too familiar, and the third draft was the one I sent.
I told her that I was the son of the woman she had trained forty years ago, that my mother had died eight months previously, and that her grandson had arrived at my Academy as part of the second cohort and had told me that Mother of Healing sat on her bedside table.
I told her that the book had been written by my mother's students, and that the methods recorded in it had begun in her hands and were still moving through villages and clinics across the western and eastern districts, and that she should know how far her teaching had carried.
I told her that her grandson was already showing the steadiness she had taught my mother to value above brilliance.
I asked her to write back when she felt she had the strength, and I told her that there was no urgency, only that I wanted her to know that the line she had begun had not ended.
I sealed the letter with the clinic's mark and I set it on the shelf to be carried to Lanyu by the next courier.
I crossed the yard at the end of the second notch as the cold was lifting off the river.
The four were waiting at the bank where I had told Wei Bolin to bring them. They stood in a rough line in their training tunics with their breath visible on the cold morning air. Wei Bolin stood at the upstream end of the line in his clinic apron with his hair tied back and his hands at his sides. The river behind them ran low and dark in the winter channel, and the willows had begun to silver at the tips with the light of the rising sun.