Chapter 60: Pei Dog
The morning after the executions was quiet.
The four wicker basins had been cleared and burned in the back of the garrison yard. The four entries had been recorded in the ledger that now hung from a long iron hook in the commons, under a small wooden roof that Bolin had built that morning to keep the rain off the parchment.
I had risen at the second notch before the dawn, written for an hour at the curriculum room, and gone down to the river to wash my hands and my face in the cold water before the rest of the compound began to move.
By the first notch I was at the eastern porch with the cohort, sitting the breath cycle. Lin Zhi held the line on her third sit, eyes shut, shoulders settled in the way I had been training them to settle.
Then the shouting reached us from the commons.
"You filthy Pei dog! Look at her!"
The voice was a young man's. A second voice picked up the chant, yelling "Pei dog" in unuson.
Then a third.
I rose.