The Imperial edict arrived three days after the morning.
I say 'the morning' because that was how I had come to think of it in the days since — not the morning of such-and-such a date, not the morning after the audience, but simply the morning: the one that had changed the quality of everything that followed. The crane lantern extinguished. The particular stillness of sitting beside Wei Zhengnan while the city woke around us. The sense of having reached the end of one kind of counting.
The edict arrived through official channels. This was itself significant. It had not been sent through the informal machinery that the court used when it wanted to communicate something without creating a record. It was a formal document, stamped with the seal of the Imperial Secretariat, addressed to the Minister of Revenue Wei Zhengnan, delivered by a courier from the Bureau of Transmission who required a signed acknowledgment of receipt.
I was in the garden when it arrived.
