Everyone on the mountain said that fate was written on paper, and what was written could not be changed.

After seven years copying the ledgers in the Hall of Destinies, Xie Wujiu knew that was only half true. The paper could not be changed. The people who wrote on it, however, grew sleepy, drank wine, and sometimes let their ink freeze solid in winter. So a man meant to drown at twenty lived to twenty-one; a woman promised a long life lost her name on the eve of her wedding.

Every day, Xie Wujiu’s job was to copy the errors into a clean ledger. Where the errors came from was a question the Hall forbade him to ask.

On the day of the first frost, he was given a thin old volume. Three characters were written on its cover: Xie Wujiu.

He thought someone was playing a joke on him. Then he opened it, and his smile slowly vanished. The date of birth was his. The hometown was his. It even recorded the left front tooth his mother had knocked loose when she caught him stealing fruit from the offering table at seven. At the end, in red ink, was a line: Died at sixteen, after falling into a well.

He was twenty-three.

Beneath the red writing lay a thinner sheet, in a different hand: Deferred for one year. There was a second sheet, and a third, and a fourth, seven in all. Someone had signed their name in the lower right corner of each. The first six signatures had faded beyond recognition. The ink on the last was still wet.

Xie Wujiu held it up to the window. Through the ink, he recognized his mother’s handwriting.

A funeral bell sounded outside. Three strokes: an ordinary death in the village below. A junior clerk on night duty came running upstairs, his face white as paper. “Senior Xie, the ledger has written a new page by itself. The person marked to die tomorrow is your mother.”

Looking at the sheet of damp ink in his palm, Xie Wujiu finally understood where his extra years had come from.

He picked up the red brush and wrote two words beside his mother’s name: I forbid it.