They sold names like bread in the lower lanes of Aeldran: wrapped, stamped, priced. A child's first name could be had for a spool of ribbon; a widow's married name fetched a pot of broth and a promise. The richest names — guildmasters, magistrates, saints — were kept behind lock and ledger, traded in velvet-lined rooms where the air tasted of candle wax and worry. People came to the market for what the City had decided every being needed: an anchor.
Miro Vesh sold the cheap things. His stall was half a canopy and a stack of scrap paper, a dented tin of ink, and a steady hand that made letters curl like small, obedient fish. He could write the sweep of all forty-seven official glyphs in the time it took someone else to cough. Mothers bought him out for petitions and apologies; lovers hired him to scribe whispers on ribbon. He made do. He did not bind names — not really. No one in the lanes called him a Weaver.
"Ari," he told a boy and folded the paper with a careful edge, "this says Ari, and because I wrote it, the saying's on you now. Be good." The boy grinned and slipped the ribbon into his shirt. Miro watched the name warm in the boy's pocket like a small coin.
When he moved his pen across a name, he felt nothing in his bones. A Weave-practitioner's callsong — that humming, the small whirl of warmth as a name let itself be read — sang in other men but never in him. He had "low resonance," the market whispered. A person with low resonance could be useful as a clerk, a courier, or, if luck or cruelty turned the wheel, a scrawl-for-hire for people who wanted names written but not bound. It was a quiet life. It was safe enough.
A convoy rolled into the lane with pommels clinking and boots drumming stone. The captain's horse had a blue tassel, and his banner had a counted crest: a silver loom crossed with a raven. Wealth walked slow; wealth walked loud, and the people who worked with names leaned out of doorways to watch. Miro straightened his back. It was easier to look away when wealth showed its face.
They never saw the bandits until the first bowstring sang.
The attack was a spill of noise and flame. Men in masks leapt from the shadows with hooked knives that took ribbons and cloak alike. The convoy's escort — eight men in chain, all bearing registered sigils down their arms — fell into the street like carved puppets. A child's shriek scattered pigeons.
Miro ducked behind the canopy. He had no sword. He had a single shard of bone — a writing nib worn smooth from scraping names into scraps — and two brittle hands that could write a petition faster than you could shout "Namekeeper." He also had the habit of watching details that other people thought too small to matter.
A man with the convoy fell over the cart, shaking blood from his lips. His wrist still held the band: a thin strip of copper threaded with a hair and stamped with a name in shallow etchings. The band hummed — faint at first, then like something remembered in a dream. The sound hit Miro in the ribs, like someone unlocking the wrong room in a house and letting the light rush in. For a dizzy second there was a song inside the copper that he had never heard, and then the soldier's hand fell limp.
Instinct did what training or sense did not. Miro darted forward. He clove a strip of his own canvas and, half-sob, half-prayer, wound it around the copper band. He had seen weavers do worse in backrooms and gutter-alleys: take a scrap and give it a name and a job, feed the new stitch a drop of blood for weight. Miro pressed the nib to his palm until the pain made the ink blot crimson and, acting without thinking, dipped the nib and scratched a single glyph of intent into the canvas.
It should not have done anything. He had no resonance. The market's gossip would have been right — he should have been a clerk, a caller, a man who never touched a sword or the hot live wood of a binding.
The copper sang.
It was as small as a heartbeat, and then larger. A frayed strand of light uncoiled from the band and braided itself into the canvas. Miro's fingers spasmed. A memory that was not his — cold rain on a night march, a brother's laugh, the angle of a blade entering a target — lanced into him like someone pressing a thumb into his skull and reading a page aloud. His muscles remembered longer motions he had never learned. He did not know how to stand a line or parry a cross, but his hands moved with the certainty of a man who had been shown a path a thousand times.
He swung.
It was awkward, ridiculous. He had never held a weapon except for a broken stick as a child. But the copper band drove a small thread into him and that thread gave him the echo of a soldier's body, and the echo taught him how to twist and throw a weight. The first attacker reeled under a flailing arc that would have been graceless in any school but staggered the man enough for the cart to topple and a wheel to crush his legs.
People shouted. The second attacker lunged for the cart. Miro found a plank, hefted it with both hands, and moved as if a voice inside him were counting off the strikes. He ducked, pivoted, and struck. The plank cracked against bone. Someone screamed. Then he was on his knees, breathing fire, with blood on his palms that was not his.
He had stolen something that a name still owned: the practice, the small, acquisitive habit of a soldier. Names did not give you everything — a name of a master smith would not instantly make you a master smith; a name of a scholar would not let you solve a law puzzle in an instant. But they gave you echoes. They lent tasks, they lent muscle memory, they lent the map to a skill if you had the right token and the right intent.
When the dust settled the convoy men were on their feet, dazed. The bandit leader slunk away into the alleys with a curse and a handful of coins. The City did not reward those who ambushed a wealthy caravan unless the caravan could pay for it. For now, the place was a bruise on the street and a story that would be stitched into the gossip.
Miro sat on a broken crate and let the world reassemble itself. The copper band on his wrist had gone cold. The piece of canvas where he had bound it smelled faintly of smoke and salt. The memory had not left; it pooled like a small river under his ribs. He could still see the angle of the blade; he could still taste the rain on a night that had not been his.
Someone touched his shoulder. A woman's fingers, narrow and deliberate. He looked up.
She wore plain clothes, but the way she held herself said she had never chased after a cart. Her hair was braided into a single rope that swung across her chest. Her eyes were the color of pounded iron. She smiled the sort of smile that was unreadable — not kind nor cruel but practiced. She was not alone. Behind her, in the shadow of an alley, a robed figure watched with a face like a ledger: blank, closed.
"You bound a name in the street," the woman said. Her voice was low and edged like a knife that had been used and put away. "You used blood as weight."
Miro's ribs burned. He wanted to tell her he had to, that the boy in the cart could have been squashed. He wanted to say the copper had sung at him and he couldn't help but answer. Instead his throat worked and he managed, "I— I helped."
"You did more than that." She crouched, close enough that he smelled the dust of old paper on her. "You absorbed a fray. Most people cannot take them. With a frayed token you take fragments — a strike, a look, a hurt. There are rules. You broke one."
Behind her, the robed watcher stirred. Miro followed the motion and saw the thread tied to a sign of office: the Namekeeper's mark — a thin spiral that said, in blunt lore, we record and we punish.
"Namekeepers?" Miro said. The word felt like a stone in his mouth.
The woman's smile sharpened. "They will not come for dust-scratches like you if you can explain it away as a trick of the light. They will come if someone with a recorded sigil claims a theft. The man you used — Captain Tharn Mal — is registered. He carries a high-weight name. Taking even a fray of a registered name is… poorly advised."
"Tharn Mal?" The name came with another memory unbidden: a stern laugh and the scent of pine. He had felt it when he bound the band — a man who thought the world necessary and small. Miro looked at the band on his wrist. It had been warm and then cold. He had not given it back.
"For now," the woman said, "you are between things. You could hand yourself in. The Namekeepers ensure order. Or you could come with me and learn to do this properly."
Miro laughed, a small, split sound. "Learn to steal names properly?"
She considered him like a book she had not read yet. "Names are not stolen when taken from a battlefield. They're rescued. There are people who collect such frays and heal them, who train the Hollows—the ones who can take frayed thread without cracking. You are a Hollow. That is rare. That is dangerous. That is valuable."
Behind her, the robed figure stepped into the light. The spiral on his chest gleamed. "You took the Nametag of a registered captain. We will file an incident if he wakes and finds his token missing."
Miro pressed both hands to the band. It lay flat and dumb on his skin like a coin. He could feel Tharn Mal's memory as if he were holding his palm over a candle: warmth and a small, stubborn pride. He had given himself something he did not own. He had saved a child and perhaps doomed himself.
The woman rose. "You have choices, Miro Vesh of the lower lane." She spoke his name like a thread. Somewhere, in the back of his memory where ink had dried on old orders, someone might have written it before. "You can go with the spiral and make up a lie about a bar fight. Or you can come with me. The first will lead to a ledger and a cell. The second may lead to a loom."
She extended a hand. Her palm had callouses like a page turned often. The robed Namekeeper's presence tightened the air. Miro's life — small, ink-stained, and safe — sat across the street where the stall was still half-standing, a half-formed ribbon with a name written in a neat curl.
Miro looked at the band on his wrist and then at his hand. His fingers trembled, either from the fight or from the echo still living inside them. He slid his pen into his pocket. He had been a writer of names all his life; he had never imagined a name would one day fall back into his lap like a living thing.
He took her hand.
Behind them, the market began to piece itself back together. The child who had been saved clutched his ribbon and squealed once. Somewhere a bell started to toll, a dull chime that meant business as usual in Aeldran. But as they walked away, the copper band at Miro's wrist hit the light and a faint stitch of sound leaked through the weave of the city, like a note bending in the wind.
The spiral on the Namekeeper's cloak did not look pleased.