Chapter 2 — City of Small Oaths
In Lunaris, even the errands wore their best manners.
Father liked to walk rather than ride when the weather allowed. He said a city's truth hid in the gaps between hoofbeats—the places wheels couldn't go and courtiers refused to look. I trotted at his side as far as my legs would permit and pretended the length of my stride was a choice rather than a fact. From the hill our estate sat upon, the streets unrolled like neat ribbon down to the river where the light made a habit of resting every afternoon.
"Count the doors that open when we pass," Father said on one of those mornings. "Not the ones that swing, the ones that open."
I frowned up at him. "What's the difference?"
"Swinging is wood. Opening is welcome."
It sounded like the kind of thing grown men said to each other when they wanted to sound like they weren't guessing. I counted anyway. Shopfronts that lifted their shutters even though business could have waited. A baker who set a tray out a finger-length over his threshold. A guard who shifted his stance—only half a step—so that the space between us felt less like a line and more like a road. By the time we reached the square, I had a number and a feeling. The number mattered less than the feeling.
We took tea at a stall that always had exactly two empty stools no matter how busy it was. Father drank his without sugar. I made a ceremony of sweetening mine, the way boys do when they want to make a small thing last longer. People came to our table: a steward from the lower wards with the kind of exhaustion that prefers accuracy to apology; a fence-maker whose hands smelled of cedar and stubbornness; a clerk with ink on his cuff who forgot, three times, to shake Father's hand and remembered, three times, to look him in the eye. Father listened, asked a question or two, and gave answers that could be carried without wrapping paper.
"Why not just fix all of it?" I asked afterward, walking the curb and pretending it was a wall high enough to matter.
"Because 'all' is a liar," he said. "Start where it bleeds."
Mother's lessons started where things breathed. She set me by the high window with parchment and a pen that made an honest scratch. "Write what the city says," she told me, and left me to find a language that wasn't made of words.
So I wrote in lists and angles. The fishmonger's call that rose a note higher when he saw a familiar face. The boy who ran messages for the guildhall and took a longer route on purpose because it passed the bakery that sprinkled sugar while the dough was still warm. The woman who sold sprigs of mint and carried herself like someone who used to carry heavier things. When I finished, Mother took the page and tapped once at the bottom where I'd written, The city wants to be good if you let it.
"Cities don't want," she said softly. "People do. Don't give your hope to stone."
I copied my line again, this time with an asterisk beside people. That made it true enough to keep.
---
I told myself I wasn't going to think about Earth. The past had been a room with a light that burned too long; when I closed the door, I wanted the dark to be a kindness. But memories have a talent for leaving windows open. In sleep, I heard tires hissing on wet roads and woke to rain on the tile roof. In a crowded street, a flash of reflected faces in a windowpane turned into an elevator door before I could blink. The ache in those moments felt like the ghost of something I couldn't name properly without waking it.
Curiosity tugged. Why me? Why here? I let the questions tug the way a fish tugs a line you have no intention of reeling. Then I set the rod down and went back to the life in my hands. Second chances are not puzzles. They're bread. You eat them while they're warm.
The house moved on its rails. In the mornings I practiced with the wooden blade until my fingers understood it better than my pride did. The guard captain—Rook, a man whose shoulders had grown opinions about weather—pushed my front foot a hair forward, back foot a hair back, lifted my chin with the back of his knuckle.
"Your eyes look for the horizon," he said. "Find your opponent first. You can take the horizon later if you're still interested."
I wanted to say I was always interested in horizons. Instead I breathed, stepped, cut, missed, stepped again. When my arms shook, he made a small approving sound. "Good," he said. "Your limits finally came to practice."
On three afternoons each week, I copied laws. Mother claimed she didn't need a dozen transcriptions of "On Public Assemblies and Safety," but she kept them in a box anyway. "You'll forget what you haven't written," she said. I suspected she meant more than words. I copied until the clauses stopped wriggling and became animals I could name. Command passes to the nearest standing authority… accountability assessed after. There was a comfort in the dullness of it, the way stones comfort you by giving your feet something honest to stand on.
Afterward, I escaped to the city. There were corners I liked—places that hadn't been designed for boys but tolerated me as if I were a necessary mistake. A staircase that led nowhere in particular and therefore belonged to everyone. A bench under a crooked plane tree where the leaves always fell a beat later than the wind said they should. A sliver of riverbank behind the dye-makers' row where the water turned improbable colors on Tuesdays and no one pretended to know why.
Once, at that staircase, I found a man reading a book of poems as if it were a map and he had already gotten lost twice. His sleeves were patched with care, his boots dappled with the city's memory. I sat three steps down and took out my own book—a ledger of numbers I was making mine. We read in the quiet accord of strangers who are not strangers to quiet. When he rose to go, he placed a small sprig of rosemary on the step between us and nodded. I nodded back. There are kinds of wealth the taxman can't count.
---
The first time I saw a Sigil drawn into daylight, I forgot to breathe. It was at a training yard two streets over from the watch-house, the sort of place that didn't mind if boys gawked at strength so long as the gawking didn't trip anyone. A visiting knight wore his hair braided with tiny copper rings that chimed when he laughed. He held out his palm and light crisped over skin—the shape of a spiral, not smooth but ridged like rope. It flared, and an invisible grip closed around the straw dummy. The dummy's frame creaked, pulled together too tightly, then sprang back when the light withdrew.
Men murmured. Boys imitated the gesture, hands to air, without success. I heard someone say "Solmere" under their breath, and someone else say, with equal respect and irritation, "They always show off."
Father stood beside me long enough for me to notice that he did not clap. When the knot of spectators loosened, he spoke low. "Constraint," he said, "is useful in the hands of a patient man. In the hands of a fearful one, it turns everything into a threat that must be tied."
"What would you do with it?" I asked.
"Learn when not to use it," he said, and let the silence after be the rest of the lesson.
That night I lay awake imagining what light might choose me. Fire? Sword? The book-shaped mark I'd traced a hundred times from the margins of old texts? I tried to imagine waking to a power that felt like a sentence I had been writing my whole life without knowing it. Then I made myself stop. I didn't want to scare anything off by wanting it too loudly.
Between such imaginings, life threaded itself. The market changed costumes with the season. In spring, fresh greens sold with their roots still daring the air; in summer, piles of fruit that had the decency to bruise when you reached too greedily; in autumn, nuts you had to work at to earn; in winter, the fat pleasure of stews that forgave a day's mistakes. I made a survey of bakers and declared, privately and without statistical rigor, a favorite. When he caught me counting customers one morning, he winked like he had been winning small competitions all his life and didn't mind that I had invented another one.
Festival nights painted the river with lanterns that rowed themselves. The Moon-Fair came and the dancers' masks looked like faces a god might try on to see if they fit. I pressed my hand to the painted height tree, just as I had the year before, and my name edged up the trunk a thumb's breadth. A boy beside me whooped when he did the same and said, to no one in particular, "I will touch the lowest branch by next year." His certainty was contagious; I let it run through me like a fever I didn't mind keeping.
Beneath the songs and stalls, the city did its unromantic work. Notices went up about inspections along the eastern canal. A drill sounded two short bells and a long—the signal for a breach-response practice rather than a breach itself. Watchmen adjusted their routes by a block. In the council hall, a map gathered pins like a habit.
I learned that drills had rules kinder than reality. In reality, teams would run; in drills, they walked fast enough to be worried and slow enough to learn. In reality, orders snapped; in drills, they were spoken twice. That mercy belonged to practice alone. It made me grateful for practice and hungry for competence.
"Leave room for learning," Mother said as we watched the false-alarm wagons roll past. "If you fill a day with fear, nothing else fits."
I tried to leave room. The world had a way of rushing to fill whatever I made.
---
The first crack I saw in Lunaris wasn't loud. It didn't even look like a crack. It looked like a line of people outside a red-brick building near the river where the lamps were always a little too clean.
Indenture Office, the sign said in paint that had not learned to chip yet.
No chains. No shouting. No rough hands. Only a clerk with a tidy ledger, a woman with a tired baby, a man whose boots were too thin for the work he was about to sign for. A posted paper listed terms that could have passed a council vote: debt structured into days, housing promised in exchange for service, release on completion, oversight guaranteed. It was easy to read the black ink and miss the gray between the lines.
I stood long enough to know that standing longer would teach me nothing new and invite something I was not ready to answer. On the way home, I bought two pears I didn't want and gave one to the old man who played his bowed instrument badly and received coin because he had been in that spot longer than any law on the books. He said, "You've got the look of a boy who is going to argue with paper." I said, "Only the parts that lie."
The second crack came wrapped in a lesson about roads.
A pair of farmers had brought a map to Father—land sloped wrong, water pooled where it should have run, a path that had existed in memory longer than in law. They argued with the agitation of men who had been patient too long and were trying, for the sake of their grandmothers, to be patient a little more. Father spread the map, listened with a stillness that could be sharpened into a blade if someone were foolish enough to mistake it for indifference, and finally gave them not a decision but a trial: reset the stones three hands west, widen the ditch by two spades, come back in a week.
"And if it doesn't work?" one demanded, fear and pride painting his voice into a color he didn't like.
"Then it doesn't," Father said. "And I will have failed with you instead of at you."
They left with their backs in an argument with their shoulders. I folded the map and felt the weight that men carried when they named themselves the reason a field behaved. There are powers more dangerous than Sigils. One of them is responsibility that cannot be proven until you have already spent it.
I tried to tell Mother about the office and the farmers without sounding like a child who had learned a new word and wanted to wear it everywhere. She listened, then made me tea with a slice of orange floating like a bright idea.
"Some things need naming," she said. "Some need numbers. Some need to be kept in your pocket until you have a place to put them."
"What if I never find a place?"
"Then you're carrying the wrong things," she said, and smiled not to soften it but because she knew the truth would bruise me and trusted me to heal.
---
Rook taught me to fall without flailing. "If you're going to meet the ground, do it like a planned appointment," he said, and demonstrated a dozen ways for the earth to receive me without complaint. The first time I managed not to bark my elbows, he grunted. "Your body has stopped arguing with gravity," he said. "It's a good sign. You'll still lose to it, but you won't embarrass yourself doing it."
I did not embarrass myself often. I did, however, enjoy small, private victories so much that I pretended not to notice them. The first time I threaded three cuts into a rhythm that felt like a sentence, I said nothing at supper and ate as if bread had never tasted so earnestly like bread. The first time I carried two ledgers' worth of numbers in my head all the way from the council hall to the steward's office without dropping a single digit, I let myself smile in the courtyard where only the fountain could see me.
Word traveled that I learned fast. I didn't argue with it, and I didn't confirm it. People like to name what they think they can use. I made myself unhelpful to the word by being reliable instead.
Scholars came and went. I was too young for the academy, not too young for public lectures if I sat quietly and didn't ask questions that put the speaker's back up. I learned about river rights, about the legal fiction of neutral ground, about census counts and why numbers might prefer to be rounded down in official reports. In one lecture a scholar compared ancient scripts etched on stones to the geometric logic of Sigils. He drew lines on a slate that made my eyes ache from trying to make them mean more than they were willing to. Another scholar scoffed that humans see patterns where only weather exists.
I wrote both views down. Then, in the margin, I drew a small square and wrote: Keep an eye on this. Sometimes the best you can do is tell your future self where to look.
News from elsewhere arrived as polite as visiting relatives and as disruptive. A caravan from the north brought metal that rang clean when you tapped it. Sailors from Solmere told a story about a dungeon that breathed like a sleeping beast and spit out birds that refused to die even when you turned their heads the wrong way. A pair of stonekin merchants—short, deliberate, built like doorways—argued over the price of gravel like the future of art depended on it. A river-born courier with the faint gill-lines of her people took tea without salt and left behind a rumor: a breach far inland that hadn't closed when it should have. She said it quietly, the way women say the names of storms before they've earned their capital letters.
I did not write that one down. I folded it and slid it into the place in me where unfinished maps wait.
---
On a morning pricked with cold, I made a mistake that felt like three wise decisions wearing a coat.
A boy too thin for the season darted from a stall with a bun in his hand. The stallkeeper roared, the nearest guard pivoted with the efficiency of a man who enjoyed his hours, and the crowd opened the way we open our palms for something we pretend not to be complicit in. I stepped into the boy's path and raised a coin I had no right to wave. He stopped because hunger has good eyes. We traded—coin for bun, bun for coin—without speaking. The guard slowed, measured me, and decided that the trouble had lowered itself to an acceptable level.
The stallkeeper took my coin. He also took the opportunity to look at my coat and adjust the price upward by the weight of my inheritance. I paid it. I can live with petty theft when it keeps a knuckle from a small jaw.
That evening Father set his knife down on the side of his plate and looked at me, not like a lord at a subject, not like a father at a son, but like a man at another man who needed to hear a thing once and then never again.
"You bought peace," he said.
"I bought time," I said, defensive because a small part of me wanted applause and another part knew I'd made myself feel at ease more than I had made anything right.
"Peace," he repeated. "Time is included. Be careful you don't teach him that a good outcome requires a noble witness."
"What should I have done? Let him get hit?"
"No," he said. "Today, perhaps that was the least-bad path. Tomorrow, find the baker's ledger and see why he raises prices at dusk, ask the guard's captain why patrols pass this stall three times more often than the one across the lane, and then ask yourself if you have the patience to fix something that won't thank you."
"I'm nine," I said before I could stop myself.
"You are," he agreed. "So be nine today. Be ready for the rest when it comes."
I wanted to argue that ready meant now. I ate my stew instead and let the lesson stand where he had set it.
---
If the city loved anything, it loved rules about candles. Curfew for street flames in three districts by the river, free lighting in the square on the last day of each month, fines for lanterns hung too low over a public way. Fire had a memory and the city had no interest in giving it a story to tell. I learned the rules because the rules were really about people—who needed light, who could afford it, who decided whether darkness was a problem or a policy.
Mother took me to the cathedral only on quiet days. We lit no candles. We stood and let the light through the stained glass make our skin briefly expensive. The mural of the faceted figure with two hands—one open, one closed—held my gaze as if it had gotten in the habit and didn't mind keeping it. I couldn't tell if the open palm released or demanded. I couldn't tell if the closed fist held or hid. I liked not knowing. Some questions are useful the way a whetstone is useful.
We passed a group of initiates going the other direction, a cluster of children moving like a single creature with a dozen beating hearts. One stumbled and laughed and then did not laugh because the moment had looked at him and he hadn't liked what he saw on its face. A steward watched them go, hands tucked in sleeves, lips moving as if counting. I felt the calm of the place settle into me like sand finds the lines of a shell.
Outside, merchants argued about tariffs in the language of discounts. A woman with a scar down one cheek pressed folded paper into Mother's hand without anyone seeing and walked away with the posture of someone who accepts consequences before they arrive. Mother palmed the note as if it were a coin too hot for daylight. We took a longer route home. She did not read it until the kitchen door had closed behind us and the steam from the kettle had risen like a curtain. I did not ask. I am not patient by nature, but I am teachable.
---
Time bent. One day I was seven, then I was eight, then I was nine, and each number fit like a coat you could still grow into a bit more. People began to take me seriously in ways I did not trust. The baker gave me a fraction more change than he owed me, the way a man pours a little extra beer for someone he wants to see again. The steward left a page from a budget open and went to get another pen, which is what men do when they want a boy to read something without being accused of reading it. Rook started letting me call the final drill of the day on the yard, not because I was clever but because speaking out loud teaches a different lesson than thinking.
Sometimes I failed small and in private. I miscounted crates on a dock by two and had to watch a woman with three children explain to a man with no patience why her inventory didn't balance. I apologized. She pocketed the apology like a coin she could spend later and told me to go home. I went. Then I learned how that dock took deliveries and you may guess that I never miscounted there again.
I read histories that were not for children and discovered that histories were not for adults either, not the way they were written. They were for victors and those who preferred their pain to be footnoted. I copied names from the margins—the losers, the traitors, the men and women who had wanted a slightly different slope to a road and were crushed under a wheel that couldn't be bothered to check the angle. I did not yet know what to do with those names. I made a place for them anyway.
And always, at the edges, talk of dungeons. Not in Lunaris, not yet, but close enough that the maps on Father's wall looked more like weather than furniture. Men debated "response time" like it was a number you could negotiate with. A woman from the academy gave a public talk where she insisted that certain gates had rhythms—openings that pulsed like veins, growth that answered invisible tides. Another scholar called her romantic. She called him unobservant. I admired them both for doing their work loudly where boys could learn what adults pretended not to know.
When a drill siren finally sounded in earnest—a single long bell followed by three short—I was in the market buying vinegar because I had gotten interested in stains and their pride. The air tightened. It didn't panic. A line of wardens broke into a lope that kept their breaths available for instructions. A clerk unrolled a map and weighted its corners with jars of pickled peppers. The noise of commerce bent itself into usefulness: stalls closed in a sequence that left a corridor free, children were gathered by the scruff of their coats by every adult within reach, someone's hand found mine and then realized I was not the kind of child who needed holding and let go.
It was not our district. We learned that within a minute. The bell cadence changed to reassurance. I watched the space the wardens had made remain open long after it was no longer required. Habit is a kind of architecture.
I went home by the long way. On the bridge I stopped and watched the river push itself under us as if it had been promised a destination and was determined to arrive even if it had to invent one. I thought about the word breach and how it sounded like something breaking and something being born. I thought about Sigils, about whether the world chose or we did. I thought about bread, because I was a boy and hunger, too, insists upon its place in every philosophy.
At supper, Father said, "You heard?"
"I heard."
"We were not called," he said.
"Good," I said, though I didn't know if I meant it. He did not ask me to decide on the spot.
Mother passed me the salt and the habit of not naming fears in front of the soup. We ate. After, I went to my room and copied a law I didn't like until I understood why men who were better than the law still believed in it.
Before I slept, I stood at the window and put my hand against the pane the way I had when I was small enough to leave a whole palm of fog. The city breathed. The house kept its quiet promises. Somewhere, beyond the line I could see, the world rehearsed being loud.
I did not knock on the door to hurry it. I did not pray for it to stay closed. I lay down and let the steady machinery of Lunaris work me toward morning.
When it came, I would be there to meet it.