Chapter 3 — Stones That Remember
At dawn the bells of Lunaris sounded the hour with a restraint I admired. They did not clamor; they arrived. One, two, three notes carried clear over tile and timber, as if the city preferred to be invited awake rather than shaken by the shoulders. From my window, roofs shone with that thin brightness that comes before heat, the river ran like a long thought, and the streets emptied of night's private promises.
Father knocked once on my door and didn't wait—his way of acknowledging I was old enough to be responsible for my readiness. "Walk with me," he said, already halfway down the corridor.
We took our usual path, the garden loop that wrapped the estate like a quiet oath, then down the east steps into the district where the day's first bread made the air taste like charity. Father didn't dress like a man who expected deference; he dressed like a man who found it inconvenient. Even so, doors opened as we passed—not the swinging of hinges, but the small adjustments people make when a person they trust comes near. A stool pulled back from a doorstep. A basket shifted to leave a clear step. A guard's elbow drawn tight to make room.
"Count them," Father murmured.
"I always do," I said, and he allowed himself the sliver of a smile he kept for when I anticipated the lesson.
The fishmonger's stall had its awning already raised despite the sun still being civilized. A cooper leaned his barrel just so, an invitation to step around without breaking stride. The city answered Father with these small courtesies not out of fear, but the way the body answers breath. I counted and then stopped counting, because numbers couldn't hold all the ways a street says we know who you are and we prefer it this way.
At the square we paused for tea at the stall with two stools that were always, miraculously, available. People found us. They never said they had sought us; they arrived as if shocked to discover themselves within speaking distance. A wool merchant with weather in his eyebrows, a clerk whose ink stains were permanent enough to be part of his blood, a mason with dust in the seams of his knuckles. Father asked almost nothing and learned nearly everything.
"Trust is slow work," he said after, walking toward the river. "Faster than ruin, slower than ambition."
"What about mercy?" I asked. I had been thinking of it lately, how it moved—or refused to—between people who could afford it and those who couldn't.
He looked at me sidelong. "Mercy is trust's younger brother. Braver. More foolish. Sometimes that's what you need."
We crossed the bridge where the stone has worn to the memory of a million shoes. I ran my hand over the parapet as we walked. The rock was smooth as a kept promise. Father allowed himself a silent moment with the view—his version of prayer—then turned back toward the lower ward.
The lower ward had its own grammar. Lines of laundry tied to arguments that had been resolved years ago and didn't mind airing themselves. A crier whose voice had learned where to aim itself so it would hit every window just so. Children stepping exactly in their mothers' footprints—not superstition, efficiency. A man in the corner of the square setting up a table for the day's games with the air of a priest preparing an altar.
Between two bakeries—the expensive one that powdered sugar like snowfall and the cheap one that sold bread dark with good intention—stood a brick building with letters on it that looked fresh enough to sting. Indenture Office. It behaved like a well-swept lie: tidy, legal, nearly polite. I had seen it before; seeing it again didn't make it less careful.
A woman with her hair wrapped tight stood in line with a calm that took work. A clerk rehearsed fair words like terms and completion and oversight. They sounded like bridges; they were, I suspected, doors that locked from the outside. Father's jaw tightened the smallest degree and then let go. He did not stop. Neither did I. Some things you do not confront with bare hands in the street, not because they are right, but because they are larger than your impulse and hate being challenged without a plan.
We looped back by the river where a team of keepers hoisted a net of glimmering fish. Their laughter had the confidence of people who knew exactly how difficult their work was and did it anyway. A river-born woman—gill-lines faint along her neck, eyes clear as the shallows—tossed a smaller catch to a boy on the bank who pretended he hadn't been waiting and failed. The stone here had been replaced recently; it remembered the weight of flood and the judgment of engineers. I touched it and told myself to do the same.
By the time we reached the estate, the sun had lifted from its haunches and begun standing properly. I went to the yard and Rook met me with a wooden blade and a nod. His nods were sermons. He set my feet, adjusted a wrist, said, "Breathe," as if I had forgotten how. We began.
Rook taught by attrition. Not words, repetitions. "Let your bones remember it," he said when the cut stuttered. "You won't have time to consult your opinions later." I cut. I missed. I cut again. Sweat replaced the air between my shirt and skin. When he finally raised a hand, I felt the shape of the stance in my muscles like a syllable on my tongue.
"Good," he said. "You're almost useful to yourself."
After drills I washed in the pump's cold iron insistence and then endured the stern mercy of law. Mother had a stack of statutes too dull to be interesting and too important to ignore. I copied On Assemblies and Safety, On Bonds and Service, On Emergency Powers of Proxy Command. The letters were crisp beneath my pen; their meanings dulled me until their edges suddenly showed. Command passes to nearest standing authority… accountability assessed after. The words demanded trust in the people who wore them. The words did not say how to earn that trust. That, I learned, would be the work of other words in other rooms.
When Mother returned, she read my copy with her irritating knack for taking in a page the way I took in a face. "And what does obstruction mean in practice?" she asked.
"It means a good citizen knows when to get out of the way," I recited, because that was the line, and then added, because she would: "It also means power can call anything inconvenient an obstacle."
She tapped the margin with a nail. "Hold both truths. One will keep you from being foolish; the other will keep you from being cruel."
In the afternoon, I reclaimed an hour for the city that belonged to me. I took the narrow stairs behind the dye-makers' row where the river pooled syrup-blue on Tuesdays. The old man with the badly bowed instrument took his usual place two steps down and rasped out a tune that had survived by being stubborn rather than beautiful. He nodded to me without ceremony. I set two coins on the step not because I liked the sound but because being predictable is a service we can offer each other.
On market days there was a woman who sold sprigs of mint. She always knew which handful had not yet decided to wilt. I bought one and tucked it behind my ear while pretending to be the kind of boy who forgot he had done so. The smell made the world seem more honest than it had to be.
Across the lane a boy stole a bun. He was quick, used his shoulders like punctuation. The stall-keeper shouted his grievance to the gods and the nearby guard turned with the easy competence of a man doing a job he had chosen. It was the same pattern as last week, the same sort of boy, the same sort of bun. I did not move this time. Father's words still rang in my bones: Be careful what you teach men about the price of peace. The guard grabbed air where the boy had been and cursed. The stall-keeper kept his hand, for once. The crowd flowed around the event with the fluidity of water passing a stone. I cataloged the names on their faces: annoyance, relief, satisfaction. I filed away the price of a bun in that neighborhood at that hour. Later, I would look for patterns. Now, I let the world perform its same act in case I had misread it the first time.
At home, I wrote: Sometimes the kindest thing is to watch long enough to understand which kindness isn't a trap.
Evenings belonged to stories no one labeled as such. Father would sit at the long table with maps, not the grand ones that dignify walls, but the working maps touched too often to remain pretty. He would smooth a corner and say, "This canal looks fine on parchment. In rain, it steals a street." Or: "Here, the law says the road belongs to the crown. In practice, it belongs to the woman who sweeps it." I stood at his elbow until he did not notice I was there and then a little longer, so that he did.
Mother's stories were quieter. She kept a ledger of names and favors owed that was not written anywhere. People came to the side door in the way a winter wind finds a crack. She did not turn anyone away. She did not promise anything she could not keep. I learned the feel of that, too: how to be a person whose yes meant the same thing at dawn as it had meant at dusk.
On the seventh day of the week—our day of not working, which always seemed to fill itself with the hardest thinking—we walked to the cathedral. Morning light stained the stone in jewel tones, and the faceted figure on the apse held its two hands in their eternal argument: one open, one closed. I studied those hands as if I could earn an answer through attention. Open could mean release. Closed could mean keep. Or the reverse: open, demand; closed, protect. Father bowed his head; Mother did not. My head stayed up, because if a god wanted to be believed, it could meet my eyes.
A young acolyte whispered as we passed: "Three awakenings this week. Two clean, one… loud." The other boy shushed him with the pleasure of shushing, and they went on, robes murmuring around their ankles. I felt the word loud catch against my ribs and stay there like a burr. For the rest of the day I looked at my hands more often than I had the day before.
I did not pray for a particular Sigil. I did not pray not to be disappointed. I only told the unlistening air: If it comes, I will listen back.
The week turned like a page and the city made new sentences out of familiar words. A caravan from the north brought blades that sang against one another and gossip about a breach that refused to close when its chart said it should. The rumor traveled on quiet feet. Dungeons, everyone agreed, were uncooperative; this one had decided to be rude as well. A scholar gave a short talk by the fountain about "lunar tethering"—how certain gates kept schedules no bureaucracy had yet understood. A stonemason snorted that the moon had been telling people what to do as long as there had been tides, and only scholars were surprised by this.
On the wall in Father's study, a corner of a map gathered pins near a place I had only ever tasted in stories. He moved two tokens from perhaps to soon and didn't see me seeing him do it. He smelled of graphite and the kind of worry that prefers to stay busy.
"Will we be called?" I asked that night, too casually to be innocent.
"We are always called," he said, wiping his hands with a rag that had once been a shirt. "The question is whether we are needed."
"And are we?"
"Not today."
He didn't say yet. He didn't have to.
I started a second notebook I kept under the mat in my room. The first held observations I could show to anyone: prices, faces, the number of steps between two corners. The second had questions that looked like accusations even when they were only hope. I wrote: How do you prevent a thing you cannot name? Then: How do you hold mercy without making it cheap? Then, smaller: How do you become a person your city can afford?
On a wet afternoon, I went with Mother to the small healing hall tucked behind the herb-sellers. We brought broth and left with fewer coins. A woman coughed a cough that sounded like an argument she was losing with her own body. A boy with a split lip tried to stand taller when he saw me and failed in a brave way. Mother wrapped a cloth around an old man's hand as if she were binding a book whose pages had begun to come loose. When we left, she said, "Count the beds."
"Ten," I said.
"How many patients?"
"Twelve."
"What does that tell you?"
"That we should have brought more," I said, because I was a child still allowed to answer with the heart first.
She squeezed my shoulder. "And?"
"And that someone is sleeping on a chair," I said. "And that the chair is probably worse for their back than the illness is for their lungs."
"Good," she said. "Now, next time, bring a cushion."
It was such a small instruction, it felt ridiculous. It was such a clear instruction, it felt like a gift.
A week later, the drill bell rang in a cadence I had been taught to know: not a breach here, but nearby. People tightened without snapping. The market shuttered in a practiced sequence that left a corridor open for wardens to pass. A woman who had never met me pressed me to the wall with one hand while gathering her twins with the other. When she realized I did not need shepherding, she nodded and let her hand fall. The wardens jogged, not sprinted. Jogging saves breath for the end; sprinting borrows it from the future. I watched them go and tried to guess from their faces whether this would be a story the city told itself kindly later.
It was not our district. The cadence changed to reassurance. The stallkeepers lifted shutters with the relief of people whose work had merely paused, not ended. A boy mimed a warden's run and almost tripped over his own enthusiasm. I bought three pears because I had to put the adrenaline somewhere. On the way home I ate one and handed two to the bowed-instrument man, who tucked them into his vest as if they were exemptions from some ordinary suffering.
That night at supper, Father said, "You heard?" and I said, "I heard," and we let the conversation take the shape of silence because sometimes speaking is disrespectful to the weight of a thing that chose not to fall on you.
After, I went to the east tower and watched the city exhale its lamps. Light withdrew from windows with the dignity of an old guest. A patrol crossed the square and paused beneath the founder's statue, as if to ask the dead for permission to continue doing what the living had already ordered. Far away—so far the sound had to lean hard to reach me—I heard another bell speaking to another district's evening. It said: We remembered our lines. No one forgot their cue. I leaned my forehead against cold stone and thanked nobody in particular.
The next morning, Father took me to a hearing about road rights. Two men who had been neighbors long enough to become enemies asked the city to choose between them. A tree had grown where maps wanted a straight line. The men wanted meanness validated; the city wanted water to run. Father asked three questions and offered a trial solution—shift the stones three hands, widen the ditch, return in a week. The men left carrying grudges like parcels wrapped too neatly to be opened without regret.
On the steps outside, I said, "You didn't decide."
"I did," he said. "I decided to ask the ground to speak."
"What if it doesn't?"
"It will," he said. "And if it lies, we will learn what kind of liars we're dealing with."
I wrote that down later: Let the ground speak when men refuse to. Then I wrote beneath it: Stones remember. I did not know yet whether that comforted me.
On my tenth name-day's eve, we visited the height-tree board by the market—the one where children mark themselves against wood to prove to time that they are participating. I stretched and stood properly and did not cheat. The girl with the inked thumb pressed my crown the way officials press seals to important paper. I stepped back. KAEL moved up a thumb's breadth exactly. The boy behind me declared he'd pass me by Harvest and I wished him the kind of luck that comes from eating regularly and sleeping in a bed that does not water your bones.
We walked the long way home. Mother spoke to a seamstress about a dress that needed to look like money and kindness at the same time. Father paused to look at a new lamppost whose angle offended him. "We'll have to fix that," he said. "It will make the street look tired." I looked and saw nothing wrong. He tilted my head with two fingers until I did. The pole leaned not enough to be a hazard, enough to be a habit. He was right. The street would learn that lean and teach it to other things. We sent for a man with a level the next morning.
Before sleep, I opened the first notebook and ran my thumb down the pages, feeling the built texture of days. Then I opened the second and wrote: When the door opens, do not run because open doors are rare. Ask who opened it and why. My hand hesitated, then added: Ask if you can afford the room on the other side.
I thought, briefly, of Earth—not of its noise or its lights, but of the feeling of walking between people who could have looked at you and didn't. Lunaris looked. It saw. Sometimes that was a blessing. Sometimes I practiced keeping my face unreadable in the mirror in case it became a burden.
Morning came as it always does in a city that respects schedules. The bells announced themselves. Rook found me before breakfast and tested whether my bones still remembered. They did. Mother set a statute before me I had failed to love and made me love it anyway by teaching me where it could be bent without breaking. Father traced a path on a working map with a charcoal-stained finger and said, "This is where you walk today. Feet on stone. Eyes up. Mouth closed unless you have something that will last."
I went. I counted doors that opened without swinging. I touched a parapet that had survived more winters than any living man. I bought a sprig of mint and remembered to leave a cushion at the healing hall because someone's back deserved a small mercy. I did not fix anything worth a song. I did not ruin anything worth a warning. I made a list. I made a promise I said only to myself: When the city needs more from me than lists, I will have something to give.
For now, the stones remembered. I practiced becoming worthy of their memory.