Chapter 16 — A Map Drawn by Footsteps
Morning came scrubbed clean, as if the night had taken a brush to the sky. On my windowsill, a folded paper breathed in the draft—thin, careful, tied with plain twine. The ward runner must have slipped it there before first bell. My mother's hand knew how to be both steady and tired at once.
Kael, it began, the K like a hinge. Your father woke early and walked the east wall. He says the mortar holds and the gulls complain in a healthier register. That is how he says he misses you. We are proud in ways that refuse to be useful; forgive us. Eat. Rest. Keep good company with quiet things.
The line about quiet things sat on my tongue longer than the others. I folded the paper and tucked it into the ledger's inside cover where the names live. I have discovered that letters weigh nothing when you carry them and everything when you try to put them down.
The notice board outside the ward office had developed a new layer like tree rings. Assay Results Posted — Materials Recall Initiated. Beneath, a copyist's hand had already transcribed the batch numbers with pitiless neatness; a second sheet listed inspection times for joints set in the last eight weeks. Someone had doodled a tiny rope knot in the margin, a joke with good posture.
Ilvine's people had done their work also. On the opposite wall: Innovation Fair — Safety in the Modern Age! Demonstrations, Refreshments, Partnerships. The exclamation point shone as if it had been polished.
"Look at him," Darius said, appearing at my shoulder with a cup of something that smelled like burned sweetness. "Only a man who believes applause can be trained would try to schedule it."
"I believe habits can be trained," I said. "Applause is what you give a habit when you're too tired to keep it standing."
Darius sipped and made a face he would never allow witnesses if he could help it. "Well, your habit drew blood yesterday. The Cooperative has sent a man to apologize to the south braces, and Ilvine has sent a man to apologize to everyone who might write about it."
"Good," I said. "We need them both busy."
He looked sideways at me. "You're smiling."
"I'm not."
"You are—inwardly. It's unsettling."
I left him to his cup and the satisfaction of finding someone else more unsettling than he was.
The warden's assembly had shrunk back to its ordinary size, which meant the people who loved paper more than power were in their element. "Take a team to the north braces," he told me, pointing with a pencil. "Quarter-load test. Witnesses, signatures, no heroics."
"Tarr and Rhoen," I said. "And two first-years who think ladders are romantic."
"Fine," he said. "Find out if romance knows how to clip a line."
We carried the cage and the ledger and the habit to the north face where the stone watches the river make patient decisions. Tarr set pins aside like judges in retirement. Rhoen tied a Munin lash that didn't apologize even a little. The first-years whispered to the ladder instead of to each other. I let them. The ladder knows how to listen.
We loaded the joint by thirds. Wood talked. Rope answered. The resin in the honest pins, old stock, breathed like something that had been allowed to become itself. The seam held—but under the fork's timid hum I felt a thinner note, a shiver barely there, like a man pretending not to shiver.
"Again," I said softly.
We repeated the cycle. The note was still there, running under the joint's voice. Not a failure—those come loud and late. A complaint.
"Log monitor," I told the warden's scribe. "Recheck in two days after rain. Witnesses: four. Present: too many."
"Too many?" she asked, deadpan.
"Everyone," I said, and made the four of us sign. Even the first-years. Especially them.
Half the workday went to what the ward office calls applied monotony and what I have begun to call keeping faith: weighing packs and arguing with scale errors, counting ward stones into canvas sleeves and then recounting because numbers have a sense of humor, writing the march cadence in a hand that a frightened recruit can read by moonlight. Elias argued the ration weights down to grams with Supply until the clerk, sweating, produced a smaller set of measures as if they had been stolen from a dollhouse.
"My compliments to the famine you survived," I told Elias later.
"Yours to the ledgers you learned to read by," he returned. We are polite to each other because we recognize the same kind of hunger at a different table.
By second bell, the Colloquy's aftershocks had arranged themselves into lists and errands, which meant Aldric knew it was time to say the part that mattered. He walked into the logistics room as if he had been sitting in the walls waiting for the silence to land.
"Assignments," he said, setting a thin stack of paper on the table like a prayer book. "Staging crew A: Leva, Sorn, Bracken. Witness detail, route one: Warden's pick. Watch rotation lead: Marei. Logistics and field record—Codex."
Eyes turned. I met none of them. Titles are bait; the work is the hook.
"You will not approach the breach," Aldric added, and I heard a few sighs of relief with bruised pride underneath. "You will be close enough to bring truth back on the page before fear edits it. If that disappoints you, bring that disappointment to me and I will turn it into a schedule."
"It doesn't," I said. "Truth travels poorly when it is hungry."
"Good," he said. "Bring hunger that knows which pocket to sit in."
On my way out, the deputy bursar intercepted me in a corridor that pretended to be public while offering corners for privacy. Ilvine wore contrition like a clean shirt—presentable, a touch stiff.
"Your Highness," he began.
"Cadet," I said.
He smiled as if wounded and magnanimous all at once. "Transparency is our common aim," he said. "But you must see how difficult this is for Procurement. We rely on partners. We are not alchemists. If the guildwoman's report were… framed with a touch more charity—"
"The report named numbers," I said. "Charity is for people."
"And institutions," he said with soft emphasis.
"Institutions are people who learned to write things down," I said. "Numbers don't need charity. They need a place to sit where everyone can see them."
His eyes cooled. "You will find," he said, "that public zeal fades."
"Then we will build a habit to carry it to the next hill," I said.
He left with the particular stride of a man practicing dignity for an audience only he could see. I wrote dignity drill in the margin of my ledger and drew a line through it because I am not entirely hopeless.
At noon I did the most offensive thing on my list: I asked for volunteers to copy the assay report by hand in the atrium and take their copies to the dormitory doors, the kitchens, the crew sheds, the market verge. "You will be paid in nothing," I told them. "You will be thanked by no one. You will, however, make it very hard for one person to remove what we now know."
We filled three tables. First-years who wanted an excuse to be near the ward scribes. A second-year healer whose handwriting was patient enough to lower fevers. Two guild apprentices who smelled of oil and truth. Elias sat and copied until his fingers cramped because he has learned to prefer honest pain.
"Why do this?" one student asked, more baffled than hostile.
"Because paper is mortal," I said. "Because a single nail is easy to pry up. Because if twenty people take this into their rooms and tack it under their beds, we will still have it when the weather forgets us."
I do not know if that satisfied him. It satisfied me.
By late afternoon, the campus had the pulse of a beehive that had convinced itself it was a city. Crews practiced cadence with a rope strung at knee height and a warden counting under her breath. Pack checks produced a small mountain of unnecessary knives. I redistributed them like a priest redistributing tithes: and now you have one; and now you have none.
Darius arrived at my elbow with a card sealed in blue wax that tried very hard to look like it did not belong in a warehouse. "Invitation," he said. "Minor house, major dining habits. They have decided you will be interesting to look at."
"I'm busy being useful to look at," I said, not unkind.
He studied me thoughtfully. "Symbols get borrowed," he said. "If you don't pick the symbol, someone will choose one that fits their pocket."
"I'll settle for being hard to fold," I said. "Tell them I'm honored and that rope is more persuasive than soup."
"I will translate that into something that will not make me unwelcome," Darius said, amused. He flicked the seal into his pocket. "Try not to set anything on fire without me."
"I will be setting only lists," I said. He grinned and vanished into his orbit of obligation.
I could have taken an hour to lie down and let stillness do the work that people keep asking sleep to do. Instead I walked the east garden, because repetition is a prayer for people who don't know how to pray. The brass circles were gone; the smear of resin had been scrubbed down to suspicion. On the jamb, almost too low to see, three letters had been scratched with a pin: w t n.
Witness, I thought.
"You see it?" someone asked, not behind me but beside, as if the air had learned to talk. The boy from the service door—hood down now, hair damp, eyes quick in the way of a stray dog who knows which hands will carry a stone. He kept his left wrist turned slightly inward, more habit than fear.
"I see it," I said.
"They'll try to say this was panic," he said. "The recall, the copies. They'll call it disorder."
"It is the order we claim to want," I said. "The kind that sweeps itself."
"You're giving Ilvine a way out," he said, frowning. "By making it about habit, you make it not about him."
"I'm making it hard for the next him," I said. "If I make it only about this man, the next man waits until we're tired."
He looked at me as if weighing a rope in his hands. "Confusing," he admitted. "But maybe useful."
"You're not wrong," I said.
He touched the jamb with his knuckles and left without looking like he had left. I let the space he had occupied cool down before I moved.
Evening led me past the market verge where the Cooperative's stall had learned humility. The vendor lifted a hand that was almost a wave and almost a shield. I ignored both shapes and went on. Near the north gate, a cart rolled in with canvas covers tight as lies. The driver's hat did more work than it should at hiding his face. The ward guard signed his board and yawned honestly. If I were a man who trusted coincidence, I would have gone home.
Instead I followed at a distance that belongs to people who have decided to keep their curiosity alive. The cart trundled past the admin cloister toward the old storage gallery where the stone remembers war and pretends to like dust. Ilvine stepped out from between two pillars exactly as if he had not been standing there for seven minutes; the vendor from NR–B detached himself from the cart's shadow like a moth learning about daylight.
I stopped where the corridor widens into the sort of emptiness voices don't like. The fork hummed in my sleeve. I did not use it. Voices carry even when they think they don't.
"…not a full recall," Ilvine was saying, low and crisp. "A staged transition. Optics are manageable if we frame it as upgrading."
"Half the batch is already in the city," the vendor murmured. "We can replace the next crates, but we can't unbuild what's built."
"Then we declare we've found a better supplier," Ilvine said. "We emphasize cost savings, improvements in… integrity. We never mention the word failure in the same sentence as student. And we arrange, delicately, to be seen inspecting south braces twice as often as north. People love numbers."
"And the crew boss?" the vendor asked.
"She will get credit for insisting on caution," Ilvine said. "And then she will discover her budget has lost weight."
I made myself exhale. Anger is a tool. It has a dull edge.
I could have stepped forward. I could have taken names and dragged them into the ward office where the warden would make them sit down until the words learned better manners. I did not. Instead I turned and walked the longer way around to Van's workshop where the varnish smell sits like a harmless ghost.
He looked up once, saw my sleeve, and then looked back at the plank he was coaxing into honesty. "You're late for returns," he said.
"I am on time for a different kind of return," I said, and set the fork on his bench. "Keep it a day."
"Changed your mind about needing it," he said.
"I want to know what I hear without it," I said. "And if I can make a room hum the right way with paper alone."
He nodded once, the sort of nod that approves without volunteering to be responsible for anything. "Bring me a story tomorrow," he said. "Not a triumph. A story."
I went from there to the guild office and copied out a letter by hand because handwriting is a knife you can show a man at his door: Proposal: Standing Audit Liaison Between Ward Office and Assay Guild. Quarterly public readings. Procurement co-signatories. Witnesses from crews and dormitories. I addressed it to the guildwoman with iron-gray hair and to the warden and, pointedly, to the deputy bursar. I sealed all three. If you invite a man to the table, he must either sit or explain his hunger in front of the room.
The day's last obligation was smaller than it felt: a quiet knock on a quiet door in a quiet hall. Aldric opened as if he had been standing with his hand on the knob since supper.
"We need hours," I said. "For the staging drills. Not a spectacle. A duty. I want watches to practice relieving each other without turning it into a parade. I want pack checks done by people who will have to carry the packs. I want someone who has been lost to talk about what being found sounds like."
"All that," he said, "and you ask for an hour."
"Two," I said, because bargaining honors the other person's time.
"You will have three," he said. "Because I enjoy disagreeing with Procurement."
"Ilvine will try to make it his idea."
"He can have the idea as long as you have the schedule," Aldric said. "Bring me the drumbeat. I will bring the room."
Back in my dormitory, I spread the march list on the desk and lined my pack beside it. I put in the small things first: needle kit, wax, spare cord, a folded square of oiled cloth that can make a dry place happen in the rain. The heavier things next: water, biscuits that complain more than they crumble, a ward stone that has learned to sleep until asked to sing. I tucked my mother's letter into the inner pocket where it could be neither lost nor heroically discovered. I left the fork where Van had it and slid a stick of cheap chalk into my sleeve. If I mean what I say about habits, I must be willing to walk without a crutch and still keep the beat.
From the window, the campus at night looks like a map arguing with itself. Lamps mark the routes people pretend are straight. The river says otherwise in a voice the lamps cannot hear. Somewhere below, in the service corridor, the boy with the turned wrist would be chalking a circle the size of a coin. Somewhere above, Ilvine would be rehearsing the sentence in which he apologizes to no one. Somewhere between, Van would be varnishing his plank into a mirror that tells the truth.
Tomorrow would bring drills that look like tedium and are actually mercy. After that, the road. Then a frontier that refuses to behave. The Codex inside me flicked a page somewhere beyond sleep, not loud, not yet. I lay back and counted the rhythm of the roof's slow drip, the hinge-sigh of the casement, the patient sound of rope drying on a peg. There is a kind of silence that isn't empty. It is full of decisions waiting to be chosen.
I have learned to listen to that one.