They woke to a thin menace in the air, the sort that moves before words form. Cael noticed it at the river first: the second tooth showed clearer than it had any morning before, cheekbone of stone the water had not fully hidden. Rook spat once into the current and said nothing; fishermen read a river as a ledger reads a page — the small changes mean more than the loud ones.
By noon a courier from the city had arrived with a folded note and a bronze pin for Jeran's lapel: the Archives Committee was coming not in seven days but in three. The University had reasons; a magistrate's letter wrapped in polite urgency had found its way into Halim's hands; the city liked deadlines the way a blade likes a groove. Miss Gavren's earlier temper had been measured; now the city's clock made temper lean toward bite.
"We have less time," Jeran said, folding the courier's wax into the ledger. His voice used the grammar of a man who had been learning to bend calendars like wire.
They accelerated.
The peg-web was retested at morning light. Talwyn's scales answered in the square with the small music of counterpoise. The ferryman's rope sang under stroke and tide. The town's demonstration had been rehearsed like a prayer; now it was a prayer said with clenched teeth.
It failed at a peg.
Not spectacularly—no snapped twine or shouted accusation—but small and precise: the shepherd's token, tied beneath the notch with Meral's careful knot, had been shifted. The peg was there, the token in place. But the name stitched into the cloth had been rubbed, softened by oil or deliberate abrasion until the letters smudged into a near-blank.
Oris found it while checking the network. He did not shout. He lifted the token like a careful thing and held it up as if the town's breath was glass.
"Someone tried to make us lose this," he said, and the words traveled like a cold hand.
They checked other pegs. A baker's second peg had been unfastened but not removed; its twine showed a pattern of knots recently retied. A ferryman's ledger had a leaf torn out and folded into the seat of his boat, then smoothed back as if it had never been missing. Each act was little enough to be explained by weather or by clumsy hands. Together, they read like a map.
"Sabotage," Liora said without ceremony. Her impatience sounded smaller than anger; she had to keep it so the town would not follow it into ruin.
"Or fear," Meral said. He was always the one to offer the other grammar. "Fears do neat things to hands."
Cael found himself thinking of the thief at the crossroads, the barefoot man with a sick child. The town had bled that day the soft way of charity; now this prick of deceit asked whether charity had become a dangerous weakness.
They called a council. The square filled with the linen-sharp air of people who knew the value of small things. Jeran read the peg-inspection list aloud. The list sounded like a thousand little legal claims: peg A (baker), peg B (ferryman), peg C (shepherd), all noting the soft violence done to the threads that bound them.
"We will not accuse blindly," Jeran said. "We will observe. We will guard. We will not let the city's hurry force us into foolishness."
Still, the pressure came from without. Miss Gavren's clerk, a man in gray who had the exact face of paperwork, arrived on the second day, not as a guest but with an escort. He wanted to see the web, to understand the demonstration's ledger firsthand. He asked the sort of civil questions that hide sharp stakes: Who ties the pegs? Who signs the tokens? Who keeps the second copy?
Cael watched the clerk's hands. They were steady and practiced; when he touched a peg he did not notice the rosemary knot hidden beneath the twine. The town's rituals were subtle like well-sharpened tools; they asked for care to be meaningful.
"Bring witnesses," the clerk said breezily. "A town is a good story if it has eyewitnesses. The Committee will want names."
Jeran named them with slow, precise dignity—the ferryman, the miller, the baker. The clerk nodded, as if names were a recipe the committee could boil down into proof. He did not ask for the House of Stones. He did not know yet which bones of a people are soft and which will break when pressed.
That night Cael slept little. He paced the ledger garden and felt the fossil's warmth like a small pulse against his sternum. The bowl-and-sword token he had left once under a vault lip now sat like an accusation in his pocket: a small icon that carried a question. He wanted to pull it out and read its line: Accounts end nowhere. That sentence felt more like a command the older the city's letters looked in his mind.
In the morning they found Bram at the wheelwright's, oil on his forearms and a collar high against the wind. Bram was not a man of easy confidence; he was the sort of neighbor who balances his children's shoes at night and knew the exact number of nails a roof needs. He had accepted—weeks ago, on a rainy afternoon—a "trusted local" token from a city envoy. Small privileges had been offered: a lower grain levy for his apprentices, a year's worth of rope at a discount. He had worn the token like a band, at first because he had thought it a neat thing for his shop.
Now Jeran watched him as if studying a page that had been partially erased. "Bram," Jeran said, "there are marks two mornings in a row. Threads tampered, ledger pages shifted."
Bram wiped his hands on his apron. He did not look like a man who had expected to be asked such things. "I swear on my mother's bowl," he said. "I did not touch any peg. I knew of nothing. I swear it."
Cael watched Bram closely. A half-peg lay on Bram's workbench where a helper had been cutting the notch in a wheel. Bram's fingers left a grease print on the wood. There was a faint smudge of black on the edge of the shepherd's token when Bram handed it back to Meral for a moment—an oil smear that could have been workshop work or something else.
"You accepted their coin," Cael said, gentle as a line on a ledger. "Did they ask you to do anything in return?"
Bram's lip trembled. "They asked me to be a bridge," he said, voice small. "To be a man they could trust. I said yes because of my boy. We had a bad spring. The city's mill's offer was…help. I thought a token would keep us from going hungry."
"And the peg?" Jeran asked.
Bram swallowed. "They asked me, once, in the lane." He looked at the town as if it might be merciful. "They said: 'If you keep your ear open for trouble, and help us when it comes, we will remember you favorably.' I thought it was only talk."
"What talk?" Cael's voice did not aim to wound; it aimed to know.
Bram's eyes lowered. "They asked me to notice if the pegs looked loose. Not to take them. Not to hurt them. To tell an officer if I found a slack knot. They said there was a lawlessness and they wanted to help make order. I thought it was a kindness."
"You thought vigilance was a favor?" Liora said. Her voice had the quickness of a snapped wire. "That's how they enlist you."
Bram's jaw worked. He had looked at the city envoy like a ladder. He had climbed. Now he was being told his ladder might be used to lower a trap.
"We will not lash you for bread," Jeran said. "But we will keep watch. If the city uses you as a lever, we will ask you to step away. We will protect your boy and your wheelwright's line if you do."
Bram's shoulders folded. "I thought I was being prudent," he said. "I only wanted the rope for the apprentices."
Prudence and leverage are siblings, and the line between them is thin. The town understood that. They also understood that small compromises are how greater losses begin. Bram left his token with Jeran that afternoon—he pushed the brass disc across the ledger like a man laying down a tool he no longer trusted. The gesture did not absolve him; it only released the immediate pressure of his choice into the public eye.
When the Archives Committee arrived two days later, it came with the cordon of law and a tired hunger for order. Miss Gavren walked with her notes like a wary custodian. Panelists carried clipboards; the clerk who had softened in the market took a different face now: the one a city gives to its officers when they have to brand honesty with regulation.
They watched the peg demonstration again. The ferryman's boat crossed with measured strokes. The pegs' tokens were read aloud by witnesses: names, stitches, witnesses. Anas sat to one side, gaunt and steady, a man who had seen the inside of a room with no windows and returned with a face older than his years.
Miss Gavren did not smile when she saw Bram standing among the town's witnesses, his hands clean on his hips. She noticed the brass disk Jeran had piled beside the ledger. Her eyes flicked to Bram and then away, quick as a ledger's flick of the wrist. The Committee is a machine that loves evidence; it loves confessions least.
Later, in the hall of record, Miss Gavren folded her notes and left a margin empty as if reserving space for something unnamed. She told Jeran with a voice that softened only slightly: "You have a living practice. You have three attestations. We will recommend reclassification to the Archives. But your guardians must be vigilant. A living tool becomes dangerous if it is bound to men who profit by quietness."
Her meaning was not veiled: watch your friends; do not let the city turn the town's prudence into its instrument.
Outside, as the Committee's carriage rolled away, Cael watched Bram at the wheelwright's door. The man stood in the sun like a figure that had been bleached by choice. Cael did not know whether Bram's bargain had done harm or whether it had been only a frightened man making a foolish trade. He only knew that trust, once fiddled with, makes new shapes.
That night they planted more pegs along the trade routes and whispered the counting-song with an extra line: for the man who took a token and then gave it up, may his hands learn what trade is honest. The town multiplied witnesses; they taught the children to knot the keeper's bend until it became a muscle. They moved small things into many hands.
Before sleep took him, Cael opened his palm and turned the bowl-and-sword token. The carved line read the same: Accounts end nowhere. He put it back into his pocket and thought of Bram, of the river's tooth, of Miss Gavren's margin left empty. The measurement tightened on them all. The town had won a breathing room, but the shape of the next days felt like a ledger not yet balanced — a paper waiting to be closed.
Outside, the night kept its own accounts. Somewhere beyond the hills the city set its clocks and smoothed its papers. Here, in the little town that had learned to tie memory into the knots of daily life, they prepared to show that even when a powerful hand wants to crown a tool, a people who hold it, sing it, and sleep with it in their pockets will not easily let it be sealed away.
Change was coming; that they could no longer pretend. The only question remained whether they would meet it with chains or with knots. Cael chose, in the dark, to keep his hands busy with rope.