They buried the dead in a light that did not know how to be soft. Morning had the thin, apologetic quality of smoke-filtered day; the sun pushed up as if through a vein of ash. The town moved with the slow mechanics of people who have learned that grief is a task: it needs feeding, folding, and the ordinary acts of washing hands and sweeping thresholds so the world will not feel like a heap of undone things.
Cael carried rosemary in his fist because Jeran's wife had given him a sprig and because rosemary was a small faith the town could hold in its fingers. The little green needle pricked his palm and pulled him back to measure. He walked among faces like one reads a ledger — line by line, looking for a pattern that would make sense of loss. It did not exist. All he found were margins that had been chewed away.
They gathered at the ledger stone. The square smelled of soot and bread and the salt of rivers. Children who had watched the riders with wide, uncomprehending eyes now stood too still, their mouths folded over songs they should not have learned. Women tied aprons tight enough to look as if they had something to save; men folded their hands as if to keep them from doing things they might only later regret.
Jeran's bier was simple, just a plank smoothed by a thousand small labors. They wrapped him in a blanket with strokes sewn into it — names of debts he had held, scrawled by his own hand; measures taken down and marks made for neighbors who had once promised but could not return. Someone had tied a pebble in a rag and placed it in his hand — the pebble that said witness. Tor lay beside him: a boy wrapped too small for the cold. The ledger-stone waited like a judge without a face.
Meral read the recorded names aloud. Each name sounded like a poem: Oris — ferryman; Talwyn — scalekeeper; Halim — scholar whose life had become a bargaining chip. When they reached Anas's name, the voice stammered and then steadied, because words keep memory the way nets keep fish — with care and the right knots.
They sang the counting-song in a low chorus, but the tune had taken on a dirge's cadence. The children echoed it with the innocent stubbornness of the young, learning a catechism of loss.
> One for the stone we seed,
Two for the hand that keeps the seed,
Three for the rope that binds the deed,
Four for the memory we teach the reed.
When the river took the first handful of rosemary and carried it away in a green-smelling whisper, Cael felt the world tilt. The current accepted the offering with an indifference that was at once brutal and merciful: it made no promises, it only remembered. In that simple act he found an answer that no human mouth seemed able to give: the world would keep things in its slow way if men only learned how to lay them down.
Mourning is public and private at once. After the rites, people dispersed into small pockets of conversation: a neighbor held Anas's mother while she touched the boy's sleeve and said his name as if that single syllable might bring him back; Bram stood in a corner and watched the line at the well, sucking in the sight of feet moving with a justice he had failed to measure; Liora sat on a stone and kept her hands folded, as if holding back the motion that wanted to become violence.
Miss Gavren arrived on the second day with a measure of large-feeling sorrow that had the curve of official sympathy. She did not come as a herald of law so much as as a careful intermediary — the University does not like blood on its hands, not because of mercy but because it stains the ledger in ways that cannot be rubbed out with sealant. Her eyes were small and dry; she had come with words the city reuses when it wishes to sound reasonable.
"I am sorry," she said without ceremony. "This was not the University's order. It is not its honor either — when law is used as instrument, the institution suffers." She placed a folded sheet with a neat seal upon Jeran's ledger and then smiled in the way a person smiles when they have to bind two hard things: apology and a bargain.
Her bargain smelled of survival. "The Archives Committee will not support lawless acts," she read, "but we will propose a temporary easing of the embargo if Binder's Reach agrees to—" Her list of conditions sounded like an accountant's blessing: joint custodianship, regular access for town witnesses, protective patrols agreed in advance.
People listened to the terms like one listens to a price on a market day: some nodded because they calculated the future in obligations; others flinched because the price sounded a little like subjugation dressed in wax. Cael watched the lines fall across faces: Bram's conflicted look, Meral's narrowed jaw, Liora's quick suspicion.
"We do not ask you to surrender your ways," Miss Gavren said, as if to repair the sting of a clause, and the words had the softness of a net thrown after a spill. "We ask only that you make the records available and the town agree to oversight while we restore order."
"Order," Liora said, the word bitter on her tongue. "You mean custody."
Miss Gavren blinked at that with a scholar's surprised look. "Custody in the sense of care," she corrected. The correction sounded small and bureaucratic, which made the town's anger a raw thing — for things that are a matter of life cannot be translated into care without losing their heat.
Outside the square, the town was trying to remember the mechanics of itself. They fixed the bridges that had been splintered in the shove and counted their losses: seeds burned where a torch had licked the storeroom, a cart's axle broken by a horse fall, the ledger-house's shelves gutted. Children found pieces of paper with Anas's inked letters, salvaged with trembling fingers. The copies had not all been consumed; Anas's work had been scattered enough that the town still had scraps in pockets, sewn under seams, tucked inside loaves. That small redundancy had been their salvation.
That night, Cael went to Anas's mother's house while the town's lamplight shivered. She set a tray of bread before him like a care offered in the currency of ordinary acts. Her hands were brown and quick, and when she took his, she smelled of ink and tea and of the small room where a boy had copied marginalia by the light of a lamp.
"I do not want vengeance for him," she said, voice hard as the bread she kneaded. "I want the ledger to be in enough places that boys will not have to die for paper."
Cael had no better words than the ones Jeran had once taught him: "We keep. We multiply witness." He promised her, as men promise in times that do not forgive careless speech. It was a promise that felt like a ledger line — to be written and then to be proved.
Far from the river and the town, Dr. Halim sat in a room that had no windows and only a table that wore the ringed mark of authority. They had taken him with the efficiency of men who have learned that scholars make useful pawns: they are admired and also disposable. They fettered him with quiet language: "It is for your protection," they said, then smiled like a man whose hand is sure on a coin.
The leader who had orchestrated the raid came to odd rooms like Halim's with the air of a man who treats cruelty as economics. He wore the style of men who make the ledger enforceable: neat, measured, and sure the smallest figure can be moved to the side without collapsing the sum.
"Why would you trade your life?" the leader asked, prodding at the soft place where morality might be.
Halim smiled, thin and tired. "Because some things are more than paper," he said. "Some pages are alive only as long as mouths speak them aloud. You may put a relic under glass, but you cannot put a song in a vault."
The leader's laugh had the flatness of a man who values tidy outcomes. "You overvalue words," he said. "We overvalue order. Where men fail, institutions step in."
Halim watched him as if reading the man's ledger — the places that mattered to him, the petty accounts he guarded. "Then you are poor auditors," Halim said. "You confuse custody with possession. You think custody ends the need for hands. It only concentrates theft."
They did not kill Halim that night, though the men had no trouble breaking other lives. They needed him alive because hostages are the tools of negotiation. They paraded him past the city's magistrates and let him stand in a court where law was an apparatus for intimidation. They used him like a mark on a board: leverage to be bartered for silence, for the surrender of the relic, for the city's image polished to a sheen.
Back in Binder's Reach the small rebellions of grief matured into sharper things. Thalos walked the lanes with the flat look of a man who had removed the hinge of doubt. The fire in his chest had not cooled with the funerals; it heated into an edge. "We cannot give them room to make us obedient in the name of peace," he told Cael in the dusk, voice low and iron. "They will ask for documents and take our lives by degrees."
"You would have us break the law?" Cael asked, feeling the ledger's ink cold on his tongue. Laws themselves had become instruments now.
"Which law?" Thalos snapped. "Their law? The kind that opened doors for torches and horse-spears? Or the law in which a ferryman keeps his oath?"
Liora's hands were steady when she took the token Jeran had carved and held it as if it were both a weight and a compass. "We will not become them," she said. "We also cannot be lulled by promises when men arrive with swords."
Bram moved among them like a man too small for the room. He had come that morning to push a brass disk — the token the city had given him — across Jeran's ledger like a confession. He had returned the disc as if it would unmake the handshake he had offered. Some called him coward; others felt the ache of the choice he had made — hunger is a counting that does not forgive easily. Bram's hands shook as they set the brass into Jeran's palm before the burial, as if to return the favor of life.
That night Cael helped sift through Jeran's things, because the old binder had been more than a ledger-holder; he had been a man with a way of hiding tools in safe places. Buried in a seam of an old wallet Cael found a scrap of paper, folded to the width of a coin and edged with Jeran's cramped, deliberate handwriting. The letters were faint with age and smudged with the smears that come when a hand writes in the dark.
He unfolded it carefully. Jeran's script was old-fashioned but clear enough to make a map of intention.
> If they come to take the book, remember the House that marks the stones. Cairnfold lies where the chalk teeth show a second lip; the keeper's groove takes the knot. If they seize the ledgers, bury the accounts in more hands than one. — J.
It was not a coordinate so much as a clue — a place name and an instruction wrapped together. Cairnfold. A word that tasted like river and hard stone. The House of Stones was a phrase Jeran had used in stories — a place that had kept accounts when men remembered rather than wrote, an old practice that bound promises across generations.
The scrap felt like a compass that would never be precise; it pointed and then left the rest to those who would go. Cael folded it and pressed it to his chest as if to keep Jeran's breath on the page. It was a dangerous treasure: it might give them a way forward, and it might also be a provocation to the city.
When dawn came again, the town's council gathered in the ledger-house, its shelves now a jagged skeleton. Miss Gavren's envoy had left two documents that claimed the University's intent to lobby the city for Halim's release under the banner of diplomacy. They were small promises: mild easing of patrols, a formal inquiry into the violence. The Courier's parchment smelled of ink and polite impotence.
"Law can be slow," Miss Gavren admitted to the assembly, "and a city quick to punish will be slow to forgive. I will press in every hearing I can. But know this: you will have to show us you will not use the tools you keep to provoke greater bloodshed. The city will not allow indefinite disorder."
Her meaning was clear: be reasonable or be crushed under a slow administrative hand dressed in righteousness. It was an offer of a path that might hold, and also a subtle threat that the town's very autonomy would be bartered for safety.
Cael left the meeting with the scrap of Jeran's note and the pebble token tied now to a strip of cloth. He walked to the river and pressed the pebble down until the water took the smear his thumb left on it. He did not pour rosemary as before. Instead he set the pebble under the tongue of the weir — not so the river would take it, but so it would be always found there for those who came after.
The town would not be the same. The riders had learned that law could be profit and not justice; the town had learned that singing and pegs could be instruments of resistance. In Jeran's handwriting there was a plan small enough to be bidden and loose enough to be dangerous: find the House of Stones, bring its method into a living place again, make memory spread until no single lock could claim it all.
Cael thought of the pilgrim's scrap — Forgive those who lie about me; I will not need their stories where I go. — and folded Jeran's line into it, like two songs in one throat. The two scraps together felt like a map and a prayer: one asked for mercy, the other for action. He would keep both in his shirt when the night fell.
They would smolder for a time — ashes and the slow spring of green memory beneath. Then, when the smoke thinned enough to see shape, they would decide whether to let the city write the next line or to write it themselves with hands that had learned to knot and to count. The scrap promised a place to go; the River's tooth had shown itself wider that morning. Cael did not yet know whether going would be courage or ruin. He only knew the ledger now demanded more than ink: it demanded that men choose what they would risk to keep memory alive.