The skiff kissed mud below the willows and held there, as if the river had decided to pin their grief in place and make them look at it. Smoke from the Court of Stones braided itself into the morning like gray handwriting. When the light shifted, the column broke into separate ribbons and each ribbon looked like a name leaving through the roof of the world.
"Not here long," Rook said. The current tugged the skiff as if to say the same.
They pulled the boat half up the bank. Liora tried to stand on her bad ankle, failed, and sat on the cut bank with the dignity of a queen refusing a chair. Miss Gavren tore linen into strips with her teeth and wrapped the ankle in neat anger. The children sat with the lacquer tube between them, flat palms on it as if it might decide to fly away given a chance.
Cael set the lead plate on his knees and watched sunlight gather in the shallow cups. The crossing groove—river over wheel—held a seam of shadow that moved when a leaf moved. Before the book, the houses kept. He said the words under his breath until their cadence lost language and became a way of breathing.
"Say it aloud," Miss Gavren murmured, as if reading his mouth. "Make the air know it."
He did. The sentence felt like a key turned slowly in a door that had been painted shut. Liora's head tipped, as though a chord had been struck in the bones behind her ear.
"What does it mean?" one of the children asked. Her thumb kept circling the tube end, nervous as a moth.
"That we made a mistake when we made the ledger a spine," Cael said. "The city could break a spine. It's harder to break a hundred small bones at once."
"Bones," Rook snorted. "Hearths. Houses."
"Witnesses," Miss Gavren added, her eyes on the smoke upriver. "You scatter the witness until the message can't be erased without killing a town."
They could not go back up the hill. Their dead were there. Serin was there, kneeling forever in Cael's memory with a half-grin and a mouth making the fourth line. Grief is a thing that tries to become a flag; you have to keep cutting it down until it's small enough to wear without tripping.
"We mark him," Liora said, as if she'd been inside Cael's head and found the same knot. "Now. Here."
They braided rosemary sprigs with river grass and made the braid long enough to speak for more than one man. The children insisted on adding a flat stone they found with a ripple of iron in it; "for keeping," the girl said, solemn, and Cael inclined to the ceremony as if it had been written a century ago.
They launched the braid into the current. It hesitated, as offerings do, then turned and went with a resolution that made something unclench in Cael's chest. Rook shaded his eyes.
"I don't like leaving him to stones and magistrates," he muttered.
"He isn't left," Miss Gavren said. "He is called. There are places where names are read. He'll arrive out of breath, make a bad joke, and then be very serious."
"About what?" the boy asked.
"About whether he kept," Liora said. She tugged the linen tighter and did not wince. "He kept."
They had no more words for it, so they ate, because eating is also an account. Flat bread from a cloth bag, hard cheese that tasted of salt and the idea of cows, a bruised pear that the children halved with fingers and a knife as if performing a rite. Cael chewed without taste and watched how the light moved on the plate's cups. He placed a pebble in each hollow and felt a logic click: not numbers, but mouths. Thumb-sized for a reason—thumb on oath, thumb on token, thumb leaving oil where oil would be read.
Hoof-sound came on the near bank, light and intermittent. The willow shade tightened into rumor. Rook went to one knee, a body already drawn into the geometry of cover. A figure appeared that was neither rider nor soldier—barefoot, panting, mud-striped, a boy no older than Cael had been when Jeran first set needle in his hand.
The boy stopped short of the skiff, hands on his thighs, head down, sweat making a map on his back. He wore a string of blue beads and a sack tied tight across his chest.
"Name?" Miss Gavren called, not unkind.
"Cailen," the boy gasped. He looked up then, eyes bright as a bird's. "From the wheat-rows. My aunt sent me. They took her. They are making… they posted… I brought…"
He fumbled the knot at his chest. Liora was there before him with a patient hand and loosened it with a binder's efficiency. She drew out a folded scrap and a twist of dried rosemary tied with hair. The scrap had been oiled long ago, the way shepherds oil papers they cannot afford to lose. When she unfolded it, the crease sighed.
Jeran's hand. Cael knew it before his ribs did. The writing had the old binder's thistle-straight patience and its wedge-shaped Js. It was not a page of accounts. It was a song—a short one, a mnemonic with too much gravity for its length:
> Twenty mouths make one bread.
Cross the houses; do not beg.
If one closes, count again.
Truth is eaten, truth is fed.
Before you bind, you must be read.
Underneath, a diagram to match the lead: a ring of dots, a crossing line, and a notation in the margin: If one hearth is broken, three adjacent carry the witness until the circle holds. And smaller still, in a corner as if Jeran had been unwilling to give the line the dignity of a full place, a note: Never centralize what you wish to keep honest.
Liora made a sound that was not a laugh and not a sob. "He left us a way to walk," she whispered.
"Where did you get this?" Cael asked the boy.
Cailen licked his lower lip. "My aunt Edda kept it rolled in the loom bar. When the riders came with the clerk, they read a paper. They said the Court acted in rebellion, that names had to be turned in. They listed your name." He looked at Cael with a bravery that was half ignorance and half love. "She said I was faster. She said they would search the bar and throw it on the fire. She said to run to the weir and then down by the willow and find whoever was holding grief like a tool."
Miss Gavren closed her eyes at the phrase. "Our language travels better than our bodies," she murmured.
"What else did they read?" Rook asked.
Cailen swallowed. "They named five for taking and ten for questions. They said the court is an unlawful assembly and stones are now Crown property. They posted a copy on the oven-house door with red wax. The clerk smiled." His mouth twisted. "He has a clean face. He said we would keep the peace better in the Crown's quiet."
"How many taken?" Liora's tone found the exact square between steel and pity.
"Three this morning. Two yester. They leave marks we can't wash."
Miss Gavren fastened the bag back against the boy's chest, emptier now. "You did well," she said. "Sit. Drink."
He sat, drank, and shook. The shake didn't stop when the cup emptied. Cael took the lead plate from his knees and set the oiled scrap on top, aligning diagram with cups. The correspondence felt foolishly perfect, as if the world had agreed to rhyme.
"Before the book, the houses kept," Rook said, slow, as if learning how the sentence balanced.
"And when the book dies," Miss Gavren added, "the houses must keep again."
The smoke upriver thickened briefly—the wind had turned and carried with it another smell, heavier than ash. "Oven-house," Cailen whispered, eyes wide. "They burned the notices on the door? No… that smell—"
"Don't imagine," Liora said. "We will see what we can. But first we must make the seeing useful." She tapped the cups. "Twenty houses. Name them."
They made a map they could carry in their mouths. Not streets—houses, hearths, names. The baker on Stone Lane (two sons, a wife who knows three songs). The midwife with the cat who does not like men's boots. The ferryman's widower who hums and never looks you in the eye. Old Salla with her garden and her careful hands. Jeran's shop, which was no longer a shop and no longer Jeran's but which still remembered the smell of glue. They named the houses until they had twenty and no more, and then they argued over which were adjacent, not by wall but by neighborliness. The arguments were brief. The map had been waiting for them like a tool on a shelf they had forgotten they owned.
Cailen watched with his mouth open. "You make a church from kitchens," he said, awed.
"We make a ledger from people," Miss Gavren corrected. "A church can be bought or bored. A ledger that lives in twenty heads takes effort to erase."
"Twenty heads," Rook mused. "Thirty, if we want sleep."
Cael smoothed Jeran's little poem and felt his throat tighten. He had not realized how hungry he had been for a sentence that knew where it was going.
They buried nothing. They could not. But they anchored memory in things that traveled. The girl took responsibility for the lacquer tube as if she had been elected by water. Cailen tied the oiled scrap inside his shirt again and made a face when it scratched. Miss Gavren inked the mnemonic onto a twist of bark with berry juice and tucked it under a willowskin; Rook filled three of the lead plate's cups with pebbles of different sizes and practiced the rhythm under his thumb until it became a habit he could set aside and pick up like a hat.
By noon the smoke strip licked sideways. The river's skin went wrinkled and then smooth again. In the quiet that followed, they heard bells where bells had promised to be silent. It was not their bells. The Crown rang its own. Counting. Announcing. Making a song of order that sounded like a chain dragged through wet sand.
"We go downriver," Rook said. "Meet the others at the weir that splits into the marsh. No roads. If the marsh takes us, it will take them too."
"After we see," Liora said. "Not the Court—we know what they will write there. The ovens. The square. The places women stand with baskets and men pretend to be useful. If we don't look, we will guess, and guessing is a kind of lie."
"We can't walk in," Miss Gavren objected.
"We don't walk," Liora said. "We listen at the edges. We have boys with bad hair who will carry rumors like bread. We have women who can sell rosemary to clerks and step on their shadows. We have the willow and the backed-up channels."
Cailen looked downriver, then upriver, torn. "Aunt Edda—" He bit the words. "If they take her—"
"They have taken her," Miss Gavren said gently. "We will try what can be tried. But there is a larger work than raiding cages. If we do not root, they can pluck us. If we do not spread, they can salt us."
"Salt," Rook said, rubbing a thumb and forefinger together as if feeling grains. "They'd like that. All neat."
They hid the skiff under a raft of reeds and walked inside the riverbank like thieves of shade. The town revealed itself in glimpses: the mill wheel turning as if nothing, boys throwing stones at a log as if nothing, women at the pump with lips pursed against news, a clerk posting a notice high enough that old backs would have to bend and hurt to read it. The notice fluttered like a poor flag. Red wax sealed the corners, ceremonial as blood.
They could not get close enough to see words. They did not need to; a man with too-white hands read aloud in the voice of someone who enjoys his own clarity: "By order of the Crown and the Judges of Ledger, the assembly at the so-called Court of Stones is declared insurrection. The stones are hereby under the protection of Crown survey. Witnesses are asked to come forward with the names of ringleaders and will be compensated." He paused delicately. "Failure to comply will be read as guilt. Public Justice will be rendered."
"His voice makes my skin itch," Liora said, deadpan.
Two soldiers stood with him, their posture bored, their eyes taking private inventory of faces. The crowd—thin, summer-thinned by fear—shifted and redistributed itself as if balancing a burden. A woman with a baby at her breast whispered, and another woman whispered back. Men looked at their shoes, as if shoes could be a theology.
"Look," Miss Gavren said, pointing with her chin.
At the oven-house, the doorway was blackened and the lintel charred. Not burned to the ground; not enough to destroy—enough to mark. On the soot someone had drawn a spiral with a finger, a lazy one, careless, as if to say, We remember. We do not have to try hard. The spiral's center had a thumbprint in it. Cael felt his jaw go tight.
"They scorch the witnesses," Rook said. "Not kill. Mark. Shame. Make it dangerous to stand."
Cailen's hands shook again. "Aunt Edda's loom—"
"Still stands, probably," Liora said. "But the bar will be gone. The scrap was the point. You did the work."
They slid back into shade. Along the narrow bank path, they passed three boys playing at being clerks: one boy reading loudly from a fig leaf, the other two writing condemnations in the mud with sticks. The game had a giggle to it that could curdle. Cael wanted to teach them the counting-song instead and held his tongue because doctrine forced into a child is just another kind of mark.
Near the old ferry post, they heard a sound that was not river, not voice, not bell—a choked, animal-small sob. In the screen of willow, an old man stood with his forehead against bark. He wasn't hiding from anything; he was propping himself open. On the tree trunk, he had pressed a pebble into a crack and the pebble didn't quite fit.
Cael had to fight the urge to make it fit for him. He stood with him instead, a few breaths' distance away, until the man turned. It was Soren, who had once brought eggs wrapped in nettle leaves to Jeran's door and asked for a small loan of rope. He recognized Cael as if you recognize the weather that breaks a habit.
"They took my daughter," Soren said, as if reporting a farm number. "They told me to be proud. They told me the city was made safer by such pride."
Cael looked at the pebble. "You pressed it?"
Soren nodded, baffled and certain. "It felt like a thing to do."
"It is," Cael said. He took the man's hand. "We will ask you to press it again tonight, but at your hearth. And to speak your name. And to listen for the next house when it answers yours. We will walk the circle. We will not let their marks be the only reading."
Soren's eyes cleared, slightly. "The houses."
"Yes."
"The old way," Soren said, unexpected awe in the word old.
"Older than the city," Miss Gavren said. "Strong enough if we do it."
They returned to the skiff like people reentering a story halfway through. The river looked the same; it always does when things break. They pushed off, and the skiff took the current like agreement. Cailen sat with the children, knees touching, their heads bent together around the tube and the oiled scrap as if warming themselves on a small fire. Liora leaned back and closed her eyes. Rook pretended not to watch the banks with his whole body.
Cael set the lead plate on the thwart between his knees. He placed pebbles in the cups to match the houses they had named, the arrangement a meditation. He tapped the crossing groove with his thumb and imagined the path: begin at Soren's hearth, cross to the baker, then to Old Salla, to the ferryman's widower, to the midwife with the cat—the cat that hated boots—and onward until the ring was closed and a thing became true because twenty witnesses had voiced it with their mouths and hands. He could hear Jeran in his head, amused and grave: A truth that can only be kept in a vault is a truth that will starve. Feed it to the houses; let it work.
They stopped once to pull weed from the rudder and once to let a barge pass in sullen majesty; the bargemen did not look down because men who move goods for a living learn to look at distance. Under the reeds a water rat watched them with interest and went back to its work. The world goes on when institutions go to war. That's part of the cruelty and part of the mercy.
By the time the sun angled from white to honey, they reached the split in the river—the place where water forgets itself on purpose and becomes marsh for a while so that birds can be emperors. Rook took the left-hand channel, the meaner one. Willow brushed their shoulders and made a cat's-cradle of shadows across faces. Mosquitoes tried to draft a treaty and failed.
They pulled in under a spit of dry ground, a place Rook called Hook-Toe for reasons lost to time. Others were there before them: two women Cael recognized from Stone Lane, a boy with a fish spear and the kind of hope that makes men stupid or brave depending on who is watching, an old woman with a cloth bundle of rosemary that smelled like a church and a sickroom and a kitchen all at once.
"News," one woman said immediately. "Say it fast."
Cael said it. Rosemaries braided for the dead. The Court marked and claimed. Notices posted like netting. Houses to keep. A method older than law. Names to call. Voices to multiply. He placed the lead plate between them and watched hands reach for it as if for warmth. The old woman—Salla—put her palm flat on the cups and closed her eyes.
"Ah," she said. "This is the shape my hands remember." She smiled without teeth and then showed them a row of seeds in her other palm. "I brought these. We plant them in the marsh edges when the moon is thin. They hold the banks together."
"Like witness," Miss Gavren said softly.
"Like witness," Salla agreed.
They made a plan that was not yet exodus and not yet surrender: tonight, the net. Twenty houses to answer and to carry neighbor if neighbor was broken. Those who could move would carry the song and the pebble and the knot to outlying farms. Those who could not would hold hearth and speak. Miss Gavren would try to find which cells in the city were bars that did not unlock with coin. Rook would slip along the reedbeds and cut the city's sense of direction wherever he could. Liora would rest because her ankle had an opinion, and then she would not rest because leadership never learns when to sit.
As the light thinned, Cailen stood and shuffled, awkward with a boy's need to be needed. "I can run messages," he said, more bravely than was fair for a boy who still said Aunt with that exact amount of love.
"You can," Liora said. "But only with someone. Pair work. The marsh eats heroes for breakfast."
He flushed with pleasure. "I'll be eaten for lunch then."
"Dinner at the latest," Rook deadpanned, which made the boy's grin blister wide. Humor is a bandage you can wear to a funeral.
A heron took off nearby, slow as a god dismissing a crowd. The marsh made its evening sounds: frogs debating, bugs practicing their tiny metal songs, the water's slow consonants. Cael watched the old woman's seeds in her palm and thought about the temptation to believe that the worst had already happened. The worst often arrives after you make that assumption. He tasted iron—not from blood, though he had tasted that too this day—but from the thought that their next choice would be the one that decided if the town survived as a story or only as a list of names on the magistrate's tidy board.
He looked at the lead and at Jeran's little poem. He looked at the children and at Cailen's thin wrists. He looked at Liora and saw the way pain sat beside resolve like a friend invited for supper. He looked at Miss Gavren and at Rook and at Salla's seeds and felt the whole strange machine of a people trying to memorize itself.
"Tonight," he said, "we walk the ring."
"And tomorrow?" Rook asked.
"Tomorrow we decide whether rings can move," Cael said. "And whether the city can count what refuses to sit still."
Salla laughed, a sound like a string plucked. "They will try to scorch us again," she said. "But you can only burn a witness if the witness agrees to live in one place."
They set the lead plate in the center of the little dry spit, and they sat in a circle that pretended to be twenty. They spoke names. They learned the rhythm: thumb, thumb, forefinger, pause. They sang Jeran's five lines until the words were less a song than an instruction manual for the mouth. Someone cried quietly. Someone else laughed at the wrong time and apologized and was not scolded. Children fell asleep with their heads on their own biceps. The first stars came out with the shy certainty of things that are there whether or not men fight.
When the moon shouldered up, fat and impartial, they rose. The marsh kept their secrets with the practiced indifference of a judge who has seen nineteen versions of the same crime. Cael took the lead plate in both hands and felt its weight redistribute his spine. Before the book, the houses kept. He believed it. He had to.
He did not sleep until he dreamed; he did not dream until he heard the counting-song spoken back to him by a voice that was not a voice. It was the river's throat and Jeran's low patience and Serin's lazy grin gone solemn. Before you bind, you must be read, the dream said, and in the dream, twenty doorways opened one by one like mouths when a loved one enters.
At dawn a boat will come out of the city with a white cloth tied to its mast, and a clerk with too-clean hands will speak of amnesty and lists and assurances. At noon the first house will refuse. At dusk the spiral will appear on the oven-house again and someone will wipe it away with a wet sleeve, and the stain will remain like a faint bruise. Before midnight, three messages will run the ring and close it. By morning, they will know whether their town can live as movement.
For now, the marsh listened and did not interject. The braid of rosemary had long since slipped its green into the wider water. Somewhere in the reeds a fish turned and forgot why. Cael lay with his head on the rolled cloak, the lead plate under his hand like a promise, and counted the houses again. When he reached twenty, he added one more—Serin, kneeling in a place without magistrates—and only then slept.