They left before the sun had learned its shape.
Light came thin and economical, the kind that asks little of sight. Men and women moved like people unclasping themselves from habit: a sleeve folded twice, a loaf wrapped in linen, a pebble slipped into a child's palm. Jeran's scrap was sewn into collars and soles, a mnemonic pressed into the private geometry of bodies. The lead plate rode under hay in a cart; the lacquer tube was lashed inside a child's coat. They made witnesses of the small things so no magistrate could point to a single spine and claim dominion.
Cael checked knots until his fingers remembered the motion better than his thoughts. He tied the keeper's knot into the wrists of three apprentices and whispered the counting-song into their bones. The song had changed—shorter now, less hymn, more instruction. They would sing it at dusk, a soft code that meant: answer, speak, be. It traveled like bread.
> 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.
They left by three routes: the marsh boats under reeds, the carts that hugged hedges, and the foot-ways that threaded farm fields like seams. Cael took the boat with Miss Gavren, Rook, Liora on one leg broken but bound tight with linen and grim will, and a handful of children who smelled of flour and fear. Cailen sat with the lacquer tube in his lap and kept it like a secret.
Salla stayed.
No one told her to. Salla had hands that mended bread and hands that kept stitches in broken time. She had the habit of planting seeds in odd places and calling it prayer. She pushed a bundle of seeds into Cael's chest as if giving a child a coin.
"Plant them where they can surprise us," she said. Her voice was the small, flat thing of someone who had spoken many necessary truths. "And tell the children the old verse where the houses answer. If they take the houses, the neighbors will keep them like bread. If they take the neighbors too, then men will carry names in their mouths until the river grows tired."
"You must come," Cael said. "We cannot leave you here."
Salla smiled without teeth. "I taught men to bind ropes and women to mend shirts," she said. "Now teach the children to speak. My wrists are slow. Let the young make the running. They learn quicker than you think."
She wrapped rosemary in oilcloth and tied it to Liora's boot. Liora tried to argue, then laid her head against Salla's shoulder the way men sometimes do before they go to war.
"If I go," Liora said, voice small, "I will not know how to be with the dead."
"Then you will know how to be with the living," Salla answered. "That is better work."
They made the braid of rosemary and river grass and cast it into the water by the skiff as a sending. The braid hesitated, then took the current like an answer. Children watched the green disappear and began to hum the counting-song lower than the reeds.
The rear-guard was tidy and old-fashioned: false fires, a scatter of bread loaves to attract dogs and leave tracks, a string of rags dipped in oil to smoke upwind. Rook's instructions were short and clean. "Delay. Confuse. Don't give them a reason to find the cache that holds the lead plate." He looked at Salla. "You sure?"
Salla nodded. "Tell me a story when you come back," she said.
They set out with the dawn and the water took them in the way rivers take things — not with malice but with a patient purpose. Behind them, the town receded like a thought easing from the mind: roofs, a crooked oven, the slant of the Court of Stones now a ragged smoke. They pushed through a bend where the current hunched and the reeds stitched a gutter of shade. Boats chimed lightly, oars in rhythm, the hulls whispering like someone trying not to wake a sleeping animal.
They had not gone far when a column of riders rose over the hill like a list being read. The city's men—clean in a way that always reads as threat—swept toward the square. The marshal's flag was neat and indifferent.
Rook swore once, the single expletive of a man who names what must be named and then moves on.
"Hook two," he said, and the skiff answered, slipping into another shadow.
They could see smoke now, a thin thread that did not promise anything like mercy. The marsh hid them and showed them in fragments: a chimney, a woman's sleeve. Men were moved by the small arithmetic of fear. The boats held their breath and the children hummed until the tune thinned into a thought.
When the night came they landed on a cove where the reeds bent like old men listening. They sheltered the children in bellies of dry reed and passed the lacquer tube from hand to hand like a relic. Cael opened it in the dim and read Jeran's lines aloud one small time, more to make the sound do the work of remembering than to teach the children.
At dawn, Rook pushed them out again. Word arrived by runner that the riders had scorched an outer lane and dragged a house-full to the magistrate's cart as example. The town's tally was being written in smoke.
They moved inland, then east, then to the next bend. Each landing they made, they distributed pieces of memory: a verse tucked under a baker's stone, a pebble sewn into a midwife's cap, the lead-plate diagram copied with berry ink onto a strip of cloth and hidden in a miller's bundle. The method went out like seeds.
When the rear-guard shouldered the town's last visible defense, Salla was there, a thin figure among older men. She had painted a spiral on the oven-house lintel with soot, a thief's small protest. She had set a kettle to boil and placed a bright cloth in the doorway to catch the eye. She moved like a woman who knew all the ways a place could be read.
Riders came like a practiced argument. Salla met them with a bowl and bread and a look that asked for a small courtesy. She spoke first with the clerk, a man whose hands were clean enough to show his office's neatness.
"You take names for coin," she said, and there was no question in it, only a fact.
He smiled, the clerk's smile that had broken more than one throat. "We clean up disorder."
"You clean. We remember," Salla said. "Take what you must of the oven's soot. Take the old man's rope. But leave the children's songs. They aren't worth a fine." She put out the bowl as if making an ordinary offering.
The clerk found her brazen, and that made him cruel. He ordered a search. His men pushed into houses with the efficiency of practice; they found a cache of strips hidden in a cradle. They dragged a boy out by his hair. The town's tally moved another notch.
Salla stepped forward then as if the world had cleared a place for her. She set the bowl in the mud and put both hands on the boy's shoulders. "You'll remember three lines," she told him. "You will say them at dusk. You will teach them to your sister." The boy, stunned, said nothing. She laughed soft, the kind of small thing that holds grief like a pocket.
A soldier struck her across the face. A man behind him raised a cudgel. In that light, with motion like the tilt of a reed, Salla did the last thing she always did—she made her face a map for other hands to read.
She did not die in a theater of sorrow. She vanished the way small flames go when you extinguish them — a breath, a tilt, a falling. They laid her out by the oven-house where the clerk had posted his clean notice, and someone put rosemary in her hair as if mending a mistake.
Cael found her in the cooling shadow with the child curled against her breast and the pebble she had given him tucked into her palm. He knelt, pressed his forehead to hers like a vow, and felt the answer in the old woman's nails: Keep. He did not weep loudly; there was no time for the loud ways of grief. He placed his keeper's knot over her wrist and tied it once, a binding that meant: your name will be taught.
They carried Salla in a sheet and set her on a cart that had been left for mercy and they left one man behind to hold the oven's crooked door until the riders had been given enough of a picture to be satisfied. Rook's face went flinty; he did not look at Salla's closed hand.
The skiffs met the bend and the river opened its narrow mouth. Smoke rose behind them, dulling the morning like a bruise. Children clutched pebbles and hummed the counting-song—so low it was sometimes nothing but breath:
> One for the stone we seed…
Miss Gavren held a folded scrap of Jeran's poem until her knuckles whitened. Cael tucked Salla's rosemary into his shirt and felt its green give a small, bitter-sweet scent against his heart.
They passed the tooth of the river — a chalky ledge that looks like a mouth when seen from the right angle — and the town became a silhouette that the current did not carry, only memory did. Behind them, a house burned up in a single quick throat of flame. A child sang the fourth line as if counting off a life.
At the bend Cael let the pebble fall from his fingers. It slipped into the river and vanished with the small, clean sound of stone on water. He did not stare into the place where it sank; he watched the bow of the skiff cut the bright skin and listened to the children's low song stitch itself into the morning.
Salla was gone. She had not been rest. She had been an instruction: plant seeds, teach mouths, keep houses waking. Death had not ended her work; it had passed it forward like bread.
They rowed east toward a valley that had the shape of a promise. The smoke was a black ledger behind them. The method, like a handful of seeds, lay in their pockets.