They learned quick what displacement teaches: that memory travels best inside the ordinary.
The roads split like veins. Boats threaded reedways and ate the dawn; carts hugged hedgerows and moved like secrets; feet carried bundles through fields where farmers pretended to sleep. Nothing about their leaving looked heroic. They left as people who had been taught how to make every small item a guardian: a pebble sewn into a hem, a scrap of berry-ink tucked beneath a loaf, a verse scored in the grain of a bowl.
Cael's company broke into thin lines. He rode with Miss Gavren and Rook for a week, then split to teach. Their protocol was distilled into very few commands — easy to remember, hard to corrupt.
First rule: never trust a house with a ledger.
Second rule: give a thing to many, not one.
Third rule: when you hide a page, teach the page a song.
They taught the mnemonic the way one teaches a recipe. The counting-song became a kitchen task; children learned it while kneading dough. Housewives hummed it as they swept; ferrymen counted oar-strokes to its rhythm. A pebble in the palm served as a metronome and a proof: if a stranger asked, you held the stone and mouthed the first line.
> One for the stone we seed…
The ferryman on the lower reach was the first anecdote Cael would tell: Joris, small-shouldered and cunning in a way that comes of watching river patterns his whole life. Joris accepted a strip of leather from Cael, cut it into small slips, and hid them inside the pulley-wheels of his skiff. When soldiers came to check for contraband, he sold them a cold bowl of stew and fed them a lie about merchants. They liked the stew, and the river liked Joris. At night he sat his boy between his knees and sang the fourth line until the child could recite it in his sleep.
At the potter's, a different craft answered. Mara pressed the mnemonic into wet clay on the underside of platters — small letters, shallow grooves, a secret inscription baked into a thousand mundane things. Buyers thought the rough marks were maker's marks; only those who had been taught would run their thumb across them and learn the map. When a rider once asked for a bowl, Mara gave him one with a deliberate liberty and slipped a small pebble into the child's pocket. Habit sells suspicion; pottery sells forgetfulness.
The midwife, old Salla's apprentice before Salla's leaving, had hair like a streak of storm and hands that smelled of warm milk. She hid pages in the folds of baby-clothes and taught lullabies that were little sermons of witness. Mothers practiced the verses at night as they rocked babes and claimed, with the steady candor of those who have no choice, that songs were as useful as grain. A stranger in the market who asked for gossip was given a small scrap of bread and a smile; the midwife's eyes never left his hands.
Not every host kept such courtesy. A trader in the crossroads — tired, hungry, new to mercy — traded one of the lacquered slips for a sack of grain from a passing clerk. He told himself it was rational; bread feeds a child now, not a future. That barter cost the town. The clerk noticed the slip's unusual ink and passed word to a magistrate's man. At dawn men in neat boots came to the mill where a copy of the lead diagram had been hidden in a sack of flour. They found a strip and a pebble and a child who had not yet learned to be afraid.
The raid was quick and polite. They took the copy, left a sealed notice, and walked away as if there had been nothing to see. By evening a man in a neighboring fold had been taken for questioning; the miller's wife wept and swore she had only ever meant to be kind. The diaspora learned its first law: kindness is a currency the city will spend against you.
Cael took the failure like a bruise. He tightened the rules. No one would keep a complete diagram. No one ledger would become a citadel. From then on, every page was cut into three, each fragment taught its own verse; only when three houses sang in sequence did the full map emerge. They called the device the "threefold mouth." It was clumsy, redundant, and beautifully effective.
A courier followed by a city agent gave the diaspora its stalking shadow. The agent was not a uniformed monster but a man with clean cuffs and a patience trained in reading faces. He rode behind a grain convoy and passed as a buyer who wondered at the woodwork. He sat at inns and listened to the way mugs changed hands. He took notes in a ledger slimmer than those in the city, and those notes were all the proof the magistrate needed to order a quiet search. Once he waited out a fisherman's song, then paid the boy extra for his silence. The boy, who had not yet been taught the threefold mouth, took the coin and told only what he thought he could afford to tell.
That night, in a marsh cabin, a woman named Tessa pressed her palm to the lead-plate copy and wept because the ink had survived long enough to teach her the song. She had not been born to rebellion; she had come south with a husband who tilled but who had been taken by fever. Hiding the page felt like stealing a house's last vase — sacrilege with a motive. She taught her neighbors one line at a time and refused to pass the full verse to any single man. When men eager for proof pressed, she fed them bread and a soft, polite refusal.
Between these personal economies the diaspora learned to trade not in pages but in habits. A baker learned to place the pebble under loaves; an old ferryman learned to whistle the counting-song between oar-strokes as a password; a milkmaid kept the scrap in a leather stitch under the churn. The method seeded itself like grain across many hands.
The compromise at the mill, however, put a notch in their confidence. Cael and Miss Gavren shifted tactics: no more single-carriage couriers. Messages moved by circuits — children, musicians, mundane traders who would look the same wherever they stopped. The lead-plate's diagram was never to leave a body; it was to be read aloud and then folded into three and given to three. If one fragment was taken, the rest were still safe, and any attempt to assemble them would require the city to arrest entire neighborhoods.
Midway through a rain that made the mud look like sealed ink, a runner arrived breathless with a grim report: the mill's child had been taken, not for a long sentence but for the magistrate's questioning. They had not learned what he knew; the boy had been too young to carry the full song. The town—what remained of its scattered pockets—moved at that news like a single animal folding itself tighter. Couriers doubled back, safe houses shifted, newly taught keepers were put in pairs.
In the quiet that followed, Cael found time to teach a different lesson that was more than policy: how to feed memory. He sat with an old woman near a peat fire and tied a pebble into her apron's hem. "Teach them to eat this song," he said. "Feed it to them as you would a bitter herb. Do not make it sweet. If a thing is comfort alone, it will be sold."
She laughed once, the sound of someone spared a panic. "You speak like Jeran," she said. "He would make you a miser."
"Make me wiser," Cael answered.
They did not stop losing things. They lost a strip here, a winter's supply there. But they grew better at the arithmetic of scattering. They made apprentices into carriers who could recite the threefold mouth at any hearth and draw a map of neighbors from memory. They learned to replace pages with practice.
At dusk on the third week the city's agent sent a small, precise message into the mud where Cael found it: a scrap tied to a nail on a merchant's door that read, in neat legal hand, Comply with notice or be counted. It was less threat than an accounting. But every counting has teeth.
Cael folded the scrap into his pocket and felt the pebble there as if it were a second heart. He had learned the truth of the exile: the town no longer lived in streets but in habits; it could die in a place, but not in practice. That belief was the fragile seed he carried to every hearth. It would have to be enough.
At night, as reeds sighed and boats shifted, children in three different hamlets hummed the counting-song and licked crumbs of bread from their fingers. The melody moved like yeast. The diaspora had become less a scattering of refugees than a moving hearth, each ember feeding the next. They were small, furtive, and alive — and the city could count them only one by one.