Hunger has many appetites.
There is the blunt appetite that makes a man count coin at night and measure his child's portion by thumb. There is another hunger — quieter, older — that asks why a life should sing at all. In the valley these hungers braided together like roots. When bread grew scarce, questions turned to prayer; when questions went unanswered, people took comfort for purchase.
He arrived like a trade-wagon rearranged into sermon. A canvas awning, spices to sell, a voice practiced into velvet. He called himself Solan the Comforter; others called him Master Solan because comfort deserves a title. He wore linen that had the neat, unspent look of a man who had not been measured by need. He carried with him an odd small chest: inside it were dried figs, a stack of printed tracts, and a bowl of seed-salt that smelled of far places.
He did not first speak of the city or law. He spoke of rest.
"Men tire," he told them the first night, standing on a low crate in the market. Children clustered, because children are greedy for story. "They tire of counting and of counting being their god. There is peace for those who accept a path: peace in the season of death, peace within the season of hunger. Drink, and you will be steadied. Hear, and you will be guided."
He lit no candles; his voice was its own light. He offered a small ritual: come and eat his fig, say an oath written on his tract, and in return the village would receive a weekly sack of salted fish and a few jars of preserved fruit. The first week he gave more than he promised. People ate the figs and forgot cold for a night.
Bram was the first to step forward formally. He had been hungry in the city for longer than most; the magistrate had taught him how much the world costs in coin and in silence. He took Solan's hand and read a short line from the tract and in the evening the boy at his stall received extra flour. Bram slept without counting for the first week in a long time; his shame wrapped softer.
Miss Gavren watched. She folded her hands like a woman who would rather hold a ledger and find pain inside the sums. "Comfort is trade," she told Cael that night, the river making a small argument against their boots. "He brings food and asks for obedience in place of names. That is how patronage works. We must not confuse it with sanctuary."
Solan did not demand names at once. He asked for attendance. He asked those who took his bread to say the hymn at dawn and to bring rosemary to the table on market day. He taught a verse that nested easily into the valley's counting-song — a line about being "clean at the end" that slid into the fifth place where the children used to recite chores. He made the counting-song sweeter, a glaze upon a bitter loaf.
The valley's needs are pragmatic. Salt is salt. When the steward's cart arrived with a crate of the Comforter's fish, hands reached instinctively. A mother who had not eaten enough in two days put her child into the queue and learned the hymn with the child's mouth open like a small receptacle. The hymn promised rest for the dead if the living kept the ritual; the child learned the words the way hunger learns to square arithmetic.
Small rituals became private commerce. Solan's circle met in a tent near the reed-line. Those who attended received a ration slip and a place at a communal table. Those who did not attend received less: the baker who refused to offer the hymn at the oven found his sacks less often refilled. The peddlers who trafficked in the Comforter's goods could point to the steward and claim favor. Charity, once a practice of neighbor to neighbor, became a ledger with a signature.
Cael watched these trades like a man learning the angle of a blade. He understood hunger; he had counted it. But he had wanted to teach the counting-song into chores so a child might recite it with flour on her fingers and keep the map in muscle rather than hand it to a stranger in exchange for a ration. Now people were trading song for bread rather than kneading song into bread.
"Their faith eats what it is fed," Miss Gavren said to him one afternoon, watching a line of women step through Solan's tent and reemerge with a scrap of the Comforter's seal. "Give them fish, and they will eat doctrine wrapped in fish. Give them rest promised beyond the grave, and they will trade you the living's voice for that rest."
A father, thin and white with worry, told Cael plainly in the market: "If prayers give my boy food tonight, what is the cost of my asking them?" His hands were cracked. Cael had no answer that tasted good. He could tell the man to hold faith like rosemary — a seasoning — but a child's belly will not be tricked by seasoning.
So the valley changed. The counting-song acquired a new refrain the women hummed while kneading: a line about "sacred bread" that meant both bread and promise. Parents taught the children the hymn with their eyes on their children's stomachs. The Comforter's circle grew. The liaison from Lord Marek nodded politely and learned the hymn in its neutral way, as if all governance benefits from songs that soothe.
There were favors, of course. Solan healed a fever that took two men in one lane by paying for an herbalist who had once hidden a page; he organized a watch that stopped a raid one night (or, as some said, moved it on to a less protected hamlet). These were visible goods, and people who received them made quick calculations: a little obedience now might mean the difference between an empty larder and fuller bellies come winter.
Not everyone bowed. Liora spat on the ground at one of his meetings, then sat on the fence and listened, because fury and curiosity are sometimes the same hunger. Miss Gavren went to the tent once and watched Solan's face while he spoke. He was careful with his scripts; he wore the kind of sincerity that could be a tool. "He will ask for more," she said quietly when she left. "Comfort needs scripture to stay profitable."
Cael tried countermeasures that were not cruelty. He taught bakers to hide verses in bread, to make the song a practice and not a sermon. He taught ferrymen to time their oars to a line so the map would not be a ledger held by any one hand. But such craft is slow. Solan sold immediate relief.
Belief as food is a vivid hunger. People eat visible comfort first and ration metaphysical promises to briefer months. The Comforter knew that. He framed his doctrine like a recipe — a ritual before sleep, a phrase before a meal — and those rituals became measurable. He asked for small tokens at first: a stitch of hair wrapped round rosemary, a small coin to place in the bowl. Tokens became pledges. Pledges become measures. Measures grow into indexes.
One scene marked the turning. A woman named Mera — who had once stitched Jeran's scrap into the hem of a baby's shirt — came to Solan for a single jar of preserved fruit. She recited the hymn; the tent man blessed her hand and tied a token round the baby's wrist. The next morning the token glinted at the market. Men who had seen it nodded to one another and gave Mera a wide berth because tokens identify houses now. The net had a new kind of thread.
Cael walked the market that day and met the gaze of a child who had not yet learned to measure such economies. The child held a pebble and mouthed the old two-line verse like a secret. Cael stooped and put his hand over the child's and removed the pebble gently. "Keep the old thing, too," he said. "Do not sell all your bread for the promise of ease." The child's eyes shone with a mixture of gratitude and fear.
That night Cael dreamed the ledger-of-the-dead again, and in the dream the dead did not look merciful; they looked thinly interested in whether the living had traded their mouths for comfort. They read names and the added lines — a hymn here, a token there — and they nodded as if keeping account. "Beliefs eaten wrong rot the belly," one whispered. It woke him as if someone had slapped his face with truth.
When he rose, he walked to the reed line and found Solan's tent in silhouette under the morning's wash. Men came and left with parcels and smiles. Children circled the tent for sweets. A small table outside bore a sign: For those who seek rest, the first meal is free. The sign was benign as a pail.
Cael understood a hard thing then: you cannot stop a hunger with argument. You can teach how to bake a loaf, but a famine makes people sell the oven. The valley needed both bread and a pedagogy that could outlast the Comforter's tent. Yet every effort to teach muscle-song felt like a plea at an empty market.
He met Solan at the river one afternoon, when the tent's trade had slowed and the man's linen showed the faint sweat of profession. The Comforter smiled like a man who had practiced generosity and knew its price.
"You feed people, and they call you blessing," Cael said. "You feed their souls, and they call you God."
Solan put out a measured hand. "I do not call myself God," he answered. "I call myself a steward. People are hungry for meaning as much as for bread. Who are you to decide which hunger is true?"
"I am no judge," Cael said. "I am a man with a pebble and a song. I know that when belief is bought like fish, it soon smells like coin. People deserve food and rest both. But which would you have them give away first when autumn takes the last of the stores?"
Solan's smile narrowed just enough to become businesslike. "They will give away what offers certainty," he said. "And I offer them a certainty: a way to be at peace when the stones close."
Cael left him then without a pledge. He had the pebble in his hand and the counting-song like a draft. He knew the valley would not hold its line forever if people continued to trade the living for promises. He also knew that hunger presses the mind into bargains.
At dusk the Comforter's followers walked the lane with little tokens at their wrists and the new hymn in their mouths. They looked satisfied, and some looked sewn shut. Cael sat by a tumbled wall and tied the keeper's knot around his own wrist until the rope bit. He hummed the old song low, a stitch against the new fabric being woven in the valley.
Beliefs are food, he thought, but not all food nourishes. Some is wrapper and spice; some will feed a night and starve a soul. The valley's hunger would have to be fed — but by what and by whom would define what the valley became.