They taught like gardeners.
Planting memory in a living place meant more than tucking scraps into drawers. It meant teaching hands, teaching hunger, making the small motions of life themselves carry meaning. Cael had spent months thinking of measures and margins; now the valley needed workers who would be memory not as relic but as habit. He called them apprentices: children of the village, fishermen's boys, the potter's slow-eyed daughter, a baker who had lost his son and learned to mold grief into crust. They came with rough palms and hungry ears.
The first lesson was mundane: how to fold a fragment so it would not tear in a pocket. Mara the potter taught that. She laid a strip of berry-ink on a cloth, creased it three times, and showed the children how each fold hid a quarter of the script. "If you tuck the verse into a bowl's underside," she said, "you turn the house into an archive. No magistrate will bother to wash a thousand bowls." Her hands moved like a song. The children imitated her until their creases were neat.
Next came the lesson the hermit had shown Cael on the ridge: embed phrase into motion. Hal the ferryman strapped small pebbles under planks and taught the oars' cadence until the rhythm lived in muscle. "Row," he said, "and the verse will ride on the echo. No one walks my channel and does not know the melody." The boys learned to time their breath to the fifth line. The counting-song moved from throat to tendon.
Cael himself taught the threefold mouth with a slow, careful patience. He sat by the oven with a dozen apprentices and spread Jeran's lead impression in their middle like a little map. He drew circles in the ash: ring, groove, crossing line.
"This is not a code for clever men," he said. "It is a debt we make to our neighbors. You carry one part, your neighbor another. When three mouths speak in sequence, the whole thing will sing true. If anyone takes one part, the system still lives. That is our strength."
He handed each child a pebble, warm from the hearth, and watched them clutch it as if it were a coin. They tied it into their aprons. He made them practice the verse while kneading, while washing boards, while mending a basket. Rhythm became practice; practice became proof.
They invented devices like modest machines. Mara pressed the counting-words into the bottoms of plates; the potter who sold to markets would let a careful thumb read the map in the fired clay. The milkmaid wrapped a strip inside newborn swaddles. The baker tucked stanzas inside loaves, not to be eaten but to be read by the mother's thumb when she wiped flour from her child's lip. A pebble sewn into a midwife's hem was a password she would never forget.
Apprenticeship had rituals and tests. On the day they were to be bound, the valley held a modest initiation—the Passing. The compact was unfolded, rosemary braided, and Jeran's lead plate set under the hearth as witness. Each apprentice came forward with a small offering: a bowl, a stitch, a handful of salt. The Keeper — Hal for the moment — took the pebble they carried and pressed it into his palm, then returned it. He tied the keeper's knot around the child's wrist with a practiced hand and spoke the law: rotation, threefold mouth, no single ledger. The child repeated the counting-song and then the rest of the village answered the verse for the child: the neighbors would be their memory's echo.
"We do not give you the full map," Cael said to them, voice low. "You will be given only what you need to carry. You will not hoard. If you find a fragment, cut it and give parts away. If you are tempted to keep one part because it feels like power, bring it to the hearth. We will mend you with work."
For three days they practiced moving fragments. They used decoy caches to teach secrecy and redundancy. Quiet tests were staged: a mock raid, a false registrar, men in plain clothes who pretended to be magistrate's clerks. The apprentices learned to split a page into three, tuck each piece into a different household's loaf, and read back the full sequence using the threefold mouth. If one household went silent, the apprentices petitioned three neighbors to fill the gap until the map could be made whole again. They learned the rule by tripping over it and then correcting.
The valley was careful to teach ethics with craft. Miss Gavren led evening circles where those who had been tempted by the Comforter told their stories publicly. They learned that confession married to labor was the best policy. Those who had failed had to become teachers for a season: teaching the counting-song in three different houses, cleaning ovens for a month, planting rosemary hedges along the outer path. Service was the ledger's clean weight.
Cael wrote a new verse in the evenings, polishing it like a knife's edge. He wanted a line that married duty and judgment without sounding like scripture. He worked it into the counting-song between bread and rope:
> Twelve for the hands that learn to keep,
Thirteen for the mouths that will not sleep,
Fourteen for the debt we leave in trust,
Fifteen for the hour that turns to dust.
It was practical and ominous in equal parts — a polite reminder that names do not dissolve with a body. He insisted the children learn it by action: twelve stitches in a sack, thirteen oars' pulls, fourteen seeds sown, fifteen minutes of watch at the gate. The verse lodged in their palms; habit was harder to steal than a page.
They formalized the Keeper's rotation into a simple calendar: each turn lasted three months, overlapping so no single Keeper's absence would unbalance the net. Names were chosen by the circle and recorded not in any one ledger but in three places: on a strip of cloth sewn into a loom, in the underside of a plate, and whispered into a child's ear to be taught at dusk. The valley's method was deliberately awkward—a feature, not a bug. To discover the full map without cooperation required taking hundreds of houses, not a single ledger.
Then came the test-run.
Cael organized it like a prayer and a training march. He carved a simple route that would pass through ten households and two river crossings. Three teams were to carry three distinct fragments, arriving in sequence. Each team practiced signals: reeds tied in a certain knot at the garden gate, a small chalk mark on a millstone, and Hal's oar cadence on the river. The test would reveal whether a fragment could be moved under pressure, whether the apprentices remembered to split pages, and whether the net could reconstruct the map when one household failed to answer.
On the morning of the run it rained thin and steady, making the dirt road a glossy line. Children hugged their fragments to their chests. Cael watched the first team slip away under the reed-line, then the second, then the third. He had hidden himself at the river crossing to watch the last hand-off.
The first team reached a house where a merchant had eyes like a hawk. The merchant's wife took the folded scrap, stroked the fabric like one might stroke a newborn, and recited her verse in a bare voice. The children slid under the table and learned patience. The second team arrived and left a pebble under the millstone; the apprentice who had carried it called the verse by the rhythm of flour falling. The third team was delayed when a magistrate's rider passed the lane; the apprentices hid behind hedges and held their breaths until the rider's boots rattled away.
At the river crossing the hand-off nearly failed: the household meant to carry the middle fragment had been stopped by a trader demanding a payment for crossing. The apprentice, young and tremulous, nearly handed the piece to the trader for a loaf. A woman from the household—one who had learned the counting-song as her mother's habit—saw the motion and took the fragment, recited the line aloud, and then whispered to the boy to hide it in the loaf's seam. The joint of song and craft saved the run. The map was reconstructed in sequence at the final hearth, despite the trader's interruption. The apprentices returned muddy, proud, thin with exertion. The valley celebrated with small cakes and long silence—an exhausted, grateful sound.
Cael marked the success and the near-miss in the compact with a small amendment: No fragment may be traded for goods. Aid is to be given freely. He put the note under the hearthstone with the rest. The valley had learned that hunger's arithmetic would always try to make a ledger of favors; the compact had to be explicit.
There were formal apprenticeships beyond the children. The potter's daughter, Lian, apprenticed full-time to Mara and learned to press more than words into clay; she learned to hide the lines where only a trusted thumb would find them. Rook took charge of a cohort that specialized in routes, teaching the boys and girls which reeds hid boats and which tides swallowed tracks. Miss Gavren oversaw the "reading rota" — the weekly circuit where elders would receive three rehearsals of a fragment and cross-check its verse against the threefold mouth.
They instituted the "caravan test" as a regular drill. Men dressed as traders would approach market, testing whether any house kept a full fragment. If they found a partial, they would be given bread and sent away. The drills were theatrical and useful; they taught the valley to assume that curiosity at the gate might be a clerk. No one carried a full map.
Before the month closed, Cael convened a different circle — quieter, more private. He wrote a single short scroll on a thin strip of skin; it was not a ledger but a last instruction. He called it the Pilgrim's Note in respect to Jeran's old style: how to behave if the valley ever had to move again en masse. It listed caches, hidden channels, and phrases to be used as decoys. He bound it in oilcloth and split it into three as they had taught — one piece to be hidden in the valley's deepest kiln, one to be sewn behind the midwife's cradle, and one to be carried, folded small, inside Cael's own shirt.
He did not keep the full direction in his head as a secret. He told Hal and Miss Gavren and the potter where each piece would go. The Pilgrim's Note would act as a last-resort map for those who had learned the counting-song.
On the last evening of instruction Cael called the apprentices to the river for the final rite: Passing the Ledger. They stood in a ring with their pebble-wrists, the heartbeat of the valley steady and small. Cael spoke simply.
"You will not be a library. You will be a practice," he said. "If you carry a verse, you are guardian. If you hoard, you are thief. If you barter, you are no longer our neighbor. Teach like the hands that make bread. Teach until it is in muscle."
One by one they came forward, paler in the candlelight, and placed their hands on Jeran's lead plate. The adults standing behind them answered the verses the children recited. Then the hands were released and the keeper's knot was tightened and retied and tightened again until it matched a man's promise.
When the rite ended, Cael walked alone a little from the ring and unrolled a small scrap delivered that day by a tired messenger. The note's wax seal was not a predator's but an old friend's: the spiral of a coastal captain who had been part of the binders' network years ago. The messenger had been humble, and his boots were muddied from sea-spray. He had walked forty miles to deliver one short line.
Cael cut the wax and read:
> To Cael of the valley —
A harbor takes little more than courage now. There is a place beyond the headland: a small quay, lanes of salt oak, a group of people who do not count exactly as the cities do. They mark a spiral on their map and say they trade in tales not names. If you ever need a shore that will not ask for your fragments, I give you this coordinate. I mark it with the spiral of those who once kept houses, not books. — Joren the mariner.
Beneath the line was a small, crude map: an inlet, a headland, an inked spiral. The paper smelled faintly of tar and sea and old rope.
Cael pressed the fragment into his palm until the heat of the candle warmed it. The valley had built a method that could survive a magistrate's appetite; still, the sea lay like an option that would allow the method to travel farther, beyond the magistrate's easy hand. The Pilgrim's Note's three parts were lodged within the valley; the new contact was a path outward.
He folded the map and put it into Jeran's lacquer tube and then, because habit has its own liturgy, he placed the tube into the child's care for safekeeping and told the child the difference between carrying and owning. "Keep it like bread," he said. "Do not swallow it."
That night the apprentices slept with their pebbles tied under their pillows. The village hummed with small work: loaves being shaped, plates stamped, oars being oiled. The compact lay under the hearthstone like a sleeping law.
Cael stood at the river and whispered the counting-song into the dark until the lines felt less fragile. He thought of Jeran's lead cups, of Salla's rosemary, of the kitchen lessons that had become a culture. The valley had passed the ledger into hands that would not treat memory as hoard. They had made witnesses out of everyday life.
Beyond the quiet, the map in Jeran's tube hid a spiral that promised a shore. It was a question that would not be answered tonight. The valley had taught its children to carry memory as chore. Cael closed his eyes and let the river's breath steady him. The Pilgrim's Note, the threefold mouth, the keeper's knot — these were the tools with which they would meet whatever came next.