They woke as if the world had been rewritten overnight; the valley rose slow and deliberate, hands already at work translating farewell into function. Bread was folded like a map. Children learned to carry silence in the way their elders had been taught to carry pebbles: close to the chest, tucked beneath the shirt, a cold assurance against panic. Each pebble felt, in those last hours, like a small heart you could not afford to lose.
They braided rosemary into ropes and into hair and into the rims of oven-doors, not for superstition but for grammar — a scent that would speak of this place in other tongues. The lead plate's grooves were wrapped in oilcloth and split into three stealthy pieces; the lacquer tube was slipped into the soft chest of a child who knew how to hide a thing by pretending it were a toy. Jeran's scrap was recited aloud until the syllables sat in the throat like a second kind of hunger: remembering that is work.
Cael moved among them like a man whose face had been keyed by sorrow into a single useful expression. He touched wrists, tied knots, counted off departures with the counting-song as if the rhythm itself could pace courage. He did not believe in magic; he believed in measures. The song had become a tool — a lesson that one must teach a mouth to keep what a hand cannot bear alone. It was not prayer but it behaved like a compass.
They left in braided lines: skiffs under reed-lips, carts pressed into hedgerows, feet that turned the fields into footsteps of ghosts. Each household answered the required line as they moved, a soft chorus beneath boots and oar-thump. The counting-song had become, in these last mornings, a lullaby against erasure. Two by two, threefold mouth answered threefold mouth, and a map stitched itself into muscle: a human architecture that law could not clip with a single shears.
At the river's tooth the rear-guard stayed because some things keep their shape only when someone refuses to cross. Old Meral — who had the blunt honesty of a season that knows how to count loss — took her place by the oven like a hinge set to hold a door. Others, older hands and women with names that had never been loud in the market, arranged themselves at thresholds: they would be the town's last grammar. These were not heroic actors; they were the careful kind of brave, the quiet people who understand that a sacrifice is not an ending but a handing across.
The city came with the clean appetite of law made spectacle: banners that meant order, clerks with their courteous cruelty, a company that walked a line between civility and the pleasure of exacting consequences. They read proclamations as if reading a menu of violations. Their men were tidy and efficient; their measures were measured. The operation unfolded like someone following a recipe they had learned by reading the margins of other menus. Thirty-two days had become the deadline and now the ritual had a time-stamp.
When the first torches lifted it was not in a rush but as an answer: a hearth given the performance of cleansing. Men in neat cuffs set a fire against a thatch that had been the town's history and watched flame eat ink and timber with a calm that counted in ledger-slow seconds. The flames wrote a new geometry on the skyline; they turned roofs into bright punctuation marks and the smoke into a column that spelled the town's name away in the only language the city trusted. The city counted ambiance; the valley counted mouths.
From the reed-line the skiffs pushed into the river as though the water had been waiting to teach them how to be lost and how to be found. Children clutched tubes and pebbles and recited the lines under their breath, as if speech could stitch a wound closed. The song pivoted, gentler now, each verse a bead strung to the next until memory had weight. One for the stone we seed, two for the hand that keeps the seed — the lines were not magic but they were directions to hold a world together until the world's architects were elsewhere.
The rear-guard's work was a slow, necessary unmaking. They used signal fires to confuse pursuers, false trails that led like riddles back upon themselves, and, where it came to it, a face that would not cross. An old man who had kept a ferry all his life pushed his boat into the teeth of the magistrate's men and made a stand of complaint so calm it felt like a weather-state; others blocked roads with carts and with bodies and, when the men came to shove them aside, the valley's last witnesses answered with the counting-song so that when the magistrate's clerks wrote down names the sound of living mouths made ink look foolish.
A child rowed the last skiff that carried the lacquer tube because small hands recall the shape of hiding better than grown hands remember the price of a thing. Cael watched the cart slides recede, the silhouette of his home collapse into flame, and for a heartbeat he saw the thing plainly: a town is a living geometry of named hands; when the hands leave the place is only a set of coordinates on a cruel man's map. He felt a tilt inside him like the loss of balance in a body learning to keep on one leg.
They went through a bend and the embers behind them made the night look like a cemetery lit for a party. The sound of singing—the counting-song—rose thin and then fuller, a choir of breath and ration and the memory that doing is the opposite of giving up. In that chorus, the counting-song revealed its deeper skin: it was more than an instruction to preserve names. It was a model of dependence — a curriculum for a people to teach themselves how to remember, how to answer, how to be accountable to one another. It was a human attempt at a map, drawn where a map had not been given.
Once the last cart slipped from sight, once the last skiff had become an oar-stamped line on the water, the town burned into private ash. Law would write its tidy report; clerks would swear they had preserved order. The children who had been spared would grow with the counting-song as if it were old blood in their veins. But the emptiness left by the place's ember-glow did not close like a well; it opened wide like a question without an answer — a missing signature at the bottom of the ledger of existence.
And here the counting-song does what law cannot: it hints at the need for a hand that sets measure, for a maker who gives a path rather than leaving the long aimless fields of chance. Without someone who writes the first line — without a maker whose handwriting draws a horizon and says, go this way, not that — humanity makes its own maps out of desperation: verses sewn into loaves, mnemonics hidden in kneading, oaths braided into rosemary. The counting-song is not a substitute for a first law; it is a people's pursuit of it: a way to say aloud, together, we will be kept because we keep one another.
They crossed a wide mouth of river where the sea would one day listen for this place's name and then not remember it. Cael, with Jeran's tube folded beneath his coat and the Pilgrim's scrap secreted into the child's pouch, looked back once, as men do when they accept a debt they cannot repay. The town behind him was a column of smoke and a memory that would live either as a story or as statistics. He put his thumb over the child's small pulse and felt the counting-song answered in something warm and mortal.
The final stanza of the valley's song was small and terrible and beautiful in its simplicity. Children, taught to be living pages, sang it like a benediction and it became less an instruction than a want: Teach us a path to follow. Set before us a line to walk by that is not merely our own invention. The words trembled with the sort of longing that always looks like prayer even in those who refuse the name.
When the skiff reached the headland and the sea opened like an honest mouth, a gull cried over water that had no interest in human law. Cael unrolled Joren's crude map and let the wind smell it. The spiral on the corner of the parchment — a mark of houses kept, not books bound — looked like a promise someone else had once left and then forgotten. He tucked the tube into the child's hands and said in the simplest voice he had: "Carry it like bread. Share it like bread."
In the next hour they would bury the last of the rosemary by a low stone and mark it with a thumbprint; in the morning they would learn to make the counting-song into the work of making a new place. But in that moment, on that cliff, the wind and the sea and the child's small breathing made a hush. It was the kind of hush that follows a bell and a book and the last hand on a ledger.
Cael let the pebble fall from his fingers. It slipped from his palm and made a single, clean sound as it hit the water — not a cry, not an accusation, just a small, honest punctuation. The ripple folded the river's skin once, twice, then let it smooth itself as if nothing had happened. That ripple was the town's last arithmetic: an action is a sound, and sound becomes memory only if someone remembers to sing back.
They stepped forward into the unknown together, carrying songs sewn into daily work, a map divided into pieces, and the uneasy wisdom that without a first writing-hand to point the path, people will always need to teach themselves how to be kept. The counting-song would do what it could; the maker may or may not be anywhere in the frame. The song is, in the end, both plea and practice — a human-lot measure against the dark.
A child on the prow breathed out the counting-song one last time as the town's silhouette fell small behind them:
> One for the stone we seed,
Two for the hand that keeps the seed,
Three for the rope that binds the deed.
And then the river folded the sound away, leaving only the ache of a name undone and the simple, terrible fact of absence — a single pebble gone where once a town had been.