The Wick stands at the nave; the city takes a breath; doors listen for a name.
…and the city inhaled as if about to pronounce itself.
The inhalation had weight. Steam stitched a tremor along the nave's ceiling; hinges adjusted their manners. The Wick in the arch tilted its head, light pooling at its shoulders like a coat borrowed too politely. Chains at its wrists made a faint, well-bred clink.
"Please," it said, as if the word were a key it had practiced until it fit everywhere. Its eyes—milk careful, candlelight trapped in glass—found Rowan and then the Public Book. "You are keeping a word. May I read it?"
"Back to your line," Voss said, not turning the command into a shout because men like him believed volume was for other people.
"Let it speak," Rell murmured, blue bell balanced on two fingers like a smile that could make noise if paid.
Blyth did not move his hand from the folio. "Public witness stands," he said to the Wick, the door, the crowd. "We're not done counting aloud."
The Wick's gaze slid to the page the way heat finds metal. Lysa shifted the corked vial in her grip; a bead of quickglass rose toward the lip, then thought better of it. Edda stepped between the candle and the page by exactly half a shoe. "Mind your inches," she told the light. "Some names are still attached."
The Wick's mouth shaped a patient apology. "Useful endings require tidy beginnings," it repeated, as if quoting a friend. Its attention returned to Rowan, gentle as rope. "You spoke a door's sentence. May I borrow it?"
The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. Rowan felt the anchor rise to the back of his teeth like a coin ready to be spent. He kept it there and answered with the piece of honesty that would cost least. "You can stand in it," he said. "You can't own it."
Rell's eyes tilted. "Look at that," she said softly. "We've taught our clerk to say no to candles."
The wardline held its new note low and steady, the kind of tone men decide to ignore until a valve decides to be a teacher. Calder's fingers twitched as if taking dictation from the building. "Minutes thinning," he said, voice empty of panic. "Make the next choice quickly and make it small."
"Small," Edda agreed, not looking away from the Wick. "Rowan. If it takes a step, tether. Bind, not Lumen. Keep your heat; spend your preferences."
Rowan swallowed brass. "Understood."
The Wick steps; Rowan offers a sentence; the bill arrives in small coins.
Understood.
The Wick shifted its weight. It wasn't a stride; it was a candle imagining what legs might feel like. The air brightened by a temperature you could measure with your tongue.
Rowan pinched a whisper of Bind from the satchel's inside flap with his teeth—the taste of old iron and paper-glue—and spoke the anchor into a shape that could carry something besides him. "The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift," he said, low and exact, his right hand set on the Book's inner hinge to aim the vector. "Stand in that hinge; wait for the lift."
The Wick obeyed the grammar of the words the way obedient men obey chairs: it sat in the sentence and tested its legs there. Its light steadied, losing the shiver that meant a corridor was about to be taught a lesson.
Cost arrived like a drawer gliding shut on something he hadn't realized he'd placed there. A small, fussy preference—Rowan's instinct to tuck titles underlined out of habit—rolled back from the edge of his hand and dropped away. In its place the bind-thread settled, neat and mean, into the book's hinge and then outward into the dais.
"You paid," Edda said, hearing the breath he didn't take.
"Something cheap," Rowan said. "I used to underline. I don't anymore." The lack was clean, his mouth uncomplaining. That frightened him more than ink ever had.
Rell's bell turned on its stem with the lazy joy of a tool content to wait. "Admirable," she said. "We're training a clerk out of gentility."
The Wick listened to the hinge as if it could hear wood in the iron. "Lift," it said, quietly delighted that the word had two jobs. Its eyes moved back to the page. "The word you wrote is people. Is it the kind with breath, or the kind with lists?"
"Breath," Rowan said.
"Then I have one," the Wick said, as if delivering an invoice, and took a half-step closer to the Book that wasn't a step at all so much as light acknowledging paper.
Voss's jaw ached. "Crane," he said to Edda, as if Edda were a tool that had been left here without authorization, "remove it."
"No," Blyth said. Calmly, like a line taught to stay straight.
The wardline's note thickened. Steam collected at the ceiling in a nervous seam.
"Small," Calder reminded the air. "Make small choices."
Rowan kept his palm on the hinge and did not spend Lumen. He refused to be a warm miracle. He would be a rude sentence. "You may read what is on the page," he told the Wick. "If you try to write, the room will take your hand."
The Wick's smile admitted the fairness of that exchange. "Thank you," it said, and leaned its face down toward the word people as if to smell it.
The Wick tries to remember its name; Lysa spends Echo; the Book decides whether a candle is a person.
…leaned its face down toward the word people…
Heat softened the air by a degree. The word did not char. It didn't like being read by fire; it tolerated it like a clerk tolerating an aunt with loud opinions. The Wick breathed. If breath is the privilege of lungs, then it cheated—but it made the same small sound anyway.
"What is your name?" Lysa asked, surprising herself by asking kindly.
The Wick looked up as if startled to be spoken to like weather, not like instrument. "I had one," it said, and the grief in the sentence was not large, only competent. It turned its head a fraction to one side in a gesture that remembered listening. "It is… io— no. Ori? There were three letters that liked each other. They were mine."
Rowan felt his mouth begin to move before he chose it. The hinge's bind made his tongue want to help. "Iori?" he offered, and regretted it, because giving a syllable to a Wick felt like teaching a knife to say please.
The Wick tilted, light brightening as if praise had been whispered in a language it didn't know it spoke. "Iori," it said, trying the size. "That was the door at the bottom of my stairs."
Lysa had already thumbed a pinch of black from the pocket near her ink. Echo. Not a flame. A bargain with memory. She touched the powder to her tongue and—without asking anyone's leave, because asking is for later—leaned close enough to breathe the Wick's syllables into a shape the room could keep. "Say it again," she whispered, and the whisper had the sound of a mother correcting table manners and a bell telling morning to behave. "Iori what? Give me a last."
The Wick's face creased, not with heat—Wicks don't mark as men do—but with the effort of lifting something name-shaped. "Iori…" Its light flickered over the page, and the watermark behind people shivered in sympathy. "Fen," it said. And then, very quietly, as if someone's door would punish the admission: "Iori Fen."
The Book listened.
On the page a hair-thin line of brightness stroked under people and then wrote, in a hand that was no one's hand at all, Iori Fen—faint, like a water stain that had decided to be letters.
Rell didn't move, because moving would admit surprise. "You taught the Book to be sentimental," she said to Blyth.
"No," Blyth said. "He taught it to be precise."
Lysa swayed and caught herself on the pedestal. The price arrived late but it arrived—a clean subtraction from her senses. "What?" Edda asked, voice flat.
"The sound of my uncle's laugh at a funeral," Lysa said. Her mouth was set; her eyes weren't. "I can remember the joke. Not his laugh. Echo took it and shook my hand before it left."
"You wanted a name," Calder said, gentle for once. "You paid correctly."
The Wick—Iori now, even if the ink denied him strength—looked down at the faint letters with a politeness that made the chain at his wrist look like ornament. "Thank you," he told the page. "I will stand still better now."
The wardline's hum swelled, put a bruise in the light. From the courtyard, a valve spat a public swear. The crowd murmured, not a panic—more like the sound a table makes when two hands reach for the same cup.
Voss stepped toward the pedestal. The Book's iron lip didn't scrape him this time; it didn't need to. The hallway's doors all at once discovered they had held their breaths and exhaled together. The air moved like a politeness that had changed its mind.
"Enough," Voss said. "We're done letting candles draft law."
"Law drafts candles," Mae said cheerfully from the nave's edge. "You just don't write that part down."
The wardline tests the room; Rowan holds with Bind and Kint; the Wick reaches for the page; everything waits on a finger-width.
"You just don't write that part down."
The wardline shifted key—down a step, into a register that makes men think of basement water and winter floors. Steam furred the ceiling. The lamps found a minor note they preferred and trembled there. Somewhere close, someone dragged a portable toneplate into the side hall and begged it to be a solution.
"Leave the toy," Calder said without looking. "Out of calendar." The word did what hands could not; the plate abashed itself silent.
A soft white blindness began to move through the nave: not fog, scald rehearsing a sermon. The crowd crouched in a ripple perfected by long civic practice. Rell did not crouch. She looked up at the steam as if it were an opera she owned seats for.
"Rowan," Edda said. "Hold small."
He put his left palm to the Book's hinge; set two fingers of the right on the pedestal seam, angled like a man adjusting a stubborn drawer. Bind first: "Keep the page unburned." The iron warmed, not affection, warning. A familiar cheapness lifted from him—his foolish hatred of dog-eared pages. He felt it depart and smiled without teeth because he would, in fact, dog-ear with impunity now.
"Still small," Edda said. "If it pushes, use Kint at the edges. Don't throw."
Rowan tasted copper on the air. He shifted his wrist a quarter inch and pushed a thin plate of Kint out from the pedestal—a transparent plank laid on the floor, a request for steam to choose down. The wardline's breath hit it and spread the way soft water spreads: it obeyed the instruction because scale had been kept reasonable. He paid in balance, a brief vertigo that moved the room half a thumb left.
He fixed his stance by remembering the anchor. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted the word in the back of his mouth; the tilt corrected.
"Not clever," Rell told him without looking. "But neat."
"Neat holds buildings together," Blyth said.
The scald rolled itself along the floor in a sulk and began to leak into the side court where drains were paid to be humble. The lamps stopped trying to be brave and succeeded. Men unfolded their knees as if someone respectable had looked away.
"Now," Voss said, and took a step as if he had been waiting for steam to put its name on the floor so he could put his on the next line. He reached—not to seize Rowan, not even to move the Book. He reached to tap the lower corner of the page with two fingers: a casual ownership, an old habit of auditing that pretends it is courtesy.
The Wick moved.
Not fast. Wicks do not hurry. The candlelight at his shoulders leaned; his chain chimed. His hand came up, palm open—the gesture of a man who doesn't want to be mistaken for a fist. His face carried three expressions trying not to argue and losing. He reached for the lower corner of the page as if asking to learn how paper feels when it belongs to more than one man.
"Don't," Edda said, and it was not a shout, which is why the room heard it.
"Let him," Rell said, and that wasn't a trap—it was curiosity sharpened to use.
"Please," Iori said, because one syllable belonged to him without being borrowed.
Rowan didn't have time to design a strategy. He had time for the smallest tool. He tightened his left hand on the hinge and said the shortest Bind he knew that had ever done what it promised. "Witness holds."
The price rose and took another little superstition—his old practice of stacking stamped forms with the stamp on the top right. It left without drama. He breathed. The hinge answered with a hum that said do not move unless the sentence changes.
Voss's fingers paused a finger-width above the corner. The Wick's fingers—cool-looking, light-dressed—came down toward the same inch of paper until Rowan could count the pores on skin that no longer owned sweat.
The Public Book took a breath.
The wardline's note swelled.
The corner of the page did not bend; it waited to be decided by hands it had not anticipated.
The Wick's shadow touched the watermark.
Rowan felt the weight of his next word like a screw laid in the dark, ready to either fix something or make it unfixable.
And the Wick's fingers descended to the page.
Fuse parts into a continuous chapter (no part titles/summaries)?