And the Wick's fingers descended to the page.
They were not quite fingers—more like light making an argument about shape. The chains at the Wick's wrists chimed once, courteous. Steam stitched a seam along the nave's ceiling and pretended to be architecture. Rowan kept his left palm pressed to the Book's inner hinge; his right hovered over the lower margin like a man ready to steady a ledger in a wind.
"Witness holds," he had said already, and the hinge hummed back do not move unless the sentence changes. He didn't change it. He filed it, a pinhead of Bind rolled under his tongue and pushed into a cleaner thread. "Read only."
The cost came small and exact. The little joy he took in peeling labels off bottles cleanly slid out of him and didn't come back. He felt the absence like a drawer that now closed easier. The ease frightened him.
The Wick's palm found paper.
Heat rose without char. The watermark behind people brightened like breath on glass: no scorch, only proof of contact. A faint whorl appeared in the margin where no clerk would dare to write. Not a signature—a touch.
Voss's left hand hovered a finger-width above the same corner, arrested mid-habit by insult or etiquette; his nerves did not flinch. Men like him train their nerves to wait.
Rell's bell turned a half circle and stopped. "Well written," she murmured. "A verb with the manners of a noun."
The crowd learned how to hold its breath for the duration of a second son's prayer. Lysa angled the vial; the bead of quickglass slid back from the lip. Edda stared at the whorl as if practicing learning to love it.
The Public Book—iron spine, lawful paper—made a sound Rowan had never heard: a dry swallow. Not quite a page-turn. A decision that had to go down.
"Name?" Rowan asked, because the room would accept that word from him.
The Wick's mouth tried a shape that remembered being human. "Iori," it said, finding a syllable as if retrieving a lost spoon. A breath, then: "Fen."
On the page, hair-thin brightness stroked under people and then wrote, in a hand that was no one's hand at all: Iori Fen—faint as a water stain deciding to be letters.
Iori Fen, the page decided, and dared the city to argue.
Blyth didn't move his palm from the folio's edge. He let his voice borrow iron. "Public custody recognizes the bearer presently touching this page as person for the duration of witness in progress."
"That isn't statute," Voss said.
"It's a sentence," Blyth replied. "And doors remember sentences."
Hinges throughout the nave shifted their weight as if taught a new posture. The bailiff at the far end bowed because his body preferred obedience to a room that had decided.
Rell's smile added one more tooth. "Shall we try its edges?" she asked, to the air and therefore everyone. "If I call him patient, does person erase itself to make room for medicine?"
"Person takes priority," Calder said, voice lazy as remittances. "Unless patient would die before the minutes finish arguing."
"Language," Rell said, pleased. "My favorite toy."
Lysa lifted her chin. "Say patient and you buy consent," she said. "Does your bell know that word?"
"It knows triage," Rell said sweetly.
The wardline dropped half a tone. Steam ratcheted at the cornice like an anxious knuckle. Somewhere in the court, a valve learned the cost of pretending it had no feelings.
"Hold small," Edda told Rowan, quiet enough that only the hinge could eavesdrop. "If it pushes, give me Kint at the edges. Don't lift heat."
Rowan kept his palm on iron and his tongue on brass. "Read only," he repeated—not for the Book, for himself. A familiar shave arrived and left—the private satisfaction of stacking stamped forms top-right fled into the hinge and left him steady.
Iori stood with his palm on the page like a penitent who had found a wall that let him lean. "Hello," he told the ink, soft. "I will stand better now."
Voss moved the way rank moves: flat, two fingers down, audit-touch. He did not seize. He attempted ownership disguised as check.
The Book did not cut him this time. It remembered the earlier scratch and chose courtesy instead: the corner stayed flat and refused to receive him.
"Warden," Blyth said, all first consonants, "do not annotate my ledger."
"You're annotating mine," Voss said, and it could have passed for humor if he believed anyone else deserved laughter. "That is my line in his chains."
Rell leaned a hip to the rail, allowances and gold-edged boredom. "Trade mercies," she suggested. "Medical custody: my ward-doctors keep him from burning a noun into the rafters while your clerk drafts an ethics pamphlet. Everybody goes home with the same faces."
"Person," Calder corrected, gentle as a banker on a Sunday. "Not it. Him."
Rell did not look ashamed. She never did. "Him," she said, obedient as an insult.
Mae slid in from the side with a grin meant for guilty doors. "Minutes moved," she reported. "South assay holds; Bay Three asked please again and then remembered itself. Dara says if anybody whispers 'optimization' to a valve she'll sell them to a dictionary."
Rell's bell rotated half a degree. "Adorable," she said. "Buy her lunch before she turns into a saint."
The wardline pressed. A breath of scald hunted ankles from the court's lip. Rowan shifted his right hand a hair, pushed Kintthin along the floor—no theater, just a suggestion that down was cheaper than forward. He swayed, corrected with the anchor, and paid a penny of balance.
"Invoice?" Edda asked.
"I used to line my coins heads-up," Rowan murmured. "I don't anymore."
"You're growing up," she said, dangerously fond.
Voss watched the invisible plank of air and hated its competence. "You will run out of small things," he told Rowan without heat. "Then you will owe me big ones."
"I'm writing what we owe," Rowan said. "People."
The Book shivered in its spine—little, less, then exactly like paper learning bravery. The watermark under people rippled outward from Iori Fen and kissed the gutter.
"Lift," Iori said. Not a plea; the word had found its lever.
Rowan kept his left palm on the hinge and let the anchor sit on his teeth like a coin he could spend without change. The door on Market Steps sticks unless you lift. He lifted Steps in his mouth, breathed once, and spoke consent pared to grammar.
"Lift one page; keep the names steady."
The hinge warmed into compliance. The invoice arrived like a drawer closing on a keepsake he'd once mistaken for necessary: his preference for matching socks let go of his ankles and walked into the paper as fee. He didn't smile. He did not stumble.
The Book lifted itself.
It didn't flutter. It didn't confess. It turned as a well-bred door opens: deliberate, exact, conscious of witnesses. Iori's hand stayed planted through the motion without smearing into ash or law. The new page showed no watermark—at first.
Then, faint, as if the paper had remembered rain, lines rose: not a table—no lists by custom here—but a field with room for many nouns.
Rell's bell didn't ring. For once her eyes engaged in something less efficient than victory. "Oh," she said, honest. "How expensive."
Blyth's hand tightened on the folio as if an artery had announced itself. "What is it?"
Calder's mouth tilted toward confession. "It looks like it wants a… census," he said. "Of the line."
The wardline altered its note by exactly a heartbeat. From the stair below, chains answered politely. Lysa's vial wrote a cold ring down the glass and back, as if certain syllables were arriving to check whether they deserved to be kept.
Iori's mouth made a shape that once meant mother and stopped, respectful of his own ignorance. He looked at Rowan, at the page, at the blank field learning appetite.
"May I lift others?" he asked, the timid courtesy of a candle asking to borrow air.
Voss moved a fraction—the way executions move before the priest arrives. "No."
Blyth did not answer yet.
Rell's bell rolled once on her palm and decided not to be music.
Edda's eyes never left Rowan's fingers. "If you allow it," she said, "you buy people at cost."
"How much?" Rowan asked.
"All of it," she said.
The new page waited, field open, watermark waking. The wardline hummed a syllable that could become a choir.
Iori's hand—person—rested on the margin of history. "May I?" he asked again, to the page, to Rowan, to the city that had taught both to count.
Rowan weighed grammar in his mouth, because grammar is how you admit the truth without letting it devour you. "One," he said. "One name. Read only. Hands stay."
The Book accepted the clause; the hinge warmed; a cheap superstition fled his pockets—the old habit of correcting strangers' commas. He let it go and found himself lighter in a way that did not equal freer.
Iori bent his head as if listening to stairs. "Ori—" He stopped, corrected himself out of politeness. "Lysa, may I borrow a sound?"
Lysa touched a kiss of Echo to her tongue—a black thimble of memory—and breathed into the space between page and light. "Say it."
"Marin," Iori said. "Marin Pell."
The wardline shoved. Steam pressed from the nave mouth in a posture that preferred drama. Rowan set two fingers to the pedestal seam, pushed a thinKint shelf along the floor—no show, just instruction. He paid in balance; the room slid half a thumbnail left; he corrected with his anchor and kept the shelf obliging.
The page brightened under nothing and then, faint as modesty, wrote: Marin Pell. The letters seemed ashamed of their own desire to stay.
The crowd made a sound like a table deciding not to break under a feast. Somewhere, a seamstress cried once because the name belonged to a man who had died facing the wrong window. The wick at the court's edge lifted its face as if someone had said mother quietly where it could hear.
"Enough," Voss said, for the habit of it.
"Not yet," the Book said without sound, turning its field a hair wider by existing under witness.
Rell's eyes never left Rowan's hands. "How many of those do you think your clerk can afford before he turns into a polite hole?" she asked the room.
"As many as the city should have counted," Blyth said.
Iori did not take his palm from the page. He stood in the hinge Rowan had offered and learned, painfully carefully, how to be read.
"Another?" he asked, and the question wasn't greedy. It was a candle asking whether there was room for one more name at a small table.
Rowan swallowed brass. He could feel the remaining cheapnesses inside him taking numbers—ink-blot symmetry, pen-nib noise, orderly columns—ready to be levied. After that would come warmth, then songs, then the parts of himself that knew where later belonged inside a sentence.
"One more," he said, because the word people had already made a promise with his mouth. "Read only. Hands stay."
The wardline held its breath, just for the width of a heartbeat that wanted never to end. The city leaned as if about to pronounce itself.