After the amphitheatre emptied, the city kept the shape of that silence like a bruise. Men moved with new calculation; houses shuttered their windows as if a draft had found paper that should have stayed folded. Nogos retreated to his maps and to a ledger that now felt like a trap; Wurtz tightened the straps on his cuirass and counted swords; Trever ordered men to tidy the registries as if neat ink could staunch a wound the mountain had opened. Merve, in the private rooms she shaped like an argument, did the thing she did best: she turned panic into a plan.
"You let a mountain name my house in public," she told the council, and she did not shout their obedience was worth more than the volume of her voice. Her fingers toyed with a cup of cooled wine; the motion kept the room steady like a practiced surgeon's hand. "That is insolence. We will answer it properly."
"Answer how?" Nogos asked. His face had the washed pallor of a man who has always measured himself by the solidity of columns and now finds one missing. "If this goes before the city, any ink we lay down can be pulled up. We can buy voices, yes—but can you buy a mountain?"
Merve's smile calmed the air. "We do not fight a mountain with coin. We fight with story." She arranged witnesses like a woman arranging knives: chosen not for their warmth but for their edge. "We will make the next page of this story so satisfying the crowd will not remember the first line. We will demand the talisman be removed. If she refuses, we will call it proof of cunning. If she removes it, we will show her collapse. Either way she loses what the mountain gave her."
A priest at the table, small and oily, rubbed his hands. Halmar had not yet been forgotten—he had left the amphitheatre bleeding and humiliated, and some men whispered that a slipshod priest was always useful as scapegoat. Merve set a few coins into the cloth before her. "Find him. Quietly," she said. "And find the maid: whether for leverage or to make a show of mercy. Have a public pen where she can be redeemed—if it suits our story."
Outside the warm rooms of Oriyana, the forges breathed soot and sound into the dusk. Dyren moved through her people like a seamstress runs a finger along a hem. She listened more than she spoke; the aurora at her shoulders pulsed like a metronome, the talisman at her breast a small clock that had been wound to the point of shiver. Names lay like hot coal under a soot-smudged palm: some to be kept warm for the right moment, others to be dropped where they would burn the right houses.
Rosily reported in short, precise sentences. "Arcin will talk if we set him under the lamp," she said. "The ferryman swears what he read. The blacksmith will swear what he saw. The exile-registrar will swear if we set him to a proper oath. But the priest Halmar and the registrar who took hush payments those men are quick to vanish. They move like rats when the tide lifts."
Dyren touched the talisman as if to feel the city's pulse through it. "Then we will press daylight," she said. "We will call witnesses who cannot be bought. We will make the amphitheatre a court, and not a theatre."
Rosily's eyes were hard as the edge of an anvil. "You want the mountain to speak again?"
"I want the city to hear its ledger," Dyren answered. "The mountain says a thing and men listen because it never lies. But the city listens to people, too. A ferryman who can read manifests aloud in the sun is better than a mountain that names in a crack. The two together will be hard to spin away."
Between the two courts the small machinery of influence began to whirl. Messengers rode with folded names and with the faint scent of panic; Halmar hid in the alleys like a man who had seen his account called and found no coin left to make it right. In his haste he made mistakes: purses left unattended, a servant boastful and too sure of a secret. Not all men are prudent under fear. Merve's spymaster liked a sloppy enemy.
On the west quay, Arcin the Binder sweated under a lamp and gave the names he had thought to forget. He had bound bone-tabs into shipments, he said, marked crates with false emblems, slipped sigils into manifests so that names could be read as cargo. He talked in the thin, defeated voice of a man who had once trusted coin more than conscience.
"They used seals like eyes," he murmured when Rosily's rope tightened. "Closed pupils. A ring like a watching eye. Men with white watermarks Nogos' men. A captain who prefers to call children 'linen.' A house with a pale watermark we shipped for twice and grew quiet about thrice."
At that name the talisman stung like a struck chord. Sywar's shadow had lengthened into a accusation. Nogos' house had a comfort that often breeds cruelty: confidence that an account can be edited out of sight. Now the city smelled of burnt paper and of ledger-scorch.
Merve heard the same names when her spies brought slurred admissions from drunken clerks, half promises from registrars, a tip from a ferryman who had been bought and then regretted. Information is a market of its own and regret sometimes pays dividends. Merve tallied and sorted; she cooked a narrative in the larder of her mind: the cruel queen, the cursed talisman, the maid saved for a show of mercy. She prepared a public stage where the removal of Dyren's talisman would be presented as a mercy and a spectacle, where the queen's collapse—if it came—would be presented as proof of the thing her enemies had long whispered.
Dyren, when she heard of the plots, only smiled with her hands closed as if holding a small, private map. "They will try to make a miracle of me," she said to Rosily. "Let them. Our remedies will be ledger-work and the stubbornness of truth. If the priest sews an altar of spectacle, we will pull up the manifold and show the names in ink too deep to wash."
Rosily's laugh was brief and iron. "They will drag the maid through the mud to make you seem monstrous."
"Then let the maid speak truth," Dyren answered. "Do not let them make her mouth the stage for their fables."
So the plan became two lines. Merve would craft a show. She would arrange a "mercy" in which the maid wherever she was would be publicly returned and Dyren made to remove the talisman in tribute, an act staged as catharsis. Dyren would gather witnesses, smuggle documents into the hands of honest men, and force the reading of names in the amphitheatre itself. Both wanted the same thing the crowd but they wanted different uses for it.
The nights turned shorter, crowded with meetings and subterfuge. Halmar, slick with fear, made a bargain he thought secret. He had a servant who owed him no loyalty anymore and a small reserve of favors with a captain who liked easy money. He paid a courier to carry the maid away under a hood of linen, to hide her in a house under the shelter of a small man who liked his walls painted clean. Money makes men brave and cruel at once.
Rosily found the trace; her hands smelled of rust and ink and the same damp fear as any hunter who follows a trail a city thinks invisible. She tracked a route by small things: a scrap of linen under a stall, a ferryman's loose tongue at dawn, footprints that turned away from the quay and toward a back door. Each piece slid into place and the net tightened.
What she found made a small sound like a rusted hinge. A child no older than twelve sat shivering on a doorstep, bound in cord and crying quietly. The cloth that had hid her face was wet. Rosily crouched, cut the bonds with a knife so smooth they did not even catch, and gathered the child like something fragile and urgent. The child's eyes had seen too much for their age; they knew pity as a thing that requires work, not as a thing to be performed.
"Roselia," the girl whispered, voice ragged. "I thought they would take me to the great house. They said mercy would be our song."
Rosily's jaw set tight. "They lied," she said. "You will come home."
Home, however, was a difficult word for a city with open ledgers. Bringing Roselia back to the forges would be a small victory. Yet Halmar's treachery had left a sour coin in the air: the maid's capture, even brief, would be the performance Merve wanted to massage into a spectacle. If the princess could present the maid as rescued by Oriyana's benevolence if she could orchestrate a public return the tide of gossip might be turned by gratitude. The price was the truth; the cost would be a show.
Dyren did not react to the finding with triumph. When Rosily wrapped the child against her, the queen's hands moved with the careful economy of someone who knows what saving a life costs. "We will not be baited into their theater," Dyren said. "We will not let the return be their prop."
So the return was delayed: they moved Roselia through the city under confusing paths, set up quiet witnesses who could swear where they had been, and sent copies of Arcin's confessions to men who would not be bribed. The ferryman, the smith, the exile-registrar small, stubborn vessels were gathered and sworn before the dawn. Each would stand in the amphitheatre not to perform but to place ink on the record and to speak what they had seen.
On the day chosen, the amphitheatre filled again like a lung testing its capacity. Merve sat as if a queen always sits composed, implacable, a figure people measure themselves against. Nogos arranged for soldiers to be visible but remote; Wurtz kept a contingent of riders in the square like a threat in horse-form; Trever adjusted his face to that of a man with virtue on schedule.
The ferryman took his place. He laid the manifest open and the inked names gleamed under the sun. He read, and the amphitheatre listened, but the listening was a crowded thing. Merve's counter-witnesses rose and tried to smooth the blotches into normality. Halmar moved among them like a viper in plainclothes, his eyes greedy for the moment Ryse no, Roselia's return would be staged.
Dyren felt the talisman as a pulse beneath skin and thought of balance. The mountain had named. She had called witnesses and the city had a choice: to swallow a show, or to taste ink that would not wash. The aurora hummed at her throat like a metronome of patience.
When the ferryman read the line that bore the seal like a closed eye, you could hear a pin drop across the amphitheatre. The name that sat beside that mark was small, but to the houses it was galling. Nogos' face did not recover from the strike. Men who had thought paper a thing easily rewritten found it suddenly anchored to the weight of riverstone and the gravity of witness.
Merve rose slowly to her feet and lifted a hand like a conductor calling a new movement. She smiled the smile that had unmade many men. "Let the girl be returned," she declared into the hush like a benediction. "Let us show mercy for the sake of peace."
Dyren met that with a steady gaze. "Return who?" she asked, and though the amphitheatre expected gratitude, what the queen asked for was a name. "Return the child who was stolen for profit. Return the ink that records who bought whom. Return truth to those who kept it in the dark."
Merve's reply dropped like an accusation dressed in courtesy. "We return what has been taken," she said. "We offer mercy in the square and calls for repentance. The talisman will be set aside and your people may partake of the ritual."
It was exactly the offer the priest had hoped for: a public unbinding. Halmar's eyes gleamed like a man who has seen an altar prepared for a coin-shaped miracle. He stepped forward and made the words of sanctity sound like an instruction. The crowd leaned forward, hungry for the proof that spectacle promises.
Dyren did not move her hands to the talisman. Instead she lifted Roselia high enough for the sun to find the girl's face and for witnesses to see that the child was alive and that no one had been allowed to manufacture her body into a prop. "The child will not be a prop," she said calmly. "She will speak if she can. She will name if she remembers. We will not allow a liturgy of show to replace the ledger."
The amphitheatre held that for a moment like a thin vein. Then Halmar began his chant and the priests rose, and Merve's men prepared a circlet of guards and a dais arranged to show the tug of mercy. Men in the front rows whispered bargains into the ears of their friends and clenched purses tighter.
The question now was simple and terrible: would men choose the clean, purchasable story or the slow and dirty light of names called aloud? Would they be seduced by a staged mercy and hand a queen back to the people as a thing to be measured by a priest's badge? Or would they listen, one by one, as ferrymen and smiths and an exile-registrar read manifest and say aloud the names that had been traded?
Above the amphitheatre, the aurora hummed even softer, like something holding its breath until the city chose. The talisman beat under Dyren's palm like a clock waiting to be wound. Below, Merve's voice rose like tide and the priests' liturgy swelled like a curtain.
And in the crowd, where men keep private ledgers that do not dare to show in daylight, someone drew a breath like a coin being spent.