They brought the registrars at dawn.
They came in pairs and thinned lines: men whose fingers were stained with wet ink, women whose robes smelled of iron filings and ledger glue, clerks whose eyes had learned the slow arithmetic of lies. Merve arrived with a retinue that smelled of salt and fine wine; Nogos with maps and a handful of men who believed the world could be ordered by iron; Wurtz with a cavalry knot and the kind of silence that means a man has decided to use force instead of speech. Between them the amphitheatre filled like a ledger being opened to the first blank page.
Dyren stood on the low wall with her talisman hidden beneath her breast, the aurora at her shoulders a narrow band of color that the morning light could not misread. Rosily was at her side, hands ready, eyes on the crowd like a hawk's. The forges' smoke still braided the air; embers clung to the edges of men's cloaks. They had come to watch law under sun instead of ledger by night. That was the promise Dyren had forced; that was the risk she accepted.
Merve stepped to the center with the practiced smile of an actress who knows when to let her voice sieve through a crowd. "Let names be spoken in daylight," she announced, "and if wrongs have been done, let the owners of those wrongs repair them. The people will see justice."
Nogos barked a command to the registrars. A thin man with ink-cracked knuckles unrolled a scroll and read the first list: ship manifests, shipment numbers, signatures. The amphitheatre leaned in as if a secret might be sketched into the air like a map.
Dyren watched the registrars' hands. One by one they unfurled pages many had been burned, some were missing, but enough remained. The ferrymen took their place, ragged men with rope-smell on their sleeves, and gave oath to the names they remembered. Each oath was a small blow to the houses that had thought themselves safe in darkness.
Then the reef-thing's bargain Merve had not forgotten came into the open like a fog. A messenger arrived from the harbor, a man with sea-bleached hair and an oath in his eyes. "The reef demands tribute," he said bluntly, and the amphitheatre shivered. "It will not be calmed by names alone. It asks for a reckoning in kind. You promised balance."
Merve's jaw tightened. She turned the question back like a knife. "How much?"
"Not coin," the sea-man said. "Wrought service. People who will guard certain channels. A tithe of sailors and a sealed oath from the houses that they will do right by the manifests. If not, reefs will rise at night, ships will founder, and ports will remember the price of trade."
Nogos muttered. Commerce is a fragile god; threats to it make men trade their morals for security.
Dyren stepped forward. The reef-thing had spoken not to ancient kings but to the modern ones' appetites; it asked for the city's muscle, not their purse. "We will bind signatures in daylight and watch the ferries," she said. "Hold our men to oath under the reef's watchers."
Merve's voice slid soft as oil. "The houses will object. They will claim this is extortion and call the reef a marauder. We may be forced to answer for a treaty none of us signed."
"You already signed by doing nothing," Dyren replied. "Silence is a signature."
A registrar, pale and trembling, read names. For each mother, each child, each captain, the amphitheatre counted and the crowd murmured. When a child's name was called that was not found in any household, a cry rose like a blade. Men looked at one another with the suddenness of guilt. A house representative white-water mark stiff on his collar rose and spoke of clerical error. He offered coin as if coin could fill a cradle. A ferryman spat and called him a liar.
Merve's temper, always a sharp instrument, found a different edge. "If a fault is proved in daylight, repair it," she declared. "But do not let vengeance be law. We do not make monsters of men for clerks' mistakes." Her eyes flicked to Dyren for a small, measured moment the look of a woman who keeps an arithmetical list of insults.
Dyren's answer was not loud but it landed like a struck nail. "If mistakes cost a life, they are not mistakes. They are crimes."
The registrars argued in a chorus that made the amphitheatre sound like a hive of cautious bees. In the rows, Nogos' men whispered and pointed, Trever made notes, Wurtz kept his jaw like a drawn blade in his mouth. Halmar was kept under guard at the far side, his talisman folded away in Dyren's chest. He watched with eyes that were both sullen and afraid.
It came then the first clear challenge. A magistrate named Halven, face swollen with the sleep of men who have grown used to buying silence, declared that the signatures were forgeries. "Our hands did not sign those," he said. "We have proud history. We do not traffic in children. These are fabrications."
A ferryman named Lir stepped forward, weather creasing his brow like a map. He spat into the dust. "I carried the crates. I saw the marks. He signed them with a swallow and my lads counted the boys. We carried them. They were children little things with eyes too old. He paid coin and told us to write them down as linen in the manifest."
Halven's men pushed. Nogos called for silence like a gavel. Merve's lips pressed. The amphitheatre trembled with the sound of men who had cooked their consciences into bills and now watched their profits smoke.
"Then swear," Merve demanded. "Open the ledger. If your name is clean, sign here and the crowd will forgive through law."
Halven's voice wavered; his hand once steady on a seal shook. He looked at Nogos as if asking for the correct sum to assert. Nogos shook his head minutely the kind of warning only a conspirator can give. The registrar unrolled another page.
They reached a line where a signature had been scrawled in a hand that matched a registrar's curlicue. But it had not been inked; a faint impression remained where pressure had pressed the paper smooth. Some clerk had used a pin to lift the curve and make a ghost-signature. The amphitheatre fell into a hush that tasted like blood.
Dyren stepped forward and took the pin; Rosily took the ghost-curlicue between her finger and thumb. "Forgery," Dyren said. "The hand that forged is listed. Do you deny it, Halven?"
Eyes snapped to Halven's clerk, who had been sweating like a man who irons away a stain with his breath. He gulped and stuttered names Arcin, he said, the Binder; a broker with a swallow-mark; a priest who liked to look away. Voices rose. The registrar's scroll was not merely a ledger now but the map of a market.
Merve's smile thinned. "If the binder admits it," she said, "we bring him here. We will have confession under light and mercy. The houses will bind to restitution."
"And if the binder refuses?" Nogos asked. His tone was silk wrapped about a blade.
"Then we take them by force," Wurtz said. "Iron ends what ink cannot."
At that, Dyren laughed once a quiet sound without mirth. "Iron will not end debts that were hidden under water," she said. "Nor will it stop names the reef remembers. If you choose force, remember the reef's price. If you choose law, remember the witnesses."
Merve made a face like someone tasting sour wine. She had thought to fashion the amphitheatre into a spectacle where heroic mercy would be sold. Instead her stage had become a courtroom with teeth. She had hoped men would choose spectacle over the raw labor of justice. That they would not do so in daylight hurt her pride more than any injury.
A scuffle started near the lower tiers a man rose to defend Halven's honor with a fist and was answered by a ferryman who had held a child's hand once too often. The crowd surged. Nogos tried to command order; his voice snapped like a whip. For a moment the amphitheatre seemed on the verge of unmaking itself into riot.
Dyren put a hand out. The aurora tightened. Her voice, when it came, folded the noise into silence. "Enough," she said. "We will not solve this by tearing throats. We will bring the binder or his trace. The registrars will seal their papers and swear to the truth beneath the reef's watchers. We will not allow a rumor to be the law."
Merve's eyes met Dyren's with a challenge. "And if we find a binder who is a pawn and not a king?" she asked. "If there are men beyond him who profit? Will you name them?"
"I will name them with witnesses," Dyren replied. "Not rumor."
They spent the day arguing statutes and reading manifests. Registrars were sworn under the reef-thing's stipulation: be honest and your docks remain open; be crooked and reefs will rise at the night. Nogos consented because trade was his balance-sheet, and Wurtz consented because his men feared for their horses in shallow seas. Trever hesitated, because his marriages and alliances tangled his motives into knots, yet even he saw the logic of daylight. Merve, forced into a pragmatic corner, agreed with a cold face.
When the sun dipped low, the amphitheatre emptied into an uneasy night. Men went to their houses and counted coin, priests muttered prayers to deities who had always been convenient, and the ferrymen drank to their courage. Halmar was taken under guard to a low cell; Arcin's name was given a price and a hunt ordered.
Dyren and Rosily walked the quay in that dark, and the stars were a thin spray. "They will try to bury the binder," Rosily said. "They will pay others to say he is dead. Men seldom keep the same lie twice."
"They will fail," Dyren answered. "No one who signs the sea's ledger can hide forever. The reef watches. People who deal in names do not understand witnesses they think only in seals. We will follow ink to hand."
Rosily spat into the tide. "And the priest?"
"He will be questioned," Dyren said. "He sold mercy for coin. He must bear witness like any other."
They moved toward the watch-tower when the horn screamed, a single long note that split the night. The reef-thing had spoken again: a ship's light had been seen at the western mouth, not one but many, a line of lanterns like a slow smear. Someone else at sea was moving in a pattern that the reef recognized. The talisman under Dyren's breast thrummed like a new drum.
"More hands on the tide," Rosily said. "Something comes."
Dyren's jaw set. The ledger had become a map that stretched beyond the city's walls now. Names called in daylight echoed out to the sea and the sea answered with its own names, older and less forgiving. Men would now choose sides in ink and in blood. The five kingdoms were no longer playing around a single stage; they were on the margins of a ledger that ran from quarry to reef and out into the dark.
She looked at the lights on the horizon and felt, for the first time in a long while, the shape of a war not only of kings but of elements stone and water and the old things that remembered trades struck before men had seals. The next page of the ledger would not be merely about names and markets. It would be about alliances, about who would take the reef's price and who would pay with hands and houses.
"Gather the captains," she said. "Ring the harbor. Let the ferrymen bring their crews. We will not sit and count while ships form like knives."
Rosily nodded. "We will show them we can read a ledger in daylight."
They moved with the economy of people who understand that when names are read in sun, the sea remembers, and when the sea remembers, kingdoms listen. The amphitheatre had given them a start; the world beyond the harbor would make sure no page closed easily.