Dawn bled into the March like watered wine. Smoke hovered in the yard while the Soot Banner tallied spoils and chained survivors. Leorie stood on the wall and tested a swallow. His throat rasped, but the hunger for heat had gone still. He could work on pain. He could not think through hunger.
Maren climbed the ladder with her ledger under oilcloth. "Choir's two hours behind," she said. "Darrik wants the village cleared before they arrive. Less to explain."
"The village feeds the gate," Leorie said.
"It also warns cousins," she said. "We take grain, leave coin, and move."
Darrik arrived with six pikemen. "You two, with me," he said. "Keep the voice holstered, cinder. Save it for armor."
They crossed the broken gate into a road of clay and puddles, milestones slick with rain. A well and a shrine marked the village edge: seven chalked discs under a leaning roof—Emberling, Tidemother, Galesword, Stonefather, Nightsward, Dawnscribe, Harvest Queen. Circles for gods that were only habits. Women watched from doorways. Children stared, then vanished.
Maren parceled orders, crisp. "Barrels to the wagons. Nails. Salt. Leave a sack per house. We are not bandits."
Leorie took the lane toward the fields. In one cottage a hearth ticked, low and careful. An old woman warmed her hands above it as if heating memory instead of skin.
"Bank it," Leorie said. "We move out soon."
She squinted at him through milk-blue eyes. "You're the one that opened the gate."
"Someone had to."
"Someone always does." Her fingers drew a small circle above the coals—a child's rhyme to slow embers. "We sing them to sleep," she said. "So they don't go walking."
"Hearth cant," he said.
"You speak it?"
"I let things sleep when I can."
A shout cracked the lane. "Fire!"
Leorie ran. Smoke whisked out from a cottage by the hedgerow, thin and fast—the kind that meant oil. Inside, a boy tugged another boy while a puddle under a table flared into orange teeth.
"Out," Leorie said. He shoved them toward the door, dropped to a knee, and tasted the air. Oil and panic. He lifted the copper striker. One small syllable, barely a breath, pressed the blaze flat. Another word, slower, and the coals shivered and went dull. He dragged a wet blanket across the slick and held his palms open until the room cooled from fever to sweat.
He stood too quickly and steadied himself against the table. Outside, the boys coughed in rain while their grandmother murmured the rhyme to the seven circles scratched above the lintel.
"You're the cinder," the older boy said when Leorie stepped out. "You broke the gate."
"I opened it," Leorie said. He didn't add that words had broken it. The difference mattered to no one but his throat.
Maren arrived, breath fogging. "Anyone hurt?"
"Singed pride," he said. "Lamp oil. Spilled."
She touched the damp floor with two fingers, sniffed, grimaced. "Accident," she said for the listening doors. Then, lower, "Thank you."
Darrik took in smoke, children, Leorie's voice, and moved them on. "Wagons in an hour," he told Maren. "Choir's close. I want the road quiet before noon."
The choir came with bells and tin-wrapped staves, a dozen cloaked singers whose voices turned weather into architecture. Their leader set a traveling bell on its frame by the shrine and began a low tone. Leorie felt pressure slide over the road, smoothing the hum in the stones. Milestones seemed to sigh.
"Gods reward," the leader told Darrik.
"They like silver better," Darrik said. "We leave a sack per door."
"Mercy."
"Policy," Maren corrected, chalking her slate.
They rolled out while the choir sang. The broken gate became a black mouth behind them. The village folded into rain. Leorie took the forward flank with three pikemen and a mule cart of nails. The road ahead bent toward a swale and a stone bridge older than the Empire's current crown.
A thin, high note drifted through the damp—one metal strike, clean as glass. Leorie had heard it in the night. Darrik's hand went up. The column slowed.
"Ambush," Darrik said. "Shield."
Leorie swallowed hurt and raised the striker. He shaped heat into a pane before the wedge, a curtain of warm pressure that made rain curl. Arrows hissed. The first wave sagged and fell, their pitch-softened tips smearing like black petals.
"Forward!" Darrik barked.
Men burst from the trees, faces wrapped in wet cloth, blades low. Leorie thickened the pane and pushed. The air turned like dough. Attackers stumbled into it and slowed. Pikes found ribs with efficient, ugly sounds. A knife glanced off Leorie's vambrace; he answered with a burst at the ground, steam and grit in a man's face, and the man fled blind into brush.
Another arrow cracked against the pane and became a droplet. The thin bell sounded once more, then silence. The attackers broke and vanished. It had been a test, not a taking.
Leorie let the pane go. His throat burned raw. Maren was there with a canteen. He drank until the scraping softened to sand.
"Losses," Darrik said. A cut hand. A bruised shoulder. Two attackers still at the verge, unmarked by colors or creed.
"I hate quarrels that refuse a name," Darrik said.
"Someone signaled them," Leorie said.
Maren's eyes weighed the trees. "Keep moving. The choir will quiet our tracks."
They crossed the bridge. On the far side the road climbed through barley. Milestones bore fresh chisel cuts, letters revised by someone with a plan. Leorie brushed one and felt nothing; the choir had damped the hum entirely. Relief and blindness arrived together.
The thin bell did not return. Rain did, fine and needling. By midafternoon the wagons creaked like tired animals and men kept their chins tucked into collars. Darrik rode the line with a look that meant no chatter. Maren wrote without looking, the slate's chalk marks appearing like weather.
Leorie kept his voice in its sheath and his eyes on the bend ahead. He preferred pain to hunger. Pain was a cost he could count.
Behind them, the choir's tone threaded back toward the village. Doors would shut. Bread would be portioned. The old woman would draw a circle over banked coals and sing them to sleep.
Ahead, the milestones gleamed like wet bones. The road waited for more words.
Leorie rolled his shoulders, tasted iron, and promised his voice nothing it could not pay: shields for arrows, heat for doors, silence for hearths, and sleep for coals. The road did not answer, but he felt it listening, like stone.