Isha did not waste time with speeches. She let me eat. Then she pointed at the map nailed to the table and tapped three places with a finger that had more scars than rings.
"This is where you sleep," she said. "This is where we keep you alive. This is where people who like crowns keep their knives."
I looked. The first mark sat in the poor wedge of the old quarter, near a row of buildings that had given up on windows and chose holes. The second mark lay deeper, close to a jagged square that used to be a market before the ground remembered it could sink. The third mark sat on a hill line like a smug cat. It had a circle around it and a small note: DO NOT GO ALONE.
"That hill," Isha said, "belongs to a man who likes the sound of his own name said back to him. He claims to keep order. He keeps fear. He calls it the same thing."
"Cassian," Veyra said from her seat, mild as milk.
Isha did not glance at her. "You will not meet him today," she told me. "If you do, say nothing clever and keep your hands where he can see them. He will talk you into a box you cannot lift."
Silas snorted. "If the boy lives that long."
I looked at him. He had the kind of face you see behind you when a street goes wrong. He smiled like he enjoyed his own voice. Pride tugged the leash on my wrist and told me to stand up and ask him to try. I told Pride to sit. It wagged its tail and waited for later.
Isha's gaze came back to me. "You stepped into two memories and came back with both hands. You think that makes you ready. It does not. You are like a man who played two songs and thinks he can write a symphony. In this city, the music eats the musician."
"I will learn fast," I said. "I am tired of being a slow meal."
"Good," she said. "You will learn to move your feet before you move your knife. You will learn to breathe when the room wants you to choke. You will learn when to let the world miss you by an inch. You will learn to count doors." She pointed at the far wall. "Up. Show me your feet."
We went to the yard behind the house. It was a place of old stone and new weeds. Rope lines hung from a high beam where people once dried laundry. Now we dried fear there and called it training. A few faces watched from the back steps: a woman with a clean apron and a pair of clever hands—Mara, the medic; a thin young man with hair like a broom that had escaped—Jin; a big man with a sledge—Birk; and an older man with chalk on his fingers—Old Tan.
Isha took a piece of chalk from Tan, snapped it in half, and drew short lines on the ground. One to my left. One to my right. One in front, like a shallow gate.
"These are marks," she said. "They are not magic. They are there to give your eyes a job, so your fear does not give them three. You will step from line to line without lifting your feet too high. You will keep your shield up. You will not look at me. You will hear me. Go."
I set my shield and stepped. Left line, right line, front line, back to left. It felt stupid for two heartbeats. Then the ground started to talk to me the way a street talks to a boy who grew up learning when to run. Small shifts in weight. Little turns in the ankle. I breathed on a count. Four in. Four out. Isha's voice came and cut the air like string.
"Lower the shield. Not that low. Watch the rim. Use your eyes at the edges."
She moved as she spoke. I could tell where she was by her shoes on stone, not by her voice. She wanted it that way. Something touched my shield. I did not see what. I kept the angle and let it slide.
"Good," she said. "Again."
I went again. Sweat found my back. The burn across my arm pulled. The spear bite in my thigh hummed like a mean fly. I ignored them. I watched the lines on the ground and the edges of the world. I kept my breath polite. I kept my knees soft.
Something flicked at my ankle. I almost hopped. I did not. I dropped the heel and let the flick go by.
"Better," Isha said. "Now speak your breath count out loud."
"Four in," I said. "Four out."
"Too loud," she said. "You share your breath with the room, and the room shares a knife with you."
I dropped my voice. "Four in. Four out."
It went on. It was simple and hard. The best things in the world are. After a time my arms shook. The shield felt like a door held against strangers. I wanted to set it down. I did not.
Mara appeared at my elbow like a thought. She slid a cup of water into my left hand without touching the band. "Sip," she said, and then to Isha, "Do not break him in the first hour. I am out of thread."
"Thread is cheap," Isha said.
"Not mine," Mara said. She smacked my wrist lightly. "Sip."
I sipped. The water tasted like coins and a promise. Jin leaned on the rail and grinned. "You are not bad," he said. "You have all your eyebrows, which is rare around here."
"Give him a week," Birk rumbled. "He will earn the look."
"Thank you for your faith," I said.
Old Tan drew two new lines behind me while I looked. Isha frowned at him. He shrugged. "Streets change," he said. "My feet forget less when I make the ground honest."
Isha wiped the chalk dust on her palms. "Enough," she said. "He will learn the rest later. Come inside."
We went back to the table. I put the shield down and flexed my hand. The burned strap printed a neat line of pain across my forearm. Mara clucked at it and put cool salve on the bite. It smelled like mint and soap. I tried not to sigh and failed. She smirked and wrapped the arm with quick neat cloth.
"Listen now," Isha said. "This city is a mouth. It eats the slow, the proud, the alone, and the loud. It also eats the clever, but it eats them last because it enjoys the taste. There are rules. You do not need to like them. You must obey them."
She raised one finger. "Rule one. Never sleep without a friend who knows how to wake you. If you can, sleep in shifts. If you cannot, sleep with your back to a door that opens outward."
"Door inward?" Jin asked.
"Inward is for the people who come to help," Isha said. "We do not count on those."
A second finger. "Rule two. In a memory, do not make speeches. Breathe. Count. Learn the rule of that place. Every memory has a rule. Find it fast. Use it. Survive. Leave. Do not be a hero. You do not get statues. You get more chances."
A third finger. "Rule three. Fragments come with flaws. Do not feed your flaws. If your flaw is pride, eat humble food. If your flaw is fear, carry a joke. If your flaw is mercy, carry a friend who will say the hard word for you. Most of all, tell someone your flaws. Secrets rot."
She looked at me when she said the last part. I looked at the table. "Pride," I said. "And fire at night."
"Good," she said. "Name them and they get smaller."
Silas leaned his shoulder on the door post and smiled with no warmth. "Name mine too, commander."
Isha's gaze slid to him like a blade. "Your flaw is that you ask for praise with your mouth when you should ask for it with your work."
Birk choked on a laugh. Jin put a fist in his mouth to hide his grin and failed. Veyra's eyes flicked down and then up, which for her was laughter.
Silas' jaw tightened. He said nothing. Pride tugged at me, happy to find it lived in someone else too.
Isha put the chalk down and turned another map. This one showed tunnels and alleys drawn as if by someone who had argued with every brick. "There are factions," she said. "Some are small. Some are loud. We are small and quiet. We pull people out. We do not build thrones. Others do."
She tapped the hill again. "Cassian builds a ladder on that hill and asks people to climb it. They think the ladder goes up. It goes in."
Veyra's voice stayed mild. "He offers protection. He takes tax. He does not always lie."
"No," Isha said. "He lies only when he smiles."
"And the other one?" I asked.
Isha's finger drifted to a red stain on the map where three lanes met and argued. "Dorn," she said. "He thinks flaws are the future. He makes a church out of teeth. Stay out of his sermons."
A low whistle came from the roof. Kellan, the quiet shot, leaned in the window after a moment. "Two on the side gate," he said. "Cassian's colors. They knocked like they own the wood."
Veyra did not move. "Emmer and a boy with a clean coat," she said, like she had known the knock before it came.
Mara swore softly. Birk's hand found the sledge and set it near the table. Jin slid along the wall to look without being seen. Old Tan pocketed his chalk as if chalk might be taxed.
Isha did not hurry. She set her palm on the map, folded one corner over another, and slid it under a ledger. "In the yard," she said to me. "Do not speak unless asked. If you feel a speech start in your throat, cough until it dies."
We went out. Two men waited inside the gate. One wore a coat so clean the dust seemed to lean away from it. The other was a soft kind of preacher with a voice he kept warm, like a hand you could fall asleep in and learn later it had cuffs.
"Emmer," Isha said. "You have come to invite us to something we do not want."
Emmer smiled as if the sun had chosen to live in his mouth. "Captain," he said. He never called her commander. That was on purpose. "We bring a word of comfort from Lord Cassian. He hears of your trouble with thieves and beasts. He offers a safety you can count."
"I can count," Isha said. "That is why I am not interested."
The clean-coat boy looked past her at me. His eyes went wide at the band on my wrist and the new marks. He whispered, "Fresh," like a baker greeting bread.
Emmer followed his glance. His smile did not change. His eyes measured me and wrote a neat number. "You have a new recruit," he said. "How lovely. It would be a shame if no one exquisite taught him how to hold such gifts."
"I have a teacher," I said before I could stop my mouth.
Isha's shoulder moved, which was her way of kicking me under the table when we were not at a table. I nodded once to say I knew I had been foolish.
Emmer put a hand over his heart. "Of course," he said. "We would not take your hand. We only offer our own, should you wish to reach for it. There is room on the hill for brave men who want to build something besides fear."
"Fear is a bad building material," Isha said. "It crumbles when you need it to stand."
"Only if you use it alone," Emmer said. "If you mix it with hope, it makes fine mortar."
Birk rolled his shoulders like a wall checking its load. "We have our own mortar," he said. "We make it from sweat."
Emmer's eyes flicked over Birk like a man making a list of furniture. "And you, young man," he said to me. "You look like you have a good ear for instruction. Lord Cassian's door is open. If today is not the day, tomorrow might be."
"Tomorrow has not asked me yet," I said.
"Then I will ask for it," Emmer said, and nodded to Isha with the respect of a man who thinks respect is a coin you can spend twice. He and the clean-coat boy turned and left with footfalls that enjoyed their own sound.
The gate shut. The yard breathed again. Jin blew out his cheeks. "He talks nice," he said. "I do not trust men who talk nice."
"Trust is not what they sell," Isha said. "They sell air that smells like it has money in it." She turned to me. "There. You have seen one ladder. You will see the other soon. Stand in the middle until you decide which one you will climb, or if you will keep your feet on the ground with us."
"I will stand," I said. "My legs are good for standing."
"We will fix that," Isha said, and for the first time she almost smiled.
The day walked forward. I learned small things with a tired joy. How to tie my shield strap so the burn bit less. How to breathe mint smoke against heat panic. How to sort a pile of scavenged nails by size so Mara could make hooks. How to sleep with one ear on the door and one eye on the wall and still wake without a knife in my own hand.
In the afternoon, Old Tan took me walking. He showed me alleys that lied and stairs that did not like to be counted. He told me their names in a voice that carried small kindness for stone.
"This is Bent Sister," he said, tapping a stair that curved where no stair should. "She will turn you in circles if you are proud. Compliment her shape and she gives you a straight climb. Try it."
I looked at the steps and said, "Well done, Sister. You hold the best kind of line."
The stair did not move. My foot found a steady rise. Old Tan nodded, pleased. "Streets are like people," he said. "Talk to them, and they will tell you how to be loved."
We crossed a small court where a fig tree grew out of a crack and offered two fruit to a world that did not deserve them. Jin found us there with news that looked like a swallow—quick and thin and trying to be brave.
"Commander," he said to Isha, who had joined us with Birk and Mara, "Smuggler at the Chalk Gate. Spindle. She says she has a basket from the Ragpicker. He wrote Corin's name on it."
We went to the Chalk Gate, which is a gate that hides behind crates because it knows how gates die. Neris Spindle leaned on a post with rings on all her fingers and a grin that had worked for her before. She held a basket covered with a cloth that had been clean in another life.
"For you," she told me, and weighed me with her eyes the way merchants weigh coin and strangers. "From our mutual friend who buys memory and sells chain."
I lifted the cloth. Inside lay a coil of chain the color of rain. A note sat on top in a neat hand.
For when doors develop opinions.
— R.
There was also a lemon, bright and rude. I picked it up and sniffed it. It smelled like a summer we did not have time for.
"Tell him thank you," I said.
"I will," Neris said. "If he is taking thanks today. He charges a tax for gratitude. I call it rude. He calls it life."
We traded a few things for her trouble: copper wire, a book with three pages missing, two stories about roads that were lies. She blew me a kiss like a joke and went, light on her feet.
As the sun slid along the brick and the air cooled from oven to stove, Isha called us in. "Tonight we move," she said. "We shift to a safer room. Cassian's men will count our doors at dawn. I prefer they count wrong."
Birk grinned. "We make new doors."
"We use old ones," Isha said. "Tan, show the boy the under-steps. Mara, pack the haste kit. Jin, rope. Kellan, eyes. Veyra—" She paused.
Veyra had been quiet all day, watching without staring, sipping tea like it had been charged extra. She lifted her chin a hair. "Yes."
"Walk with Cassian's men on your way out," Isha said, as if asking for bread. "Tell them a story. Make them late."
Veyra's lips made the shape of a smile. "Of course," she said. She set her cup down with a soft click and went. Silas went with her, silent for once.
"Is she ours?" I asked.
"She is hers," Isha said. "For now, that helps us."
We moved after moonrise. The moon here does not mind business like ours. It minded its own and let us use the light it had left over. We carried what we could and left what we could replace. Mara cursed at the bandage bowl and then left it clean. Birk shouldered the table as if it had insulted his mother. Jin fluttered along the edges and tied rope to roof hooks like a spider who liked jokes.
Old Tan led me to the under-steps: a cut between two walls where a real stair had been before the city remembered it needed a secret more. We slid along that cut and came out near a wide alley that had a habit of pretending to be two. Isha marked the air with small lines only her fingers and our eyes could see. I felt a push on my shoulder and my hip when I walked the lines right. She called it wind. It felt like being told a door was open.
We were three turns from the new hide when a shout rose from a roof above and a tile fell and broke near my ear.
"Company," Kellan's voice drifted, thin and plain.
Shapes moved on the far end of the alley. Three men in red scraps of cloth tied to their arms. Dorn's people. One of them carried a chain with hooks that sang when he swung it. Another had a body like a door and a head like a wall. The third grinned like he wanted to see his own teeth.
"Run or talk," Birk said.
"Neither," Isha said. "We flow." She drew two lines in the air with quick motions of her fingers. My feet felt them like a soft hand.
The men came. The chain whistled. I set the shield at a steep angle. The hook slid. The chain tried to pull. I did not let it. I stepped on it, felt heat from old blood baked into the iron, and twisted my heel to pin it. The man tugged. The chain held. His eyes went wide, and then Birk was there with the sledge and he did not use the sledge the way you would think. He set it as a brace and shoved the man over it. The chain went slack. Jin's rope flashed and hissed. It caught a wrist and a knee as if by accident and was not.
The door-headed man charged. Isha's mark nudged my hip. I moved a half step and the charge passed close enough that I could have stolen the man's breath if I had wanted. He hit the wall with his shoulder. The wall did not move. His shoulder did.
The third man grinned wider and came for Mara. Mara threw a kettle. I did not know where she had been hiding a kettle. It hit the man's shins and the hot water inside found him wanting. He yelped. "Language," she said, and stuck him with a pin that made his leg forget what it was doing.
We did not stay and make a sermon out of it. We went. Isha's marks tugged us through a crooked window and across a courtyard where someone had once hung blue cloth and called it a sky. Kellan's whistle cut the air sharp when we almost chose a wrong turn. Old Tan hummed to an arch until it agreed to wait to fall until we were not under it.
We reached the new hide: an old bathhouse with a roof that mostly pretended to be a roof. Inside, steam pipes ran like iron vines along a wall, cold now but still humming a little with remembered heat. We went quiet and breathed and counted. When the count reached thirty and no one had followed, we let our shoulders drop.
Jin flopped on a bench. "That was exciting," he said. "I rate it a seven out of ten."
"Points off for the chain," Birk said. "And the part where I almost became soup."
Mara set out bandages with a little curse for each. "Soup is my job," she said. "You stick to smashing."
I sat and let my breath slow. Isha crouched in front of me and looked at my eyes the way doctors look at pupils after a fall. "How is the head," she asked.
"Loud," I said. "But it will be quiet later."
"It gets louder later," Mara said without looking up. "Sleep eats quiet first."
"I will sleep anyway," I said. "I owe someone a dream."
"Not alone," Isha said. "We pair watches. Jin first with you. Birk second. I will take third. I do not like dawn. It lies."
Jin saluted with two fingers and passed me a blanket that had once been half of a coat. "Do you snore," he asked.
"I do not," I said. "But if I start, throw a lemon at me."
"We do not waste lemons," Mara said.
"Throw something less holy," I said.
They joked because joking is a wall you can build without bricks. We ate bad stew that tasted good because we were safe for an hour. We took off boots and checked blisters. We counted knives and the knives counted us back. Then the room settled into that low hum that rooms make when they hold people who trust each other just enough to put their heads down.
Jin sat near my feet with a rope across his lap. He tied and untied knots in the half-light. "What was your job before the band," he asked.
"I carried crates," I said. "And sometimes I did not."
He nodded like that was fine. "I sold maps to people who did not listen," he said. "Now I sell ropes to people who learn."
"Better trade," I said.
He yawned. "Wake you if the bell rings too loud," he said. "Or if you start shouting. Or if the cat comes back."
"There is a cat," I asked.
"There is always a cat," he said.
I lay back. The bathhouse ceiling had a crack that ran like a river without a map. I followed it with my eyes as if I could swim out. My arm ached in a nice steady way that let the bigger pains hide under it. The band on my wrist was warm like a stone that had been sitting in late sun.
I closed my eyes.
Sleep took me the way it takes a man who has run all day: like a hand on a shoulder that is careful but does not ask.
Dark. Then gray. Then sound.
Not fire this time. Wind. Thin, high, cold wind that tasted like iron and old water. I stood on a tower that forgot what it had been built for and now only held up sky. Snow dusted the stones in a skin of white that squeaked when boots turned. There were no boots but mine.
The bell struck in my bones. The Oathlink wrote its line.
New Memory. Survive to Claim.
A figure stood at the far edge of the tower. Cloak snapping like a flag. Face hidden by a hood. Hands bare, red, open to the air. They were not human hands. They were longer, with thin black nails and skin like old marble.
The figure turned. Its face was wrong in small ways that made it almost kind. The eyes were pale gold like winter sun seen through ice. The mouth was too still.
"Hello," it said in a voice that sounded like wind through a keyhole. "I have been waiting for someone who can stand in cold."
"I can stand," I said, and rolled my shoulders to settle the weight that was not there.
"Good," it said. "I am called Watchman by those who fear being seen. You brought heat into fire. Let us see if you can bring silence into glass."
Snow lifted from the edges of the tower and hung in the air like dust with ideas. Mirrors stood in a ring around the tower, each one a broken pane mounted in iron. As the wind moved, the panes showed different scenes: a boy dropping a banner; a woman with a knife who looked like Lyra and did not; a city that tried to smile with too many windows.
The Watchman lifted a hand. The mirrors turned. The wind sang.
Rule: See and be unseen.
The words came. The game began.
Back in the bathhouse, Jin dozed with the rope in his hands. He jerked awake once, twice, and looked at my face. He saw the new sweat there and the small twitch in the corner of my eye and frowned.
"Time," he whispered to the room. "He is in. I am up."
Birk grunted from the floor and rolled to his feet even as his eyes were still slow. He put a hand on my shoulder and felt the heat there and did not pull away. "Hold," he said softly, like a friend telling a friend about weather.
I was far away and right there, standing in the wind with the Watchman's gold eyes on me and the ring of glass waiting to show me a version of myself that I might not like.
The city breathed. The night moved. Somewhere, not far, a man with a clean coat raised a cup and told another man that the morning would find us.
Let it, I thought, and set my feet on the tower stones.
I had lines to learn. I had glass to ignore. I had a day to earn.