The market smelled like burned wax and bad bargains.
Nysa kept the scroll pressed to her ribs, under her shawl. The seal at her wrist felt hot. People moved around them in quick, rude paths. Merchants sold shards of nights and jars of laughter. There were men there who traded in things no one else wanted: last words, broken lullabies, smoke from burned weddings. They traded memories like coins.
Ilias led. He moved like someone who knew which eyes to avoid. He ducked past a stall that sold used songs and a woman who sold other people's dreams in folded paper. Nysa walked small. She had to. Her name was already a rumor they tried to hide.
The first fight came quickly. A kid, thin as a reed, tried to lift the scroll. He moved like a trained pickpocket, not hungry curiosity. Ilias saw him. He moved faster. The boy's fingers closed on the leather. The scroll trembled. The boy went blank then he screamed like someone struck and fell limp. People backed away. No one touched him. No one wanted to be the next thing that went quiet.
"Apprentices," a vendor said, not looking up from his pile. His voice was a flat rock. "They touch the wrong pages and they're gone. Walkers call them the Hollowed. You can't talk tq1qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
hem back. You can keep them fed maybe. They don't remember who they are."
Nysa's heart flipped. She'd heard rumors in the archive—about helpers who'd walked into stacks and vanished—but she'd never seen one. The kid lay on the ground, hands curled. His face was empty. A thin crowd ringed him like a small, frightened island.
"Is that from a living scroll?" Nysa asked. She kept her voice steady. Curiosity had teeth.
"Wrong scroll," the vendor said. "Wrong touch. You keep your hands off the ink if you value your memories. The living ones have teeth. They chew what you remember most. Sometimes the apprentices vanish. Sometimes they just lose the name of the person who loved them. Bad luck." He spat. "Or good, depending on what you want."
Ilias crouched, checking the boy's pulse. He wasn't dead. He was hollow. The guard in him moved slow and quick at once. He slammed his palm onto the boy's chest then rolled him gently and fed him water. The boy blinked but did not speak.
"You see why we don't burn the archive," Ilias said. Quiet. "Burn it and you free what's inside. Free things don't always mean safe."
Nysa watched the boy and the vendor. She thought of Serene's words: stitch names to names. Protect the city. Sometimes stitch people out. This market made the stitch feel monstrous.
A merchant with a scarred chin beckoned them closer. He had a cart with glass vials. Each vial held a scrap: a wedding laugh, a whisper, a child's drawing. He opened one and a paper-sound bled out—a note from a lover someone had paid to forget. People crowded. Spice and ash and greed bounced off the stall.
"You want names?" the scarred man said. "I have ledger work. I know things. I trade in records. Not the big state kind—private lists. People pay me to remove history or to plant it. Names are easier to sell than coins."
Ilias stepped forward. "We're looking for Idran."
The man laughed one hard bark. "Idran? Not a common coin. Why are you looking for him?"
"Orders," Ilias said. The word had a sharp edge that made people step back.
The vendor's smile thinned. He reached under his cart and pulled out a folded book, edges browned and soaked with something old. He opened it on the crate between them. The pages were cramped, ink like a swarm. Names in columns. Dates. Comments. A ledger of memory-work.
Nysa leaned in. The living scroll hummed beneath her shawl like it wanted company.
"You read everything," the vendor said. "You'll see apprentices in the back pages. They keep lists in the city. Helpful for jobs like mine."
He flipped pages. Names. Names. Then a column titled: SEALED. Short entries beside names. Notes. Nysa felt her pulse sharpen.
Then she saw it. N. A curl. A looped y. Her handwriting, tucked between two cramped lines, clearer than it should be. The vendor had written it in the margin the way thieves note the best houses.
"N — Sealed," the man read aloud. His voice was careful, like he did not want to wake something sleeping. "Erased apprentice. Duty: Archive. Date sealed:—" He tapped a date Nysa did not know. "Notes: Do not attempt recall. Dangerous. Custody: Palace."
Her stomach went empty. She stared at the letter. Her hand had been there, the same curl she'd made her whole life. This scrap repeated it outside the scroll. Outside the archive. Someone had written her out and then kept that erasure on paper.
Ilias's face changed. It drained color. He had looked calm earlier—like a guard. Now his jaw tightened. He closed his mouth like holding back words.
"You kept this," Nysa said. No accusation. Just fact.
He didn't answer right away. Around them, buyers and sellers watched. People had heard the word Sealed before. They understood the danger.
"I kept it," Ilias said at last. His voice had an edge of pain. "We stole an official ledger years back. I saved this page. I thought it was a child's scribble. I kept it because—" He blinked like a man trying to clear sleep. "Because I thought you might be someone the world forgot but who mattered."
A small, ugly laugh rose from a corner. "You're a thief," the man said. "Not a hero. People like you buy stories for coins and sell them when the price's right."
Ilias didn't flinch. He looked at the vendor instead. "What else?" he asked.
The vendor tapped other entries. A line where an apprentice touched a wrong page: 'Hollowed. Experiments.' Another line: 'Removed from pay. Kept in Care.' Names scribbled under: missing.
"They disappear if they touch certain scrolls," the vendor said. "Not all living pages bite. Some remember small things only. Some remember whole lovers and pull a person into their frame. Apprentices with weak wills—gone. Others come back and can't remember their name. That palace stack has more of those wrong pages than an honest man should like."
Nysa felt a pressure behind her eyes she didn't have words for. She pressed her thumb into the leather of the scroll. She wanted to believe she was safe because she could read. She wanted to believe the archive was careful. The ledger said otherwise. The King's archive had hidden lists of people written out and marked Sealed. Her name was in one.
"How long has this been going on?" she asked.
The vendor shrugged. "As long as the bargains were made. Names get expensive."
"You show me where Idran is," she said. "And you'll have the first pick of any scrap I find."
He blinked. "You think you can pay me with fragments?"
"It's what I have," Nysa said. "And the King will pay better. Find Idran and you get more than scraps."
The vendor's eyes flicked toward Ilias. He saw the scrap burned in Ilias' palm. He read the story that was half-true: a ledger stolen, a page kept, a thief who'd kept it because the mark meant something to him.
"You carry that around?," the vendor said to Ilias. "Why keep this if it costs you?"
Ilias folded his hands tight. "Because I wanted to remember something that wasn't mine to touch." He did not explain further. He did not need to.
A pair of men—buyers known for snatching good finds—saw the ledger. They moved nearer, greedy. Ilias closed the book with his hands like a glove. He stood between Nysa and the men.
"Not today," he said. The voice was low and flat. The men laughed and walked away. They didn't try to test him. They'd seen him before.
Nysa's eyes slid back to the ledger. Her name. Her looped y. The word Sealed beside it. The scroll at her ribs hummed like a secret.
"Why sealed?" she asked. "Who sealed me?"
The vendor shrugged like a man who'd sold worse answers. "Orders," he said. "From up top. For a reason that sounded good at the time. Maybe someone thought you would burn the city. Maybe someone thought you would save it. Either way, they cut you out."
Nysa swallowed. She thought of Serene's quiet face in the archive and the iron seal placed in her palm. She thought of the boy who had lost his words. She thought of the market and its ledger and the way people kept names like tools to be used and discarded.
Ilias folded the burned scrap into his fist and tucked it back into his coat. "Let's find Idran," he said. "Then we decide what to do with a ledger that says you don't exist."
Nysa folded her hand over the scroll and squeezed. "We move," she said. "We move now."
At the gate, Ilias paused once. He looked at her with an odd, raw look in his face—like someone who'd found a map that showed his own home had been burned. "I saved that scrap for years," he said. "I thought it might lead to something like this. I didn't know it would lead me to you."
Nysa did not answer. She had no words that made sense. Her name was on a ledger and labeled Sealed. Apprentices disappeared. The living pages ate what you loved. The King had bound her with a seal that could drag her home. The market had just shown her how thin a life could be when someone else decided who remembered you.
They walked on. The month felt one step shorter. The ledger burned in her head. She kept the scroll tight. She kept moving.