Root writes DAY 3/7 on the pillar and, beside it, a hard D-4. The chalk squeaks like a mouse learning to be brave.
The rope bell gives three—and a half. The last note falls wrong, like a drunk stepping off a curb he can't see.
"That one's a fake," Kirella says. "Real call is the pan lid."
Lelia lifts the pan lid once and bangs it. The sound goes through the room and sets everything straight.
Kirella buckles his strap, checks my eyes. "Two breaths."
"Us first," I answer, and we lift the lantern together.
Kitchen School runs in the Commons before the kiln is fully awake. The board says WRITE • KNOT • RING • PROMISE. Nim stands by the ring line with their spoon like a tiny conductor.
"Lesson," I say. "We write WE KEEP EACH OTHER in letters a door can't misunderstand. We tie a kept-knot—two fingers, two breaths. We pull a thin ring from the lamp—quiet, no applause. Then we give two promises."
Kirella counts: one—two—three—four. I hum low under his numbers. The lantern warms.
Lelia says the words first, clear as water in a clean cup. "We won't pay."Bora follows, voice like a gate that knows when to open. "We won't sell."I add the old kitchen vow. "We leave doors open; we return for three."
Nim keeps the four with serious eyebrows. The little swirl on the lantern glass flashes once, pleased.
We walk the ring to Blue Pantry. The paper fold over the lintel drops half a hand and raises the bruise-letters: SIGN. It smells like fruit and ink.
"Not yours," I tell it.
We set the Promise Choir—Kirella's steady count, my low hum, Lelia and Bora and Ira and Root speaking the two sentences like they were born knowing them. The paper ripples. SIGN blurs at the edges and sinks toward KEEP the way grease sinks toward salt. I write WE KEEP EACH OTHER along the threshold with brine-wet chalk. Kirella threads a kept-knot through the pull. The fold sulks into WAIT.
"Next," Root says.
Ash Market yawns awake. The Kitchen Fair already has ribs—Ring Walk, Knot Clinic, Chalk School, Pepper-Mint smoke in a dented pan. The city assessor arrives with two plain jackets behind her and a stamp you can't see but you can feel. She nods at our ring and lifts two fingers: "Kitchens marked. Mirrors banned inside the line."
"Fair," Kirella says.
She turns on a heel and walks toward the lockwright tents like a woman who knows paper better than men think she does. Three old scribes—ledger aunties with fingers stained by a lifetime of ink—fall in behind her, each carrying a bundle of ropes with receipts tied to them like tails. They start at the edge of the market, where a board says TITHE, and begin pulling false names from it the way a mother pulls burrs out of a child's hair. Every time they tear a strip away, they write a bowl instead: BOWLS KEPT: +1. The board stops looking like a tax and starts looking like a pantry list.
The lockwrights hate it. They don't show it. Men like that prefer to smile until the room runs out of mirrors.
We feed. We teach. The air smells like pepper and soup and wood that remembers boats.
Rope bell: two short, one long from the water side.
"Wharf," Syth says, already moving.
"Go," Lelia orders. "We'll carry."
Quiet Wharf thinks instead of talks. Paper rafts trail the surface—door-sized, varnished, edges seeded with mirror scutes. They bump the lip and smear scent that wants to teach stones a word we didn't invite.
"Brine," Ira says.
Kirella and I shoulder the brine cauldron. We tip it with a board under its belly. The salt water falls like honest rain. The first raft sags, slumps, melts into paste. Scutes slide and drop into dark.
"Again," Ira says.
We drown two, three, four rafts in brine. Syth tosses two small ring-stones into position—Post Saint and Post Dummy. Their warm circles touch and stretch into a thin strip of light on the black water. I pass her three thin chalk boards. She prints the words so a river can read:
WE … KEEP … EACH … OTHER.
We slide the boards into the strip. They float slow as bread. The smell loses its nerve when it crosses OTHER and meets a little warmth that isn't polite to it.
Up above, Ira's crew swings pepper-mint pots on ropes. Smoke walks the wind and slaps wrong air until it minds itself. Children cough less. One girl with a fish in both hands points at the posts and names them, solemn: "Big Wrist. Broken Thumb. Saint."
Syth ties a kept-knot under Saint's collar. "Judges your shin if you lie," she tells the knot. It believes her.
The river settles from plot to plan.
"Bowls later," Ira says. The words mean thank you.
We go.
Back at the Kitchen Fair, the ring line holds. The ledger aunties have stripped half the tithe board to wood; the city assessor writes MIRRORS OUT at the edge of our chalk in all caps. Nim counts small feet on the Ring Walk, spoon lifted like a clever scepter. The paper moth in the lantern shade flutters and changes its wing to BOWLS KEPT: 52 and then hides like a shy clerk.
The lockwright returns in a coat that pretends it wasn't watching us drown his paper. He drops a tin key onto our table again, delicate as sin. "For your trouble," he says, like a man complimenting a dog that found a stick.
Syth salts a circle around the key. It ticks once, insulted, then learns sulking is a hobby.
We don't take his bait.
He whistles. A low smog slides along the market's waist—mirror dust with perfume woven in. It makes eyes feel useful and lungs feel like they owe someone a favor. At the same time a paper kite drops from a tent peak and lands on Blue Pantry's lintel. In fat letters: SIGN HERE, the ink laced with a smell that wants to be your name.
"Split," Kirella says.
"Go," Lelia says, already lifting the pan lid to bring the kitchen bell down once and make the room pick the right sound to follow.
We answer both tricks at once.
Syth raises the WORD tile high and steps into the smog. It reads the brass letters the way a bee reads smoke—gets confused, loses its point. She waves pepper-mint in slow eights until the cloud breaks and sneaks away, embarrassed. I pull a ring wide across the stones. The mirror dust falls through the warmth like bad flour through a good sieve.
At Blue Pantry, the paper kite flutters and asks. I set the ring around the lintel, Kirella sets the count, and Lelia—arrived with the lid because she refuses to miss a fight with paper—speaks the two lines calm and mean as law. SIGN washes to WAIT. Syth slaps the WORD tile against the fold. The letters print through. I pour brine from a jar along the edge. The kite wilts, then dissolves into paste. Lelia scrapes it off with a bread knife and adds the scrapings to a bucket labeled SORRY because she is a tidy person.
We return to the Fair to find one more bait waiting: a lidded tin box the size of a book, left where a thief with good taste would see it. On the lid: a small half-lock stamped smug. The lockwright stands six stalls away and pretends to be bored.
"Escrow," Syth says, eyes bright and cruel in the good way. "For keys. For names."
"Salt first," I say.
We draw a salt ring on the board. I lift a thin ring of light above it and hold it steady. Kirella stands beside me, warm shoulder, steady spine. "Two truths," he says softly, to the box, to the man who planted it, to the air.
"We won't pay," I say.
"We won't sell," he says.
Syth unlatches the tin.
Inside: a name-tally—little pins that drop when a voice says a syllable; a smear of mirror dust; a ribbon hole for smelling the person bold enough to open it. The pins don't fall. The dust does nothing. The ribbon smells like salt, because our ring taught it manners before it could learn a face.
"Brine," Syth says, gleeful. We dunk the box in the bucket marked SORRY and hold it there until it stops pretending to learn.
The lockwright tips his hat at nothing. He pastes a new poster on a pillar and pretends he didn't make the numbers bigger: AUCTION—DAY 4. He likes moving goalposts because buying time in both directions is his hobby.
Root underlines D-4 on the pillar back home and circles it with a ring big enough for fear to sit in and not take the whole room.
Near sun-slap, we gather at Blue Pantry for the big trial. People line the alley. Bowls knock against hips. Children who learned to step on four stand in pairs so no one forgets who keeps who.
We make the Promise Choir with the whole street.
Kirella sets the count, one—two—three—four. I hum the low line that lives under tables. Nim gives the four with their spoon, eyes proud and steady. Lelia and Bora and Ira and Root speak the two sentences, not loud, not soft. The voices behind them catch the rhythm, then the words, then the meaning.
The paper fold above the door shivers. SIGN fades to a pale stamp that means nothing without coin. The bottom hem shows a faint, stubborn KEEP where the chalk wrote it this morning, now baked into the fibers by soup work and breath.
The lantern grows heavier—the good heavy—like a loaded bowl.
Someone cries a little. It might be me.
We hang the lamp back on its hook in the Commons.
The rope bell gives one clean note. Good. Then, shy, another half, as if testing our patience. Lelia lifts the pan lid a finger. The bell thinks better and holds its tongue.
I should be relieved. I am.
Then the wall where we sealed the listening lock moves. Not a click. A line.
A pale scratch crawls up through wax and into stone, slow as a worm that thinks it is a pen. It draws an M. It draws an I. It starts the R.
My name tastes like metal in my mouth.
I set the lantern on the floor and pour a thin ring up the stone with my palm—warmth into rock, polite, firm. I put my hand flat against the letters. "We won't give names to paper or stone," I say. My voice stays steady. My knees would like to argue.
The scratch struggles at the R and stalls. The MI— sits there in the rock like a needle snapped off under skin.
Root stands at my shoulder. They don't touch me. They smell like chalk and seawater. "He isn't mimicking now," they say, quiet. "He's trying to steal."
"Can he?" Syth asks, small and furious from the ladder.
"Yes," Root says, honest. "No," I say, stubborn. The two words sit together and make a fence.
Kirella's palm comes down over mine on the stone. Warmth over warmth. The ring steadies. The letters don't fade. They also don't grow.
"Two truths," he tells the wall. "We keep kitchens. We keep each other."
The wax seal trembles, offended. The rope bell flirts with four and misses by a step on purpose. Lelia brings the pan lid down once—bang—and the room decides which sound to believe.
The scratch stays at MI—. It hangs there, sharp, unfinished, wrong.
Root draws a ring around D-4 on the pillar and then draws another around the half-name on the wall, as if we can keep it from becoming a whole by surrounding it with work.
"Tomorrow," they say, calm as boats in a storm they already outlived. "We teach bowl-names. No real names to paper. No names to stone. Promise Choir every morning and night."
"Tomorrow," Kirella echoes.
"Tomorrow," I say, and mean we first, then the rest, and then ten quiet years even if we have to buy them one bowl at a time.
The kiln breathes. The market mutters in its sleep. The Abbey's door under the world remembers a tune. The lantern waits on its hook, heavy and good.
And the chapter ends there, with our door held by promises, the river reading WE, the market learning to wait, and MI— stuck in stone like a bad idea caught in a good kitchen, while the clock we can't see turns us toward Day 4.