By week's end the city had learned a new reflex: when fear rose, it counted to four.
Lantern pins appeared on jackets and aprons; bakers stamped a small breath-mark into crusts with the morning's batch; children kept time with finger-taps on stair rails. Petitioners lined the palace colonnade not with grievances but with thanks—a rarity so startling that clerks forgot how to file them and stacked the letters like bread. The Wardwatch marched without plumes; the brass they polished were braziers.
Support rose like a tide. Derek felt it every time the circlet hummed, each note a promise he hadn't asked for and could no longer refuse.
He moved through the day like a stitch through canvas—clinics, ward-post, council, market, council again—leaving small, careful miracles behind him the way a boat leaves ripples: a fever untied, a broken wrist coaxed back into its hinge, a breath settled where panic had loosened every seam.
Each act cost little by itself. Together, they spent him.
Elyna noticed first. She had a talent for noticing in the space before embarrassment begins.
"Quiet hour," she said at noon, hand light at his elbow.
"After the river ward," Derek answered, not lying, merely postponing.
Nox fanned himself with an outlaw's treatise, appalled and delighted in equal measure. "The problem with being a keystone is that stones don't nap. We need proxy anchors—a choir that can hold the pitch without you on every beat."
The High Priestess nodded. "Delegated rites. We keep the wall in key with Keepers who carry your cadence."
Derek exhaled. The circlet answered with a sympathetic ache at his temples, like a weather-front gathering behind his eyes. "Choose them."
Elyna already had names. "Lantern matrons who ran the braziers during the Harvester's Moon. A mender from the east docks. Two midwives. Sergeant Callen from the river watch. None of them thirsts for titles. All of them keep hours."
"Good," Derek said. "Make them a choir. Teach them the counts."
They met that evening in the palace's old mirror gallery, which Derek had ordered stripped of glass and lined with wardstone and benches. He stood in the doorway while Elyna set the rhythm, while the High Priestess built sigils like scaffolds for breath, while Nox scribbled notes in a margin and muttered, "Keystone, but distributed; the gardener will hate sweeping this many floors."
The circlet warmed as the Keepers' voices braided. For a blissful quarter hour, the weight left Derek's bones as if it had been persuaded to sit elsewhere.
Then a runner hit the doorway with river-water on his boots. "Tenement fall at Southditch! Six trapped under beam—braziers flickering—children—"
The choir shifted as one to stand. Derek lifted a hand without thinking, and they stilled in the waiting that means tell us how to help.
"Hold the cadence here," he said. "I'll go."
"Your Majesty," the High Priestess warned, soft iron. "Do not sing alone."
"I won't," he lied gently, and Elyna heard the lie and went with him anyway.
Southditch stank of salt and mildew and stubbornness. A load-bearing beam had failed in a house that had been too brave for its bones; the whole structure tilted like a lover who stayed at the dance too long. Watchmen struggled with ropes, ankles braced against a doorjamb that protested in three different dialects of wood.
"Quiet," Derek said, and the word behaved like a hand lowering itself over an animal's back. He knelt, palm to the beam, and felt the panic-thrum of the people crushed beneath, felt where the floor had forgotten how to trust itself.
He had learned to prefer fine surgery; this called for a lift.
He called the lanterns in the alley, called the breath of the Keepers miles away, called the wardstones that remembered how to be upright. He did not pull hard. He pulled true—up and slightly left, where the house still knew the pitch of its own making.
The beam rose. Voices beneath went from strangled to astonished. Hands slid bodies free—one, two, three, four, five—six with a midwife's growled blessing. The house settled back into a new key. It would need a builder's hymn tomorrow. Tonight, it held.
Derek's vision folded at the edges. Elyna's hand found the back of his neck, cool linen catching the thin line of blood that had begun its almost ritual path from ear to collar. "In for four," she whispered. "Hold for two. Out for four."
He obeyed. The world widened enough to stand in.
A boy with plaster in his hair looked up from the blanket where someone had put him. "Are you the Empress?"
Derek managed the shape of a smile. "Today."
"My mam says we don't get pageants anymore," the boy said, accusatory and admiring in equal measure.
"Pageants don't hold walls," Derek said. "You do."
The boy considered this and nodded as if presented with a difficult but fair chore.
The alley bowed around him—not a courtier's scrape, but the way a crowd leans when it decides to believe. Someone began a low count to four. Someone else passed forward a half-loaf. Derek sat on a stoop and ate the bread with plaster dust on his fingers, and for a moment he felt like a man who had once loved dumb jokes at family dinners.
Then the circlet pulsed in warning. He hid the flinch by standing.
The air scribbled, faint and apologetic.
[MICRO-MIRACLE — STRUCTURAL LIFT] Lantern Link: engaged (local + remote) Rescue: 6/6 Life Drain (base): -12% Mitigation (choir/lanterns): +7% Net Personal Drain: -5% Keystone Strain: rising Advisory: Delegate next two major acts
Elyna watched his face the way one watches a fragile glass, not to catch it when it falls but to make sure it isn't set where elbows travel.
"Home," she said.
"Clinic," he countered.
"Home, then clinic," she bargained, and he accepted because bargaining was a kind of mercy he could still afford.
The palace felt larger at night, which Derek did not care for. He let Elyna exchange his linen for a fresh square and allowed the High Priestess to look into his eyes the way healers look—without flattery.
"You are close to the threshold where steady drains become collapse," she said.
"How close?"
"Closer if you lie," she said, and he almost smiled.
Nox arrived with numbers and a reckless sort of cheer. "Public support is an engine. Your edicts moved three more districts to sign. Trade princes are donating to braziers in order to be seen donating; accept the hypocrisy and spend the oil. But—" He flipped the slate. New glyphs: arcs and measures. "Your visibility is creating a second demand: appearances. The court wants your face as much as your hand."
"The court wants reassurance it can auction," the High Priestess said.
Derek rubbed the spot above his brow where the circlet pressed. "Then it will go hungry."
"Not entirely," Nox said. "We craft stand-ins for appearances: Keeper Choirs at balconies, lantern courts with public rulings, the Torrent Marshal presiding at ceremonies you are too wise to attend. We preserve the image while you preserve the breath."
Elyna placed a cup of ginger tea in Derek's hand and left her fingers there long enough to count a beat. "And you will keep quiet hours," she added. "Non-negotiable."
"Advisory agrees," Derek said dryly, tipping the cup toward the faint letters that still hovered in the corner of his vision.
He signed the orders Nox pushed forward: Keeper Choirs codified; Lantern Courts empowered to adjudicate tithe disputes; Quiet Hours posted to every clinic door with the same authority as curfew. He added one more line in his own hand: Any miracle attempted during a Quiet Hour must be accompanied by a chorus of five. He initialed it before anyone could argue.
The circlet cooled a fraction, as if relieved by paperwork.
Outside, late lanterns moved like slow stars. Inside, Elyna drew the curtains and barred the balcony door against moon and minister alike.
When the room finally emptied, Derek stood alone a moment and read the day's letters of thanks. He handled them like small, living things and returned them to the desk without stacking them too neatly.
The air whispered again—less a message than a listening.
[REGNAL WEEK 1 — SUMMARY] Public Support: RISING (Revered in 7/12 districts) Civic Chorus Efficiency: +17% Personal Drain Trend: WORSENING (manageable) Keystone Threshold: 72% Recommendation: Assign 3 Proxy Anchors within 7 days Note: Do not sing alone.
He touched the circlet, felt the faint bite of wardstone at his hairline, and imagined it not as a crown but as a beam he pressed his shoulder to while others hammered braces into place.
"Not alone," he said softly—to the system, to the city, to the versions of himself who had learned survival by memorizing pain.
A knock, gentle. Elyna again, with a blanket she did not offer so much as insist on. "Lantern count in fifteen," she said. "We'll breathe at the window and then you'll sleep."
"We?" he asked, on the edge of a smile.
"Someone has to keep time," she said.
When the bell tolled, they stood at the casement and looked down at their wall of small suns. In for four. Hold for two. Out for four. The city answered, and for the length of the count his bones remembered how to be light.
He slept like a man collapsing into an armchair between rounds. The circlet hummed on the table, quiet as a promise that weighs the same tomorrow.