Kaito smelled smoke before he saw it — not the warm, honest smoke of a kitchen hearth, but the sour, coppery tang of Veilash burning: the kind of smell that set teeth on edge and made grown men cross themselves until their knuckles went white. The market was a smear of shouting and shadow; canvas awnings blackened and curled, and every scrap of glyph-paper from Old Teku's stall fluttered like wounded birds, edges singed into impossible shapes.
He moved through the crowd the way a wound moves toward light: with a stubborn pull he couldn't talk himself out of. People parted for him with the same mixture of fear and habit they reserved for accidents half their own fault — as if Kaito's presence somehow made calamity more likely, as if his Veilmark might be a whisper of contagion.
At his ribs something thumped, patient and sharp, like a small drum under cloth. The mark had been there since a nurse wrapped him and called him a foundling; the mark had never stopped humming. On calm days it was nothing more than an itch. On days like this it felt like someone rattling the bars of a cage.
"The shrine's offering!" a woman screamed near the fountain, dragging a child who clutched a cracked wooden toy. A smear of shadow slid across the cobblestones behind them: the thing that made grown men who'd lived their whole lives in cities look away and think of bathhouse tales. Hollow-sheets. Flayed things that sipped at auras. Wraiths, the children called them, and mothers called them worse when they thought nobody could hear.
Kaito could have kept walking. He could have pursed his lips, let his grin be the mask everyone expected, and moved on. Instead he picked up a splintered spear from a broken stall, the wood warm from sun and treated with oil, and ran.
He had always been loud when he was scared. Loud had kept him alive in the alleys as a boy — loud enough to make predators flinch, loud enough to make crowds notice and children step aside. The market's clamor became a drum for his feet. Voices fell away into a distant sea as the Veilmark at his ribs warmed to a glow so faint only he felt it. The humming gathered itself like breath before a shout.
"Get back!" someone yelled. Kaito ignored the command. There was a child no bigger than the length of his spear, trapped under a stall's broken beam. The shadow above them moved with hunger, fingers thinning into metal and reaching. The child's breath came in tiny, sharp pulls; eyes wide and wet.
Kaito put his hand on the beam, felt the heat of splintered wood and the stick of spilled oil, and thought of every morning he had woken with a song stuck in his chest — a lullaby from no one, a line of sound that had found him when he was very small and cold. He had never known the tune's name; sometimes, alone on rooftops, he'd hum it to himself until it stopped feeling like emptiness. Tonight, as the shadow leaned in, the lullaby was a rope coiling inside him.
He screamed. Not a heroic shout, not one of those practiced cries the bards wrote about, but a raw noise that came from below the jaw and scraped the air like a blade. The Veilmark flared — a sliver of black light, then a ripple — and the shadow recoiled as if stung.
For a heartbeat the market held its breath. The child looked up at him with a face that had always belonged to some other life: trust without calculation, misery without irony. Kaito braced his feet, shoved the beam, and rolled the child free. A woman grabbed the child and ran, screaming thanks that sounded like curses.
The shadow did not vanish. It reassembled, more patient now, like someone who'd been thwarted and liked the taste of the chase. It was when it advanced again that the Veilmark stopped humming and started to pull — a low, insistent tug, as if someone were answering from very deep inside him.
Kaito had been bound since birth. The village midwife had sewn a thin rune into his swaddling cloth as they said he had a name and a mark, and that should have been the end of it. That was the story Master Haru told to the apprentices who came to his small dojo: being Veilbound was an ancient mercy and a terrible responsibility. For Kaito, who'd been watched with the mixture of pity and suspicion that follows orphans, it had been a tangle of rules and whispers and the occasional thrown stone.
He had practiced control like a ritual, learned to press the mark flat as if it were a bruise. He had learned to keep his grin in place. It was a skill. Tonight, skill failed him.
The beast inside — the thing he felt slipping the bars of the cage — spoke in a language older than syllables. It did not use words. It painted cold fire behind Kaito's eyes and then gave him something he could use: a motion, a momentum. He did not ask permission. He had never been good at waiting for consent.
Kaito stepped forward and slammed his spear into the cobbles. The impact sent a spiderweb of light across the street; the glyph fragments on the stone flared where his spear landed, and the shadow screamed in a sound like wind through a ruined bell. People yelped and leaned back as a bloom of black flame — an ugly, starless thing — blossomed from the mark on Kaito's chest and licked along the shaft of the spear like ivy. The air smelled awful: like wet iron and old paper, like memory caught on fire.
The child was safe. The crowd cheered, then stopped, then shifted into that older, colder fear. Some of them dropped their offerings. An old man clutched at his beads, muttering a blessing for someone he did not know.
"Monster," someone whispered. It was a single word, sharp as glass.
Kaito laughed, because that was all he could do. Laughter sheltered him like armor. "Saved you," he said to the child, though the child could no longer hear him. He shouldered the spear and walked away like any other hero with a spear and a bad haircut. But nothing about the market that night would be read like a hero's tale in the months to come. The Veilmark left residue. That residue made people remember and then, faster than remembrance, made them fear.
Rein Veldt was there to see it.
He stood on the rim of the crowd with half of the town's official curiosity packed around him like a cloak. Rein was the sort of person who made people uneasy by not trying to be different — by being small and precise and unnaturally clean even in a place that smelled of fish and smoke. His hair was a dark fan that always seemed to fall in the same perfect line when someone else's was a mess. The four-glyph seal on his palm glinted when he held it up; the sigil burned with a calmness Kaito had never been taught to respect.
"Idiot," Rein said softly, not loud enough for the crowd to hear. The tone was not anger. It was the sound people made when they saw somebody making a mess of a machine they themselves understood. Rein had been a friend, once. Friends who had been children in the same orphanage had clubbed together for scraps and lied in the gutters, and Rein's hands had been small and capable even then. But friendship carved different shapes as children grew. For Rein there had always been a coin for careful measurement. For Kaito there had been fire.
Kaito met Rein's eyes and gave him a grin. Rein's mouth tightened, and for a moment something like pity flickered across his face. Pity stung. Kaito had been trying, in his own poor, loud way, to be someone the town could forgive. Tonight his attempt had been both a miracle and a brand.
Mira Sora arrived with Master Haru before the dust had cleared. Mira moved like someone who had learned to be small in order to be entirely heard — quiet steps that leaned toward anyone in need, eyes an attentive undercurrent. Her hands were not empty: a small, coiled threadblade hung at her hip, a tool of Lifewardery apprentices that could cut a soul-thread and mend a frayed line with equal grace. The Threadblade pulsed faintly when it touched the air, small and blue as a winter pond.
Master Haru was a wide-shouldered man whose age lived in the lines of his hands and the way his voice dropped when he wanted to be listened to. He had a long history in Veilbinding and even longer regrets. He had been the man who first taught Kaito to stop the mark from showing in the right company; he had been the man who told the story of the midwife's stitch. His eyes lingered on Kaito the way guilty things linger on someone who has been forgiven but does not forget why.
"Master," Kaito said. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and tossed his spear aside. He had never liked to have anything he could use to hit people on him when he spoke with Haru. It made both of them nervous. Haru's jaw clenched; the mark on his hand, the old scar crossing it, had its own history. He knew what Kaito had done without being told.
"You could have killed someone," Haru said simply, and there was no anger in it. There was only the flat, stern voice of a teacher who had seen too many promising flames burn their hands.
Kaito shrugged. "Saved them, too. Pick your verb."
Mira's gaze flicked to the dark corners where the shadow had been. She did not ask if Kaito had used Veilbind. She already knew, in the way apprentices know the scent of wet pages before they see them. "There are more of them tonight," she said instead. Her voice was small but carried. "Several reports came in earlier. In the east quarter the wells ran dark."
Haru's mouth hardened. "Wardenate scouts?" he asked, and the city murmured; Wardenate was a word to make markets go still. The Wardenate were the rumor-people: an organized order from beyond the mountains who preferred to call their forces the Reclaimers. They moved like a shadow-empire piece across maps, a threat that might be merely political or might be a full undoing. Nobody knew where their loyalty ended and their hunger began.
"Maybe," Mira said. "Maybe not. But I felt the threads shift. Someone is reaching through the Veil."
Kaito felt, more than heard, the little pull beneath his ribs when she said it. The lullaby thrummed the way it always did when hope and fear braided together. He did not mention the other thing: the scrape of the Shade's breath, like a dog's sleeping rasp at the edge of the world. He had learned to keep such talk to himself.
"You should come with us," Haru said, and it was not an invitation. It was a directive wrapped in concern. "You are not safe here when your mark sings."
The townsfolk had already begun to point. Mothers pulled children close. The market vendors, practical to a fault, counted how much of their wares had been ruined and how much they could blame on Kaito for the distraction. A few cheered when the child was recovered, but the cheers were the quick, shaky kind people give at funerals to keep from crying.
"You know I can't leave," Kaito said. He wanted to be the one who stayed. That was the honesty of it. He wanted people to stop pretending the mark was an accident and start pretending he was a man they could trust. "Who would take care of town nonsense if I didn't? Besides, who else would catch the wraiths in the alleys?"
Haru regarded him close. "You would catch them fine enough on your own, maybe. But someone will see, Kaito. Someone who collects marks and keeps them catalogued. Someone who thinks a Veilbound should be a weapon on a shelf. You know how these things go."
Kaito did. He had seen the way officials made lists of Veilbound in the years before he was old enough to read. He had seen the way those lists found their way into cupboards of men who liked power.
A commotion broke out near the edge of the market then, a different knot of noise: not fear so much as enforced order. A carriage of the Spirit Courts — a low, clumsy thing with banners that looked older than anybody remembered — rolled into the square. The driver had the bored look of someone who delivers bad news for a living; the men with him had the peculiar blankness of protocol. A clerk jumped down and unfurled parchment the way a man would show a license.
"There's been sightings of a Veilbound youth," one of the clerks said, loud enough for the market to hear. "By order of the Spirit Courts, all such sightings are to be reported and your cooperation requested."
Kaito felt the sound of his name on the clerk's tongue like a stone. The market angled toward him, and in the movement he saw the shadow of a figure high on a rooftop that had not been there before: a thin shape in a hood, watching. For a fraction of a heartbeat the hood shifted and something in the watching hand gleamed: a small shard of black glass, faceted like a sliver of a moon.
The clerk's eyes slid past Kaito as if to something behind him, and the Veilmark at Kaito's ribs burned cold and brilliant. The lullaby in his chest changed its little tune — a single note in a long song — and Kaito realized with that peculiar sharpness of certainty that he had been looked at as a thing of interest before. He had been catalogued in someone's mind, and what human minds catalogued the world were the sort that also wrote lists.
"Come," Haru said. He took Kaito's shoulder with a hand that felt like a promise and a warning wrapped together. "Come and answer the clerk. Don't make this harder than you must."
Kaito let himself be led, shoulders square and grin fixed. He walked past Rein and Mira and the people who had called him monster and then saved him in the same breath. The hooded figure on the rooftop did not move. The clerk took down Kaito's name with a flourish, as if to make formal what had been a street rumor moments before.
When they reached the carriage, the clerk bent his head and read aloud, the official voice flattening the market's edge into a newspaper strip: "By decree of the Spirit Courts — we request that all Veilbound come to register."
Kaito stood very still in the carriage's shadow and let the market press around him like wind. He could feel the small black shard in someone else's hand, as visible as a stone though he had never seen it. He felt the shade stir in the hollow of his ribs, restless and eager and something like hungry.
The clerk's quill scratched. Somewhere on a rooftop the hooded watcher turned and slid away like a thought forgotten at dawn, and for the first time in his life Kaito understood that saving a child in a market could be both a mercy and a bell that could never be un-rung.
He did not tell Haru that the lullaby had given him an image in that instant: a door, old and carved with glyphs that pulsed like chessboard squares, and beyond it, a room full of shelves with names written on their spines. On one shelf, next to a book with a four-glyph crest, lay a small, dark object — a shard that fit the shape of his palm.
Haru signed the paper for him with the same hand that had once taught him to hide. "We go," Haru said. "We answer. And we see who else has started to look."
Kaito folded his hands in his lap and felt the darkness press pleasantly against his skin. The lullaby softened, like a mother smoothing a restless child. He would answer. He had always been loud enough to be noticed. Now the world had noticed him. That, he supposed, was better than the opposite.
Outside, overhead in the high plain between roofs, the hooded watcher paused and tapped the shard in his palm until it glowed a faint, predatory light. Then the watcher pulled the hood up and vanished into the night like a seam pulled closed.
Kaito did not see the watcher leave. He saw only the market, the child being held safe at last, and the clerk's quill making a black mark that would follow him farther than he imagined. He closed his eyes, hummed the last line of the lullaby quietly between his teeth, and felt the Veilmark glow like coals. Something had been set in motion, and the sound of it would be the rhythm that carried them forward, through smoke and song, through lists and libraries and the long, patient eyes of those who collect marks.