Chapter 9.1 — Songs on the Nareth

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“Some rivers carry water.
Others carry the names we will need when the night asks who we are.”

Noon tried to be a mirror.

The city refused.

The gate Lysander lifted—smooth as a thought that doesn’t ask permission—shivered when the people did not kneel. The mirror-sheen rippled and skinned the light wrong, but the bridge held its memory. Copper circlets rang soft against forearms and sleeves as hands rose—not in worship, not in surrender, in witness. Bells did not ring. They listened.

Seraphine stepped forward with one of the valley’s circles over her arm. She did not raise it above her head. She held it at her heart.

“This crown,” she said, “is not for a single brow. It moves. If you would wear it, hold out your hand. If you cannot hold it today, say the name of one who will.”

Murmur. Then a mason with mortar in his cuticles stepped into the chalk seam and took the circlet from her. He lifted it to his chest. “For my son,” he said, voice thick. “He is not brave yet. He will be if we let him practice without scaring him.”

Laughter. A sob swallowed into a smile. Another hand. And another. The copper went around the circle, pausing at wrists like a memory offered deliberately.

Across the rise, Lysander’s mouth curved. Not anger—interest. He altered three sigils with a finger and the mirror gate steadied, glassier. The crowd did not shift. Their small bells, hung at shop doors and balconies, chimed once together without wind. The city had decided what noon was for.

Cael Ardentis stood at the edge of the gathering with dust on his boots and the river still drying in the hem of his cloak. When Seraphine’s gaze found him, the look they shared did not make a spectacle of anyone’s heart. It simply named a road between them and agreed it existed.

“Go,” she said when he reached her. No plea. No command. An acknowledgment of two duties shaking hands.

“I’ll send word if the Nareth starts lying,” he said.

“It always lies,” Maren said from behind a sheaf of petitions and quills. “That’s what rivers and polite people do.”

“Keep them talking,” Seraphine told her.

“I intend to,” Maren said. “I have extreme opinions about fonts.”

Lioren swung into the saddle like a man who had learned to mount with stitches and never unlearned the habit. “Cohort?” he asked Cael.

“Three miles east,” Cael said. “They’ll stand if the ground remembers how.”

Seraphine took a small copper loop from Cerys’ stack—the lightest of the thirty, thin as a bangle, the metal imperfectly hammered the way honest things often are. “A crown that moves,” she murmured. She slipped it over her own wrist first, to teach it the shape of her pulse, then eased it onto Cael’s forearm. The gesture was not a claim. It was a prayer with hands.

“It will ring if the mirror tries to fold you,” she said.

His eyes flicked to hers, unreadable for a breath. “And if I try to fold myself?”

“It will ring louder,” she said, meeting his evasion where it lived. “So will I.”

Something eased at the corner of his mouth—amusement surrendered to respect. “Then I’ll pretend to be music.”

“You don’t need to pretend,” she said, and if the compliment touched somewhere he carried quiet, he did not show it.

They parted without theatrics. There is dignity in work that knows where to be.

❖

The road to the Nareth ford followed a spine of earth and apology. Oaks leaned in as if to listen. Blackbirds made grammar of the hedges. Cael rode at a pace that admitted urgency and refused panic. Two border riders loped a field’s length ahead, the scouts’ posture a conversation with the wind. Behind, a strip of wardens kept distance on Lioren’s order; their shadows were visible only to men accustomed to counting such things.

“You ride like a man who built the road,” Lioren said, catching up on the far side of a ditch.

“I ride like a man who sleeps better when his horse does,” Cael answered.

Cerys’ lantern chimed once against her saddle-bow, as if embarrassed to be ornament. “Do you hear it?” she asked.

Cael did. The faintest thread under the hoofbeats, as if someone hummed through a wall. Not song precisely. Intention. It had the same aftertaste as the mirror on the hill— uncolor and tidy hunger.

“Gate-hum,” he said. “Too far for a full opening. Close enough to make men dream wrong.”

“Break it,” Lioren said.

“I haven’t got a hammer big enough for someone else’s dream,” Cael said. “But the river might.”

“The river lies,” Lioren reminded him.

“Only to the vain,” Cerys said. “Rivers are poets. They hate being quoted accurately.”

They came over a rise and the Nareth spread at their feet—wide and dark, shoulders hunched under a wind that hadn’t made up its mind. The ford lay like a pale scar across the water, stones packed by years of feet and hooves. On the far bank, beyond a ribbon of willow, the land sloped to marsh. Haze hung there like a vow someone hadn’t kept.

The Border Cohort East held the near side with rope, pikes laid—not leveled—watchfires banked to ember. No banners. Men and women in leather, patched and scrubbed; a boy not old enough to shave cleaning blood from the haft of a spear with a care that said he wanted it to last longer than he might. When Cael rode in, backs straightened an inch. Not more. Respect that doesn’t ask for witnesses.

“Second,” called a woman with hair the color of rust and arms like answers. “You’re late to your own river.”

“Would you believe I stopped to argue with a city?” Cael said, dismounting.

“Not if you called it arguing,” the woman said. “Thalen’s in your tent. He’s decided the fog is philosophical.”

Thalen’s voice drifted out before Cael pulled the tent flap—low, quick, a man tuning his own mind against silence. Inside, the map table was a collage of ink and bread crumbs. A string marked depths; a handful of river stones weighted the corners. Thalen himself was all bones and notes, a small pipe stuck behind one ear and an air of having slept at odd angles his whole life.

“Songs,” Thalen said by way of greeting. “We’ve been riddled with them since midnight. Two parts mirror, one part bloom. He means the gates to open toward us and keep memory from running the other way.”

“Lysander,” Cael said.

“Or his delicate friends,” Thalen said. “Men who think music is a machine. They forget it’s a beast. If you don’t feed it right, it bites the hand that plays it.”

Cerys ducked in. The lantern made the tent’s shadows behave. Lioren followed because he would not let the Second stand in canvas with only a poet for a shield.

“Can you answer them?” Cael asked Thalen.

“Not alone,” Thalen said. He tapped the pipe against his palm. “They’re borrowing an old cadence—pilgrim hymn, pre-war. It wants to thrum the bones. We need something older and wider than that. Something the river knows in its gut.”

“Work song?” Cael said.

Thalen’s eyes sparked. “Fording-chant. The one your—” He paused, corrected with care. “—the one you learned somewhere you won’t name.”

Cerys’ head tilted. “You know it?”

“Muscle knows it,” Cael said. “It’s woven to lengthen breath and shorten fear.” He looked to Lioren. “We’ll need the whole line. Not just voices—backs, hands, rope.”

“And if men laugh?” Lioren asked.

“They won’t,” Cael said. “They’ve carried stones.”

Lioren’s mouth did something like respect. “Very well. Make singers out of soldiers.” He turned to go, then paused. “And if the gate cracks anyway?”

“Then we show it we have better rhythm,” Cael said.