Chapter 9.3 — Songs on the Nareth

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Night settled not as a curtain but as an agreement. The cohort banked fires low and took watches in threes. Thalen’s pipe made a small, domestic sound. Lioren dozed like a man whose sleep had learned to keep one ear awake. Cerys wrote something small and folded it even smaller, then tucked it under the lantern—letters to bells, perhaps, or a prayer with no audience.

Cael walked the ford’s length and felt for wrongness with his feet. Sand tells a truer story than torches do. When he was certain he had nothing left to teach his boots, he sat on the high stone where Cerys had stood and let the river rub his calves with cold cloth.

The copper circlet glinted in the starlight. He glanced at it and thought, in the private place men set aside for the thing they have not yet had the courage to name: She trusted me with this.

It wasn’t a ring. It wasn’t a chain. It was a tool a sovereign had given a soldier. He did not love her for it. He loved the way it made him remember what kind of man he intended to be.

Something like laughter moved in the leaves above and behind him. Not human. The sound of a large bird taking humor into its feathers. Cael did not start. He did not turn. A voice spoke from his other ear anyway.

“You are not where I am,” Seraphine said, and the fact did not sound like accusation.

“I am where your city ends and its rumor begins,” he said, because he did not know how to pretend the connection between them wasn’t a bridge too. “What does the mirror do?”

“Tries to teach noon to look like it owns the hour,” she said. “Fails politely.”

“You gave them copper.”

“It gave me back my hands,” she said, and there was weariness in her voice like soft stone. “How many of yours would sing if you asked them to?”

“All of them,” he said. “Not pretty. True.”

“That’s the only song that holds,” she said softly.

He didn’t ask how she spoke to him without glass. He did not want a mechanism; he wanted the fact. After a time, he said, “The young one at the far bank smiled as if he were bleeding proof.”

“He will be a priest soon,” she murmured. “They promote the ones who smile at wounds.”

“Your Archon?”

“Not mine,” she said, and the copper at his wrist warmed.

Silence held for a dozen breaths. He could hear men turn in their sleep. A fox scolded the dark. The river counted lies at a rate that did not worry him, which worried him.

“Cael,” she said, as if testing whether the name fit her mouth. “When you go quiet like that, what do you hear?”

“My mother’s stitch,” he said.

“You sew?”

“I keep things from falling apart,” he said. “Clothes. Lines. Plans.”

“Good,” she said. “I break things neatly. We’ll be efficient and irritating.”

He laughed, and the laugh sounded like the first time a man trusts his back to a new wall. “We might be.”

A rustle below. Footsteps, unhurried. Thalen, carrying two cups that steamed. “Either you’ve learned to talk in your sleep,” he said, “or the dusk princess is whispering in your head. Here. Drink. It’s leaf boiled in river. I did the spell I was told once. It’s supposed to keep dreams honest.”

Cael took the cup. “Who told you the spell?”

“An old woman who called me stupid and then taught me a better key,” Thalen said cheerfully. “I don’t argue with old women. I’m saving my lifespan to argue with kings.”

“Don’t waste it,” Cael said. He sipped. The tea tasted like bark that had been convinced to try sweetness and found it liked the idea without committing to it.

“Do you know your father?” Thalen asked, as if inquiring after weather.

“I know his lesson,” Cael said. “And two songs he taught my mother in a voice that forgot how to stay.”

“Good fathers,” Thalen said sagely, “do not always stay. They leave tools. But the best ones stay and still leave tools. We keep making men choose where choice is not required. It’s a bad habit.”

“I intend to be inconvenient to that habit,” Cael said.

“Then marry a woman who will break your good habits and nourish your bad ones,” Thalen said, not subtle, entirely kind.

Cerys’ voice drifted from the gloom, amused and unamused. “Bards matchmaking at a ford. What could go wrong?”

“Everything worth writing about,” Thalen said.

Lioren snorted awake. “If you two are done mending the empire, try not to let the gate open while I’m on watch.”

“It won’t,” Cael said, and then, because confidence without humility gets men killed: “It might.”

“Sing at it,” Lioren said, settling back. “If you die, I will pretend to be sad when I spend your pay.”

Cael smiled into his cup. He had the sensation of a plan forming in him the way frost forms on winter glass: quietly, inevitably, with a beauty that might cost something.

“Thalen,” he said. “At dawn I want rope across the ford in three lines, not one. I want every man to know which knot is his. I want the chant learned to breath, not tongue. Cerys—teach me the bell-name that wakes water without drowning it.”

“Velmoriel,” Cerys said. “You’ll mispronounce it. The river will forgive you if you mean it.”

“I will mean it,” Cael said. The copper band ringed his pulse, an accompaniment, not a restraint. “At noon they tried to borrow a holy hour. Let’s lend the river a better one.”

Thalen frowned. “Lending implies usury. I prefer gifts.”

“Then a gift,” Cael said. He looked upriver where the black shapes of trees wrote their names on the sky. “A song that says we are not empty before anyone tries to fill us.”

He slept for two hours that night, and in those two hours he dreamed of a city that had learned to hum, and of a girl with copper on her arm tying a knot that held.

Dawn found them already standing in the water. Men complain about many things when ordered before breakfast. They complained now and obeyed without malice. Rope crosses back and forth—three lines, a braid across the ford. The chant grew out of them like breath in winter. Even the ones who could not carry a tune could carry weight.

Velmoriel, Cael said under his breath, mangling it. The river still made a small, approving sound. Cerys’ lantern threw the kind of light that doesn’t need eyes to be seen.

The mist on the far bank thickened again, and with it the neat hunger. The young mirror-singer appeared once more, eyes bright with zeal and sleep deprivation. He lifted his hands. The water tried to forget it had ever been wet.

“Now,” Cael said.

The rope sang.

Not literally. But fibers groaned in a key that teaches men to lean together. Thalen’s hands marked time. The chant rose and did not strain. Work is a hymn that never lies. Cerys spoke Velmoriel once, and once was enough.

The gate slit itself like a lip—then found something in the seam it did not want to swallow: will. Not the sovereign’s alone. Not the Cohort’s alone. A city’s, carried here in river and rope and the ridiculous courage of people who had eaten badly and slept worse and still chose to stand.

The slit closed.

The young man on the far bank lowered his hands. He did not bow this time. He looked at them with a grief that had not yet learned where to sit.

“Why?” he called. Not standard provocation. A genuine question. “Why not let the clean thing cut the rot? Why make your hands dirty with holding?”

“Because rot feeds the field when you turn it right,” Thalen called back, scandalizing three wardens and delighting a farmer. “And because hands were made to hold.”

Cael gestured for quiet. He had seen men’s faith become a noose. He would not be the knot. “Because we do not wish to end choice,” he said, and reached across the water with words he felt like dowels under a sagging beam. “And because the last time a mirror told this land who it was, it forgot to ask the people living in it.”

The young man’s mouth shaped something Cael could not hear. Perhaps a name. Perhaps his own.

When he vanished, he did it with less neatness, as if the mirror had stopped obeying him as quickly as he liked.

They did not cheer. They eased rope from water, hands burning, spines cursing, hearts steady. A boy who could not yet shave grinned at no one in particular and nearly fell, and Lioren caught him by the back of his collar and shook him once for good luck.

Cerys reached out and touched the copper at Cael’s wrist with two fingers. “You carry it well,” she said.

“It carries me,” he said. He looked east, toward the city that was teaching itself to listen, and west, toward the marsh that wanted to teach him to stop. “Send word to Seraphine,” he said. “Tell her noon learned a lesson today.”

“What lesson?” Thalen asked, risking a pipe between his teeth before breakfast.

“That we choose what an hour is for,” Cael said.

“And dusk?” Cerys asked.

“Dusk is when we remember why,” he said.

They set the line again. The day did not promise peace. Gates can be stubborn; mirrors jealous. Men are sometimes worse than both. But the ford had a song now that did not belong to the Archon, and the river had learned a name from a man who mispronounced it honestly.

Somewhere between city and ford, a copper circlet chimed in answer, and a girl with a bridge in her mouth smiled because the sound reached her without permission.

And the Nareth moved on, carrying bread-crumb map and rumor, carrying proof and laughter, carrying, too, the names they would need when night asked—politely, then not—who they were.