By morning, the square had already begun arguing with the idea of a festival.
Arguments, like hinges, have sounds. This one creaked under the weight of questions: Who brings wheat when sugar is cheaper to brag about? Who gets to give away the best spot? Who decides what is "one free thing" when the butcher insists a scrap isn't stingy but his wife says it is? And how long, exactly, does a "true story" take before it curdles into a sermon?
"Tables," Luminous said, hands on hips, hair half-tamed by pins that hoped for the best. "Not booths. Not stalls. Tables."
"Because?" Xion asked, already liking the fight.
"Stalls face out," she said. "Tables face each other."
He let himself grin. "You're terrible."
"I prefer effective." She pointed with her chin. "Tilda: benches, rope lashed so children can't tilt themselves into legend. Eline: a circle of walkways—if a man tries to turn a conversation into a wall, you escort him to air. Oren: blessing by sarcasm. Make it short, so they beg you for the long one tomorrow."
"Sacrilege," Oren said from the chapel steps, but he smiled, because he loved being given an excuse to be better on purpose.
Sareen arrived with Mara, Ivo, a stack of rough cloth, and a ledger she swore she would not bring and had nonetheless brought. She glared at the square as if it owed her rent. "If we're giving away a thing," she warned Xion, "we are choosing the thing. Not you. Not the Ordo. Not some man with a pious sword."
"I am not pious," Xion said mildly.
"You smell like you think you are," she said, and he had no defense.
The Intercalary Clerk came to watch with a face like a calendar page that had been kept from the sun. Their chain of discs ticked in the wind, each tiny ring a stifled clink.
"You could help," Xion told them, knowing they would hate being asked.
"I am helping," the Clerk said. "By witnessing. My notes will determine whether your experiment becomes a habit."
"Witness this," Luminous said dryly, and pointed at the tower. "The tooth is still at twelve-oh-three. If you want the city to pay, tally how many people stay three minutes longer than is useful because they're looking at each other."
Will Breaker drifted above the fountain and turned in lazy circles, letting her skirt pretend it was cloth. "Your petty religion has liturgy now," she said, delighted. "Rope. Hinge. Pitch. Hem. Ledger. Table."
"Add: elbow," Xion said. "As in: make room with one."
He didn't draw Will Breaker. He took a hammer. He put his shoulder under a plank and the plank remembered how to be a table because men had taught it once and wood isn't a snob about being given purpose twice. Eline had guards string red ribbon—not to forbid, to suggest where flow should be; Tilda's knots turned untrustworthy benches into furniture with opinions; Oren paced like a caged bless and then gave up his dignity and carried bread.
By second hour, the square had a spine. By third, it had a pulse. By fourth, it had the thing no plan can force: a joking argument between strangers about the best way to cut cheese. Xion cataloged that sound and hid it in his ribs where the anchor thread liked to worry them; he would need it later when something loud tried to replace it.
He paid three petty coins before noon arrived uninvited. The first was the crispness of a first laugh—his laughter came, but it rounded its corners as if padded. He hated noticing. He noticed anyway. The second was the pleasure of stretching after lifting—his muscles obliged, but the stretch forgot its small euphoria. The third was a smell: hot bread's whisper, gone. He chewed crust and chose the word perfect for a boy to imitate; Ivo imitated, solemn as a priest.
"Your face," Luminous murmured, passing him a cloth. "It's doing honesty."
"Disgusting," he said, dabbing sweat. "I'll stop."
"Don't," she said, not looking at him. "It works."
The first free thing given was not dramatic; it wasn't meant to be. Sareen cut a plum in thirds and gave a third to a woman whose hand trembled slightly when she reached. "No story," the woman said, defensive, daring.
"You must have one," Mara said, bold.
"Not for you," the woman answered, and flinched at her own bravery.
"Then for the Ledger," Xion said, and was glad the Ledger was a book and not a judge. "Tell it in your head. That counts."
She nodded, small, as if making a pact with the square itself; she ate the fruit and the sound of the bite made two men turn and one child clap.
Three tables over, Eline pressed three minutes into an argument until the quarrel forgot the performance and returned to content; Oren offered absolution for the sin of making a story prettier than it had the strength to be; Tilda returned a fallen bench to sturdiness and whispered to it, "hold," as if furniture required comfort.
At the far side, a man with a mouth that had learned to sneer before it learned to kiss stood with crossed arms, surveying. He had a face the city made as often as it could afford—a face built to say no; his nose had been broken by someone who'd meant to improve him and had not.
"You," he said to Xion, as if informing a clerk the ink had bled. "Trinity."
He didn't reach for his blade; neither did Xion, who tried to be a different animal than the one the city kept expecting. "Me."
"Name's Kett," the man said. "I didn't come to eat. I came to see the trick."
"No trick," Xion said.
"Everything's a trick," Kett said. "You push a bell, little men with discs come to count your push. You smudge a ledger, the city decides to like you until it doesn't. You set tables, the Gate gets hungry for chairs."
"You talk like a calendar," Luminous said from behind Kett's shoulder. She had a trick of arriving at the exact second people could be made to hear something they wouldn't before. "Do you eat at all?"
"Not if it's yours," Kett said. "I don't beg."
"Sit," Xion said, pointing at a chair with three legs worth trusting and a fourth Tilda had over-knotted into compliance. "You aren't begging. You're paying with the one coin I want."
"What coin?"
"Presence," Xion said.
Kett looked at the chair as if it might bite. The square looked at him as if it might clap. He chose to be mocked. He sat. The chair held.
"Now what?" he demanded.
"Now you tell someone to your left a true thing and someone to your right a kindness," Xion said.
Kett's mouth flattened. He turned left. He told the woman who'd come with a basket emptier than she wanted that her hair looked like a righteousness. She snorted and forgave him the poetry. He turned right. He told a boy that his plum-drop was the best executed he'd seen all week. The boy preened. Kett's jaw loosened. Xion let the square do the rest.
"Do you think you can fix the world with chairs?" the Intercalary Clerk asked, appearing at his elbow like good weather changing its mind.
"Not fix," Xion said. "Keep the door from sticking."
"Your metaphors irritate me," the Clerk said.
"You love them," he said, and was right enough to make their eyes flick up and away.
He did not see the Gate's agent arrive—he felt the absence it brought.
A party is a music: the hum of hands passing cups, the cluck of tongues, the plates' glockenspiel, the children's percussion. The silence came like a man snuffing a candle in a room he doesn't own. It moved from the cemetery side of the square, sliding between table legs with the entitlement of law. Chairs shifted an inch as it passed, as if making room without being asked. Conversation forgot nouns.
Luminous reached for his sleeve with the same inevitability she reached for knives. "Null Host," she whispered.
"How welcoming," he said.
"They set wakes without bodies," Will Breaker breathed, her voice a glass sweating cold. "They lay out chairs facing a table full of nothing and ask people to speak their losses. Then the nothing eats the speaking."
"Fun at parties," Xion said, and stepped into the agent's path.
It looked like a man in a suit a grandmother would call Sunday, except everything about it resisted detail. If he'd been asked later to draw it, he'd have drawn a chair and a blank and an afterward. It wore a white flower in its lapel; the flower was not white, it was all the colors of a memory bleached to the edge of itself.
"Welcome," Xion said.
The Null Host turned its not-quite-face. It did not bow. It had never learned the use of knees. "You have set places," it said, voice lint-free. "I have come to correct."
"This is intercalary," the Clerk said tightly behind Xion. "We have declared a table."
"Not your table," the Host replied. "Mine. And mine is empty." It smiled without lips. "The Gate is very hungry for empty."
The square tightened its grip on itself. Xion felt the old impulse—sword, stance, miasma, solve. He held it in his teeth and made a leash. "We have a place for you," he said.
"Do not invite it," Luminous hissed.
"We have to," he whispered. "Tables work because there's a chair for the difficult uncle."
"I am not your uncle," the Host said.
"You're a habit," Xion said. "Sit."
It looked at the chair. Chairs don't like being looked at by things that see them as equations. Tilda's knots tightened until the rope creaked under the weight of principle.
"The rules?" the Host asked, almost amused.
"One true thing to your left," Xion said. "One kindness to your right."
"I do not have kindness," the Host said, too quick.
"Then say nothing," he said. "That counts."
It sat.
The rope of the square held; chairs did not skitter away; no plates shattered out of respect or terror. It sat and the table did not catch fire. Luminous slid across from it, knives in her eyes and mercy nowhere anyone could point. She put her hands on the wood as if to remind it that it could be a ship if it needed.
"Left," Xion prompted.
The Host turned. The person on its left was Eline, because fate is not creative when it wants a good scene. She stared into the place where eyes would be and lifted her chin a degree. The Host spoke softly and the square leaned, deliciously nosy.
"You polish your buckles because your commander thinks you will be content with shine," it said. "You will not."
Eline's shoulders didn't move. Her mouth did. "True."
"Right," Xion said gently.
The Host turned. Tilda met its blank with a rope burn callus and a mother's boredom. "Kindness," she said, daring it.
It paused—humiliation for a thing like this. "Your knots," it said finally, "are sermons."
Tilda blinked. "True and kind," she decided, and the square allowed itself a little laugh, then more of one when Tilda tied a fast loop around the table leg and the Host's chair, not binding, reminding.
Xion could feel the Gate's irritation climb like frost along a window. He took a breath he had not paid for yet and spent it. "Now," he said to the Host, "a third thing. Eat."
"I do not eat," it said, repulsed.
"You are empty," he said. "Have a plum."
"I do not—"
"Have it," Sareen said, from nowhere and everywhere, and pushed a piece of fruit that had once tasted like summer across the wood. "Or starve politely."
The Host lifted it with fingers that had never peeled anything in generosity. It put it to the place where a mouth might be.
The square held its breath.
The Host chewed.
The world didn't change.
The Gate did not open.
People exhaled with a sound you could have mistaken for laughter.
"Now you tell a story," Luminous said, cruel and correct.
"I do not have—" it began.
"Then borrow," Oren said mildly. "We do. All the time. We carry our dead in participles and leave them at the corners of sentences."
It spoke. Not long. Not well. A memory of a chair in a room where no one sat because a man had said his grief was efficient and must be handled privately. A wake where pity outnumbered names. A table with a spot no plate had ever warmed. It said, "I didn't always—" and did not finish, because finishing would be a break in policy.
"Thank you," Xion said.
"Do not thank it," Will Breaker murmured.
"I'm thanking the chair," he whispered back.
The Host stood. It did not push the chair in. Kett—the man who had sat when mocked—reached and did it without looking like a man who had always done the unthanked tasks. The Host turned its blank toward the cemetery and took one step and then another. It did not bless. It did not curse. It did not correct. It left.
The square did not cheer, because cheering is a story, and this wasn't one yet. It returned to talking. Talking was the victory.
Xion found he was shaking, a small, embarrassing tremor in the hands of a man who thinks himself immune to theatre. Luminous touched his knuckles with the back of her fingers as if checking for fever. "You invited it," she said, accusation and admiration fused.
"I set the table," he said. "You told me to."
"I suggested," she said.
"You suggested like a knife suggests an incision," he said.
She didn't smile. She looked a little like a woman being made to admit she wanted something from a world that had not previously been generous with her wants.
The Intercalary Clerk approached, chain quiet. "That," they said carefully, "was against policy."
"Write a new policy," Xion said, too tired to be diplomatic. "Call it: Guests With Teeth."
"I prefer: Chairs For Absences," the Clerk said, almost smiling and appalled at themselves for the betrayal.
"Fine," he said. "Just never: Efficiency."
"That word is how civilizations die of boredom," Oren muttered, earning his own grin from the square.
The Ledger in the tower rustled, unread, and altered three lines without being asked: Kett—owed a seat became Kett—took a seat; Null Host—owed emptiness became Null Host—ate; Maryville—owes time remained what it always would be.
The price came due at dusk, quiet and exact. Xion reached for the familiar slap of cool air on his neck as the sun slipped and found nothing there to enjoy. He had given the day his small wealth and received more days. He counted the coins in his head like a boy preserving an allowance: warmth in a mug; the clean stretch; sweet on first bite; the smell of rain on dust; the crisp of first laughter; the cool of dusk; the lullaby he had thrown to the Court and was teaching himself to replace; the scar's vanity; sleep unbroken by thunder; now the edge-light. He was being nickeled into a different man.
"Worth it?" Will Breaker asked, because lovers ask and swords sometimes get to be lovers.
"Today," he said. "Ask me tomorrow."
"I will," she said softly.
Night fell like the city had decided to close its eyes in shifts so no one had to keep watch alone. Eline released the guard ring one by one, telling each what he had done well even if she had to invent a thing to praise. Tilda coiled rope without looking and found a little boy's hand in the loops and let him pretend to help. Sareen counted the ledger and then scratched out three tallies because the square had made her soft and she would deny it until asked.
Luminous took the last walk around the tables with Xion, their shoulders almost but not quite touching because they were both cowards in expensive ways.
"You set a table," she said.
"You came," he said.
She exhaled, laughing without offering anyone else pieces of it. "I like chairs that don't match," she said. "It looks like people are allowed."
"They are," he said.
"Even me?"
"Especially you."
She flinched. "Don't make me special."
"Then," he said, "especially us," and she took it, because sometimes the plural is safer than the throne.
They stood under the tower when twelve-oh-three came. The bell's tongue behaved itself; the note went through him and around him and into the square and found tables and chairs and rope and knives and ledgers and knees and laughed and kept going. He did not anchor it. He learned when to hold and when to let.
"Grave?" Luminous asked.
"Grave," he said.
They walked the path like men and women walk to visit a stubborn relative. The gate did not creak. The stone did not change its carved name. But there was chalk—child's chalk—at the base of his grave, a little drawing of a table with six legs because the artist did not trust four yet, and eight circles like plates that were too big for the table and that made the entire thing look like it might wobble and did not.
Beside it, a scrawl in round letters:
we set it
"Who?" Luminous asked, bending.
"Maryville," Will Breaker said, pleased. "Part of it."
Xion crouched and added, with a piece of chalk that had lost its paper and its pride: we'll eat
He stood and brushed dust off his palms. He looked at his name cut in stone. He looked at the chalk table. He looked at the line that still threatened: anchor accepted. price pending. And at the newer: put plates back later. And at the latest: set a table. He wanted to ask the stone to stop giving him errands. He didn't. He took them as compliments from an aunt who would never say she loved him.
On the way out of the cemetery, the boy with soot hair sat on the wall, string in his hands, knot between his knees. He grinned. "You invited the uninvitable."
"Do not tell the Ordo," Xion said.
"I told the pigeons," the boy said gravely. "They kept it secret."
"What's that knot?" Xion asked, nodding at the string.
"Chair-knot," the boy said, and showed him: loop; bite; pull; done. "It tightens when someone leans, loosens when they stand, and never tells if someone cried while sitting."
"Teach me," Xion said.
The boy did. Xion learned. He mis-tucked and corrected. He smiled without crispness and called it perfect for Ivo's sake even though Ivo was asleep somewhere with sticky hands and an earned tired.
"Tomorrow," Luminous said as they walked back toward a square already dismantling itself kindly. "We smudge the Ledger again."
"Tomorrow," he agreed. "We tie chair-knots where benches are vain. We teach Kett how to scold without making it hobby. We steal a page we don't need to because it will look like we did. We pay three minutes with three truths."
"And the Gate?"
"It yawns," he said. "We feed it chairs."
She laughed so honestly it startled him as much as any Hound.
"You're—" she began, searching for a word that would neither pin him nor flatter her.
"Petty," he supplied.
"Relentless," she corrected.
He bowed, small, to the silliness of their survival. "Relentless is a petty repeated often."
She bumped his shoulder. "Goodnight, hinge."
He almost said something with the shape of care. He didn't. He went home and left the window open the exact width a string could slip through if a city wanted to pass him a note. He slept, and when the storm nudged him awake he counted seconds like a child learning multiplication, hummed a lullaby he hadn't paid for, and felt the new absence—the cool of dusk—like a promise to find another way to enjoy evening.
In the seam behind maps, the Calendar Court penned a policy draft and argued footnotes; the Sundial insisted on a clause for chairs at wakes; the Scribe added a margin note: The human has a table. account for this. The Sexton, tired of being last, closed the book and went to sit somewhere no one had invited him and discovered to his irritation that the chair held.
The Beast Gate licked its lips and found less panic on its tongue than it preferred. It breathed again, louder. The city answered with cutlery.
In Maryville proper, a woman who had once refused to tell a story told one to a child; a guard whose buckles shone slept with clean anger instead of loud shame; a laundress dreamed knots untying themselves under weight without breaking; a vendor wrote one lie in her ledger and scratched it out and called it practice; a man named Kett lay on his back and stared at a ceiling he had hated and forgave it one beam at a time.
And Xion, who was paying down a debt in coins too small to brag about, woke before dawn because he had an appointment with rope and a table and the terrible habit of making tomorrow possible.