Thom believed in hunger the way sailors believe in wind: as a force that must be courted, joked with, praised, and disciplined. The Feast of Many Mouths overflowed by sunset—tables dressed in plain linen, cutlery mismatched but polished, bowls piling into a sculpture of intention. The tavern's beams held garlands of dried herbs and little mirror-charms Mirelle had hung to catch laughter and reflect it back. Music came in from the door and built itself like a scaffolding over the smell of onion, anise, roasted root, and sourdough.
Raviel arrived with a ledger of recipes and restraint. Temperance was not a dour virtue here; Raviel's sleeves were rolled, his hair tied with a sky-blue ribbon, his hands quick. He moved through the kitchen balancing measures—salt added, sweetness pared, spice lifted—to make abundance sing instead of drown. He and Thom were an odd duet: Thom's laughter punctuated Raviel's careful notes; Raviel's raised eyebrow moderated Thom's urge to heap plates high enough to make people cry.
Aurelia stood at the tavern's threshold with a plate in her hands, and her understanding of ritual altered. In the Vault, rites had been precise, correct, and often cold; here, ritual was the way people showed each other they belonged. Thom set a bowl in her hands.
"This one is memory-stew," he said, the words like a story he had told gently a hundred times without dulling. "We cook a thing we all know—carrot, bone stock, onion—and someone brings a memory to the table and we pass it around like it is also bread."
"And what if they bring pain?" Aurelia asked.
"We salt it," Thom said. "We tell the ache it is permitted to be here. Sometimes we sing."
Aurelia looked at the bowl and felt the ash-sigil tap a rhythm against her bones as if to say: yes, this is law, too.
The first course came dressed in stories. A woman at the center table lifted a small carved bird and said she had found it in a box in a house where she had hidden when she was five; the bird had lived in her mind ever since, an emblem of escape and return. Raviel wrote the story in a thin book that smelled of thyme and ink. Thom set a piece of bread by the bird. Aedara lit a lamp and said the bird's story was now protected by a vow—no one could trade it without consent.
The second course threatened to tip abundance into harm. A supplier had sent a crate of sweets—candied slices of fruit lacquered with a glaze that caught the light too bright. Mirelle's eyes narrowed. "Memory-laced," she said under her breath, and Thom's hand froze as it reached for the tongs. Memory-laced foods were the glamorous rot of the Gutter: eat them and taste a borrowed joy; wake feeling owned.
Raviel turned the tongs back into the crate with a motion that looked like sorrow disguised as economy. "Not tonight," he said, and Thom nodded. The crate was sealed and marked with a red line. Aurelia watched the exchange, recognizing how a feast can turn to harm if indulgence becomes the measure. Temperance's ritual was not abstinence; it was choosing moderation actively in public so the choice multiplies.
After the third course—a stew made from small contributions a dozen families had tithing out of their cupboards—Raviel rang a small bell. The room's music softened. "Tonight," Raviel said, "we add the fast."
Aurelia felt people shift—some confused, some curious, some wary. Thom lifted his glass and grinned. "Not forever," he assured them. "Just a breath between courses, long enough to remember what we have and long enough to hold what we gave."
The fast was simple and therefore profound. No one ate for seven minutes. Children fidgeted and then learned stillness in little shared glances snapped like ribbons between them. Old men cleared their throats and told small stories to fill the space. A woman cried quietly, something breaking and repairing in her chest as the room held her without rush. Aurelia closed her eyes and let the Watchful Hour she had learned with Calma stretch its sand across the room, sanctifying the pause into a rite.
When the bell rang again, the feast resumed as if a wound had been rinsed and bandaged. Thom brought a tray of roasted roots and set it down like gratitude. Mirelle walked the perimeter, stealing tiny bites and passing tiny truths—salted compliments, information about a cousin newly employed, a tip about a corner where enforcers had begun to loiter. Vashara's runner pinned a paper to the tavern wall with coral ink: open-hand accounts for the week, commons funds in and out, repair lines for broken chairs, paid meals for senior neighbors, the ledger of gratitude that Thalen had convinced her to keep public.
Aurelia ate and listened. Food carried texture and inflection—the onions sweet in a way that tasted like Thom's laughing sorrow, the broth seasoned like Raviel's discipline. The room's light shifted as vow lamps brightened at moments of consent: a hand offered and accepted to carry dishes, a pledge made to walk neighbors home. Aurelia found that the lamp light made her feel held rather than watched; it gave the night shape like a net woven from willingness.
Near the end, Seraphine's salon slipped into the tavern through the back door like a hush. She wore silk the color of a rose just before it goes brown, the beauty tight and honest about its own decay. Aedara followed in ivory, plain and luminous, vow lights carried as if she held fragile birds cupped. They set a small table near the bar and invited anyone who needed to speak a desire to do so and have it heard without harm.
Aurelia watched a man approach with his hat in his hands, eyes skittering. He confessed, under vow light, that he wanted to leave the city and feared he would never be brave enough; he asked if wanting could be a sin. Seraphine's smile was soft. "Desire is not a sin," she said. "It is a language. What you do with it is grammar." Aedara's lamp flared, and the room murmured like a choir that has learned it can carry truth without chorus masters.
After midnight, Thom dimmed the lamps and let memory be the final course. People stood one by one and returned traded stories to their owners: a boy gave back a thrill he had borrowed from his father's tale of stealing an apple; a girl handed her grandmother the taste of a first kiss stolen from an aunt's jar; a woman reclaimed a grief she had loaned to a friend for practice. The Memory Night was both ridiculous and profound. Aurelia cried once, quietly, when an old man reclaimed the memory of holding his dead brother's hand on a cold floor and smiled as if the recollection had been cleaned.
She went outside for breath and found the braid-stone brighter, the glow fuller around the edges like a vessel topped off with careful hands. The city smelled less of iron and more of baked bread. Kade leaned on a post, arms folded, listening to the distance. He tipped his chin at the stone.
"Feast and fast," he said. "A pair that works."
"They caught the sweets," Aurelia said, wiping her face with the back of her wrist and staring at the place where the crate had been sealed. "Do people eat memory often?"
"People without hope eat whatever comforts," Kade said. "We take the comfort without letting it steal what's left."
Aurelia nodded, feeling the ash-sigil cool against her collarbone in the night air. She had sung law like a hymn once; now she had helped ring a little bell that meant a pause that might keep greed from dressing itself as generosity. It was small. And it was the size of a world.
They walked home under vow lamps that glowed brighter where consent had been honored, dimmer where coercion had been avoided by luck. The lamps formed a constellation that showed a city's choices, and Aurelia felt the urge to chart them like stars. In the morning, there would be markets again, writs, a tribunal, and the quieter work of Gratitude and Envy rebalancing the stories that put weight on a neighborhood's ribs.
She touched the old crown through the pocket of Kade's shirt and nearly laughed at herself. It had been designed to shine under Court light; here it would look gaudy and no one would care except to make a joke and hand it back. Her authority would never be metal again.
It would be bread, and pause, and a lamp lit because two people had said yes at the same time.