The village had boiled its day into night: lanterns on door lintels, oil spilling steady in clay mouths; strings of marigolds sagging between windows; a square swept clean until it gleamed like a promise. A boy tried to balance a bamboo pole on his chin and almost didn't break his nose. An auntie clapped and told him he would live and therefore should marry soon.
"Perfect," Mira said. "Chaos."
A drummer tapped a pattern on a low madal, not the Ash-walkers' summoning, but the other beat—the one made by hands that sweat because they're shy, not because they're wrong. Two girls in scarves threaded with mirrors practiced steps, laughter rearranging the mistakes into style.
Sagar peeled his Guards to the edges like white moths that knew how not to singe themselves. Ketu looked at a line of bunting with an expression that admitted bunting was not strictly necessary for roadkeeping and that bunting was delightful anyway. Gita nodded to an elder as if they had both cleaned the same temple steps in different years.
Yeshe found a stool at the square's edge and sat with her cane across her knees. Arya stood beside her and let the village touch him with its noise. The storm under his ribs sighed. Small circles sat in his breath, turning like prayer wheels, content to spin on soup and gossip.
A man with a painted Bhairav mask strutted into the square and scowled at a child until the child remembered to giggle. A woman in a peacock-green shawl hit a cymbal with unnecessary force and then apologized formally to nobody. The air smelled of rice beer and fried dough and the kind of smoke you forgive.
The headman—thin, serious, wearing a kurta whose collar had been ironed by someone who loved order—approached with palms together. "Guests," he said, "eat first, talk later."
"Another religion I can support," Mira said, accepting a leaf plate.
They ate. Arya's palm stopped itching in the pleasant way it does when a brain finally believes dinner is not theoretical. He watched the prayer flags shiver on their line and felt how good it was to watch something shiver and not call it danger.
The flute changed key.
Not much. A half-step down, like a joke told just a little too slow. Arya's head turned before he knew why. The player was a boy with cheeks too hollow for his age, eyes too old for his cheeks. His fingers moved cleanly over holes. The song wound around the square and under benches and into the wayhouse of everyone's ribs.
Yeshe's cane touched Arya's boot: notice.
He listened beyond melody. Under the notes, a thread. Not Ash-walker ash-breath, not seam-silence. Invitation. Polite. Patient. Hungry the way a house is hungry at mealtime: not malice—expectation.
Ketu had heard it too. He drifted behind the flute boy like a cat behind a bird and watched the boy's breath, not his fingers. Steady. Too steady.
"Not wind," he murmured near Arya's shoulder. "The flute is breathing the boy."
"How do we ignore a song?" Mira said. "People aren't built for that."
"We don't," Yeshe said. "We answer it with a smaller song."
Gita pulled a tiny bell from her bag—the sort of hand-bell women ring when lamps are lit and names are recited—and set it in Arya's palm. "Breathe your circles into this," she said. "Then ring it like a bad singer rings truth—off-key, too loud, with love."
"I can do two of those," Arya said.
"Do all three," Gita said.
He breathed into the little bell—felt its metal remember being ore, then fire, then someone's work. He set his no fear, no pride, no harm to mine, no plea, no village as price, no ally mistaken for obstacle, no curiosity-theater along the inside lip like lines of grease where sound would pick them up.
The flute's melody curled around them like cooking smoke. A child started to hum, then another. The prayer flags trembled as if trying to sing without being caught.
Arya rang the bell.
It was not beautiful. It was human. The note wobbled where his breath wobbled and steadied where his shoulders remembered habit. The vibration curled out from his palm across the square and under the benches and into ribs. It didn't block the flute. It reminded the air of an older job: carry breath, not steal it.
The flute's thread faltered—half a heartbeat, a single misstep that made a dancer laugh and find her proper foot. The boy's eyes flickered—the first thing about him that felt his age.
The headman noticed nothing and everything. He clapped time too fast; the drummer chose to forgive him, which is the only way clapping ever works.
The flute insisted. It slid around Arya's bell note and tried to sweeten it with harmony that sounded like sugar poured over a roof. The bell refused to be harmonized. It rang like a spoon against a cooking pot and made the square grin.
Mira threw her head back and laughed on purpose into the bell's wobble, and laughter is a tuning fork if you let it be. People picked it up like rice scattered in a courtyard. The flute tightened—not angry, exactly, but disappointed that the room had decided to be a room and not a hallway.
"Again," Gita said.
Arya rang the bell again, then handed it to the headman, who rang it twice, then to a child who rang it six times on accident, which is ceremony.
The boy with the flute choked on a note. His fingers slipped. The thread snapped like an old hair. For an instant his face was all child and no instrument. He blinked and stopped playing. The square's noise rushed back into its proper skin.
From the edge of the houses, three Ash-walkers watched—masks on, polite, hands stained. Not stepping in. Evaluating curriculum.
Lhakpa moved to put his body between masks and boy, trident low. "For the record," he told nobody, "we don't grade that way."
The boy gasped like someone had cut a cord that had been helping him drown. He swayed; Arya was already there, catching elbow, lowering flute, saying the single soft word that replaces whole languages: "Hey."
The boy focused on him slowly. "It kept breathing," he said, voice thready with shame and relief. "I couldn't stop."
"I know," Arya said. "I brought a bell to a flute fight."
The Ash-walkers did not advance. The front mask inclined, gracious as a teacher who sees a student cheat in the correct direction. "Little bearer," it called, gentle, "we approve of small music. It makes such tidy notes to bind."
"Class dismissed," Mira called back. "Go grade a tree."
The drum did not sound. The seam did not open. The masks drifted away with the shamelessness of fog deciding to be weather elsewhere.
Ketu took the flute from the boy and blew the most offensive, flat note Arya had ever endured. Children screamed with delight. The boy laughed like he'd never met his own breath before. Ketu handed the flute back. "Now it remembers your lips," he said. "Keep it that way."
Sagar exhaled in a key that apologized to nothing and no one. He looked at Arya. "Small circles," he said.
"Small songs," Arya said.
Gita rang the bell once more, brief and matter-of-fact, like a cook making sure a lid is seated.
Night folded tighter around the village. Stars stitched themselves into a roof that had never leaked. The festival kept being a festival. When a seam is denied a stage, it scowls and looks for another show.
On the ridge beyond the last house, something long and patient watched and did not move. It did not belong to ash or seam. It belonged to hunger that wore boots and read maps.
"Yes," Yeshe said after a while, to a question nobody had asked aloud. "Tomorrow we pay a different toll."