Maelin and Daran got Kaelen off the floor and over to the long bench by the kitchen hearth because the bench knew him and would lend him its shape. His knees wobbled like bad stools. He obeyed without grace and sat without noticing his own weight. Maelin pressed a rag into his hands and then remembered herself and pressed it to his face instead; it came away wet with river, sweat, and more salt than any soup should allow. Daran crossed to the door and shut it softly, as if gentleness could prevent whatever was outside from asking to be let in.
"Water," Maelin said, already pouring. She added a little honey because she believed in lying to panic and telling it the world was sweet. "Breathe first. Then words."
Kaelen tried, and air stubbed its toe at the back of his throat. He folded, elbows on his knees, the rag a small shipwreck in his fists. He had not planned to cry, and here he was, an ocean with no permission. He despised the noise he was making and kept making it anyway because his body didn't accept decisions from pride in emergencies.
His father knelt beside him, all the clatter of watch and father set aside. He positioned himself slightly to Kaelen's left, never in a doorway; always where a door could be, if something needed to pass through.
"All right, son," he said in the tone he used when a mule had decided to take philosophical positions. "We will do this like we do everything: one thing at a time. Hands steady."
Kaelen shook his head because steady belonged to other boys.
"Name five things you can see," Daran said.
"The rag," Kaelen heard himself say, somewhere between sob and hiccup.
"Good," Daran said, and pointed with his eyes, not his finger. "What else."
"Your boots," Kaelen got out. "The... the pot. The peel-" His mother's bread peel hung on its peg like a flag. "The spoon."
"The spoon is an honest friend," Maelin said. She put the cup to his lips, tilting only enough to wet, not drown. "Two things you can hear."
Kaelen strained and forced his ears to return from the white. "Someone... the lamplighter, two lanes over. He sings when he thinks no one hears." Another breath. "The goose next door being convinced of something ridiculous."
"One thing you can smell that isn't fear."
"Onion," Kaelen said, absurdly grateful to onion for existing. "And... and honey."
"Good," Daran said. "You're here, then."
Kaelen's sobbing calmed to aftershocks. The rag went to his eyes and stayed. When he pulled it down, his face felt skinned and new. Maelin's thumb swept the last salt from his cheek with a tenderness that could slice rope. "There we are," she said. "No one has bled to death from crying in this kitchen. We would be famous if it were possible."
"I-" He tried. The words were stones stuck in a sluice; once dislodged they might flood and break everything. He found a smaller stone to move. "It came again," he said to the rag, because the rag knew how to keep secrets. "The... the whiteness."
Daran and Maelin exchanged a look with no panic. That was their work: to make their son feel that fear was welcome at their table and panic had to wait on the stoop.
"Tell it simple," Daran said. "We'll wait for the clever version."
Kaelen could not bring the willow into the room, or the heron, or Rowan and the others and their careful witness. He would have to bring the afterward. "It... the path went thin," he said. "Like parchment. The world... I don't know how to say it. It faded more politely than last time. Not a snap. A... taking away. And I was inside it again."
Maelin's hand tightened on the cup so little that only the cup noticed. "Inside what?" she asked gently.
"The blank," he whispered. "The nothing. The... page. Everything was white without light. No sound. I could walk, but it was like walking on... cloth stretched too tight. And ahead there was a... bruise." He shut his eyes because his mouth had to keep talking. "Black. Not shadow. Pulsing. It... wasn't alive. That was the worst part. It did not care. It wanted to be the only thing that got to be anything. And then-" He gulped. "A window appeared. Not a window. A rectangle, like the door on the oven if the door could be air. Symbols on it. Not letters. Lines trying to be words. They stacked and unstacked. I didn't... I didn't understand any. And I think the black... spoke. Not to me. Over me."
He expected disbelief. He got Maelin moving like weather: swift, warm, practical. She set the cup down with the authority of someone returning a crown to its box. She knelt by the bench and took his splintered hands into hers with the skill of a baker who has washed many cuts in cold water before bread.
"Let me see," she said, and turned his palms up. "Splinters first. Stories after."
Daran fetched the little tin from the shelf that held a needle, tweezers, and salve. He prepared them on the table like he was laying out a map to a quiet day. He lit a stub of tallow and held the needle in the small flame just long enough to tell it the world isn't filthy.
"All right," he said, settling across from Kaelen and taking the first hand Maelin surrendered to his keeping. "Look at your mother. Count her freckles. Every time I pluck one, make a tally."
Maelin snorted. "I have none."
"You have thousands," Daran said without looking up. "They move at night. Hold still." He teased the first splinter free. Kaelen winced; the pain was honest, and he was grateful for it. The needle found the second. The tweezers spoke to the wood in a tiny language of pressure and release and success.
"You said it spoke," Maelin prompted after they'd rescued four slivers and made a pile of things that had no right to be in boys. "Over you?"
"I don't have a word," Kaelen said. "I thought-, no. That's not right. I felt... shapes of thoughts. Like when Sister Anwen reads scripture, and you don't know the old words but you know what she means by the way she says them. But worse. Like someone tried to talk by sending numbers at my head."
Daran's mouth thinned, not at the boy, at the story. "Did it touch you?"
"A window- " Kaelen closed his eyes and saw it again, the pane that refused to decide what it was. "It followed me. Always a hand's reach away. I tried to bat it away. It didn't-, my arm went through, and cold-" He swallowed. "Like my skin forgot something and then remembered. No mark." He turned his forearm to show it. The skin was ordinary. "I ran. The ground didn't know where to be. But then... there was hedge. And a root. And the world came back."
Maelin dabbed salve and wrapped a thin strip of linen around the knuckle that had done the brave and foolish work of catching reality on a root. "Did anyone see you," she asked softly. "In the white?"
Kaelen shook his head. "No one is there. It does not have room for people."
"Did you see anyone before," Daran asked. Guards ask in plural; it's their way of exorcising fear with possibility. "At the river, on your way. Any trouble. Any sign."
Kaelen thought of Rowan stepping out of shade, of Seraine's quiet verdict, 'That's not magic', that had landed in him like a lodestone. He did not want to bring them into this kitchen yet. He knew Daran respected Rowan; he also knew what Daran would do with information: build a fence, then build a gate, then stand in it.
"Travelers," he said, honest without being helpful. "Nothing about them was wrong."
"But something about the world was," Maelin concluded, and her voice was stern with reality, not with Kaelen. "All right. We have a plan."
"We do," Daran agreed, catching her look and folding himself into it like a soldier into a command he's grateful to be given. "Rule the first: no practicing alone."
Kaelen opened his mouth to argue: But the willow is mine. He closed it because he had run into the house with death at his heels and had thrown himself at the life his parents had built; he did not have the right to ask for more freedom in the same breath. "All right."
"Rule the second," Daran said, "if the path goes thin, you turn back. You do not test it. You do not test yourself. You turn. If you cannot turn, you sit. If you cannot sit, you call me with your feet."
Kaelen almost asked how to call someone with feet. He heard it: run. "All right."
"Third," Maelin said, tying a neat knot. "You will tell Sister Anwen. Not today. Not if your mouth refuses. But soon. She is the temple's door for questions bigger than rooms. If there is a thing in our city that needs measuring with a long quiet, she keeps the tape."
Kaelen's stomach flipped and righted. "She'll make me-" He didn't know. Tell. Be good. Be ordinary.
"She will make you sit," Maelin said. "Between sitting and panic, I choose sitting."
"She will not tell the square," Daran added. "She has not told the square where the good pears are for three years and everyone asks her daily."
That cunning point of truth tugged a smile out of Kaelen that had been hiding behind his ears. "They aren't ours," he said on reflex, because you defend your mother's honor even in jokes.
"They are in your mother's hands," Daran said. "Which is where most good things are, when they are in this house." He tipped the last tiny sliver into the pile on the table and Maelin swept them away into the small box where she kept hazards to bake into the pie of later disposal.
"There," Maelin said. "Hands. Let me see them." He showed her. She turned them over like loaves ascertaining whether their bottoms were singing. "They look like work," she said, which was the highest praise she had. "You'll keep them clean. We'll keep them busy."
He hadn't realized until that moment that part of his terror had been about his hands: that they had carried the wrong-fire and therefore might be contaminated, traitors, no longer trustworthy for bread or spokes. He flexed and felt the hum curl like a cat that intends to be good in the room where guests are. It tried to be small and quiet. It failed because it was new and had not learned how to be either.
Daran saw something move behind Kaelen's eyes and did not ask what. "I'd like to know what you saw," he said instead, and put the pressure of his attention on the grammar, not the gods. "More of it. When you can bear telling. Use the short words. If you don't have any, make them. We can always bake a better sentence later."
Kaelen nodded because nodding was more possible than speaking. He had given them a shape; it wasn't the shape of a door, but it was enough to keep the cold rectangle from being the only thing in the room with edges.
His mother stood. "We will rescue this evening from whatever thinks it owns it," she announced. "Kaelen, we will do the easy work: cut and stir. Daran will fetch wood because wood likes to be fetched by men who pretend they are above wood. Then we will eat, and we will allow ourselves to have a night. In the morning, you can go to Bren's, if you wish, and do the things that remind your body it is your body."
They set about the ordinary tasks that sometimes defeat extraordinary dread. Daran went to the yard. He returned with kindling and the gait of a man who had tested the sky and asked it to wait. Kaelen lit the small fire in the hearth and did not flinch when flame was ordinary in a world that had recently refused to allow the name to be used correctly. He peeled carrots, stacks of coins that would buy a good soup. He sliced onion in the thickness Maelin called honest. He washed his hands and found they did not throb. He stirred when asked to stir. He set bowls out when his mother's look told him to set bowls out.
Daran laid his palm briefly on the doorframe the way he had always done, as if confirming that doors are still the thing that stands between the house and whatever else exists, and returned to his chair.
"Tell me the part with the window," he said then, calm as bread rising. "Tell me what it didn't do."
Kaelen considered. "It didn't show me me," he said, surprised by the baldness of the fact. "Not like glass. It didn't make a picture. It didn't... have patience. It kept trying to say things and making them disappear when they weren't good enough. It didn't... choose me. It put itself in front of where I was going. It wanted to be the only thing between me and forward. It didn't want to be touched. But it didn't hurt me, either. It felt like forgetting, and then remembering wrong."
Daran's brow furrowed, not protective, analytical. "Grammar of a trap," he mused. "Not a knife, a net. Not to cut, to path." He shook his head slightly, as if telling himself he was not a philosopher but could try on the cape for a breath. "If it comes again, we make it deal with me. I am better at being bored than you are."
"True," Maelin said. She set the ladle down, took Kaelen's chin lightly, and turned his face to hers so he would have to let her look at him. Mothers do this to check whether a child is a story or a body in front of them. "You were brave," she said. "Brave is not the same as clever. You will be both, but you must practice. Tomorrow, you take someone when you go anywhere you think might refuse to stay put. Not because I doubt your legs. Because we move better when love counts our steps."
Kaelen swallowed and found gratitude sharp and easy. "I'll take Tamsin," he said, and winced because Tamsin would test him and that was both fair and unbearable. "Or Garrin. Or-" He stopped before Sister Anwen's name, because he wasn't ready for gentle and relentless at once.
"Good choices," Daran said, like a sergeant marking down recruits. "And if you're with Bren, tell him you are to be given tasks with names."
They ate. The bread had the decency to be perfect. The stew tasted of things that had decided to become themselves with heat: onion, carrot, a scrap of meat so tender it didn't recall being difficult. Maelin watched Kaelen until she saw his face remember to be pleased and then stopped watching, because love has manners.
After bowls were stacked and rinsed, his father fetched the small box of pretext, a deck of well-used cards, a couple of peg puzzles that had fooled him as a boy and continued to insult him cheerfully, a carved game where stones marched across a grid and tried to corner one another.
He set them on the table like shields. "We could be beaten by children at any of these," he said, inviting ease.
They were, briefly, beaten by Maelin at two. Kaelen let himself lose with joy. He laughed once, short, when Daran failed to notice an obvious trap, and the laugh did not feel like a stranger. It felt like a small citizen of his mouth returning home after it had fled the whiteness.
When the lamplighter really did pass, singing a snatch of the song he claimed he wasn't singing, Daran rose to light their little lantern even though the hearth was audience enough. He tapped the wick with his thumb to settle it. The flame caught politely. Kaelen watched, he could not help it, for any sign that the world would edit itself in front of him. It did not. It burned like fire: gold, steady, content to be seen and heard.
Night turned a corner toward them. The square outside lost some of its clatter and borrowed the softer noise of dishes being put away and people forgiving one another for the day.
"I might sleep downstairs," Kaelen said at last, embarrassed to be a child in a boy's body and too tired to hide it.
"You might," Maelin said, as if she had already laid out a blanket where his old fear had slept when he was small and storms had pretended to have opinions about roofs.
Daran unfolded a pallet with the competence of a man who had learned to make comfort quickly in bad places and now enjoyed applying the skills in good ones.
Kaelen stretched out on the floor near the hearth where heat made a friendly draft. The hum in his hands shifted under the blankets like a beast finding a position that did not need claws. He watched the ceiling's shadows turn slow shapes and decided to decide later whether he would tell Sister Anwen tomorrow or next day. He would certainly tell Tamsin something that was not a lie and not the whole truth; she would consider that a challenge and turn it into a game and, often, games saved boys.
Daran sat nearby threading a small piece of twine through a split wooden button as if repairing a coat's thought. Maelin hummed under her breath, the kind of tune that helps yeast remember its responsibilities. The house did the thing houses do when they know a thing has chased one of their own to the door: it lifted its shoulders and made itself heavier around him, as if to say, in plank and peg and nail, 'we will be a wall now.'
Kaelen let his eyes shut. Behind them there was nothing, and then there was willow, and then he steered his mind away like a boat avoiding a weir. He thought of the bench in Bren's, of the gauge making one line straight, of the mallet tapping the spoke persuasive, of his mother's spoon choosing the right bowl's edge to rest against. He thought of his father saying, 'You are a bridge,' and pretended for one minute that bridges are not things enemies test first.
He did not sleep easily. But when sleep did come, it did not bring rectangles. It brought a foolish dream in which he had to carry a loaf across the bridge and the loaf grew heavier each step because the city kept placing its hope on it; he laughed at the dream for being on-the-nose even while he staggered, and woke briefly to find he had laughed out loud and Daran had smiled in the dark, unoffended by the honesty of a boy's brain.
"It's all right," Daran murmured from his chair, and Kaelen did not know whether he meant the dream, the day, or the part of the world that had decided it was allowed to become a page. "We're here."
Kaelen slept again, he would survive this evening. He had. Tomorrow would come, and he would show up for it with his plain jobs and his complicated palms and see which of them obeyed first.
Kaelen woke on the pallet by the hearth with the feeling that someone had swapped his bones for damp kindling in the night. Not pain, fatigue, the honest tax after a day when a boy's body and courage had run ahead of each other and then had to walk home carrying one another's shoes. The smell in the kitchen said his mother had risen before light and taught flour the difference between hope and dough. His father snored in the chair where he lost on purpose at peg puzzles. Outside, the lane clicked to itself like a loom preparing an argument.
He lay for a few breaths and examined his insides like he would the underside of a bench: testing for sound boards, looking for splinters pride had left. The memory of the white hovered, less near than last night, but rude enough to keep a corner of the room for itself. When he lifted his palms, the hum nestled there like a cat who had agreed to be alive another day out of curiosity. He flexed and the hum didn't sing back for attention; it acknowledged, then tucked itself down. That was the best he could ask this morning.
"Alive," Maelin observed from the stove without looking, the way sunrise observes windows. "Stand slowly; your head owes you honesty."
Kaelen obeyed and found that standing was exactly as hard as getting up ought to be. He washed his face at the basin and let the cold water declare him a citizen of the morning.
Daran stirred and said, "We saved the world while you slept," so Maelin threw him a roll to punish hubris. He caught it by accident and pretended he had planned it.
"It's a rest day," Maelin said, which in Stonebridge meant the square would try to outdo itself and people would invent chores named strolling and gossip. "The market will pretend to be a festival without the manners. If you go, don't purchase a philosophy without bringing it home for me to inspect. Secondhand ideas carry moths."
"I'll bring pears," Kaelen said, because some promises you make to yourself just to see if you can keep them.
He did the very small, very honest tasks a house requires before it lets you go. He swept the stoop in long strokes until grit behaved. He oiled a squeaking hinge because squeaks invite complaint. He lifted the water bucket and found that his arms remembered whom they served. He returned Daran's folded blanket to its shelf and laid the peg puzzle back in its box because even games deserve to be treated like work after they've done some.
Maelin pushed a heel of bread at him and he ate because refusing would be treachery. Daran nodded at the door with the solemnity of a guard granting a pass. "I have the afternoon watch," he said. "If you see me before that, I am someone else and you should ignore him."
Kaelen pulled on his cloak against a breeze that had decided to be accurate about the date, and stepped out into a day that already knew what it wanted to be. Rest days made Stonebridge kinder and worse. Kinder, because men let tools nap without feeling judged, and worse, because idleness is a magnet that pulls opinions out of pockets. Children ran ahead of their guardians across the square with that infuriating belief that space belongs to them unless proved otherwise. Dogs made treaties with one another at the fountain and then broke them in the name of sausage. The hawk in the fountain stared at its stone fish and asserted the superiority of patience over intelligence.
The hum in his palms rose once in small greeting to the day and then went quiet, as if recognizing that markets are already a kind of magic. He let his feet carry him toward the square at a pace that could be called strolling if someone were generous and watching.
He turned the corner of the lane and the sound struck him, not loud at first, but organized in a way most noises aren't. Drums, yes, low and insistent; and beneath them a drone that wasn't pipe or string, a held tone, a hum so broad it almost hid in the air the way darkness hides under the bed at noon. People had gathered the way wheat gathers around an old stone in a field: circular, with a grudging curiosity that pretends it's skepticism. A ring of bystanders thickened two and three deep, faces up like sunflowers.
Kaelen might have stopped at the rim and peered over safer shoulders like a polite citizen. His feet stepped forward before he could argue. The hum in him did not recognize itself in the drone, the two were cousins who'd disagreed at a family dinner years ago, but they nodded.
The dancers at the center wore clothes that weren't clothes until they moved. At rest, they were lengths of undyed cloth draped simply; over that, bands and sashes and strips of fabric patterned in small, broken weaves, diamond interrupted, chevron with the chevs pulled loose, borders that ran and then stopped and then started again one thread to the left. The ends were knotted and then unraveled and then knotted again, tassels left half-tied on purpose. Indigo had kissed some bits, ash others, the palette of people who borrow from rivers and fire but refuse to be too proud of either. Their sleeves were slit and reknotted so that you could see their forearms when their hands rose, the way a loom lets you see its teeth. Some wore half-masks across the eyes, plain but mirrored, reflecting back the citizens' faces in a smear that made words die in throats. Bells? No, small wooden beads that clicked softly from hems and cuffs when steps crossed, a sound like seeds in a gourd.
There were six of them, if counting even matters when dances move. Two beat frame drums with felted mallets, hands bouncing with the patience of rain. One cranked a hurdy-gurdy's wheel, coaxing out that held drone, the hum that twined under everything and instructed feet to decide. Two danced in counterpoint: cross-step, backstep, twist, pause, and then repeat a little sequence exactly, as if someone had dragged their bodies backward a heartbeat and then let them go again. The sixth knelt at the circle's edge and tied ribbon bands around the wrists of people who asked, lips moving, whispering something low to each as the ribbon cinched.
"Faith of the Fractured Loom," a woman near Kaelen muttered, half caustic, half gleeful, as people get when presented with an exotic nonsense that will give the afternoon something to chew. "Back again with their knots and sighing."
"Frayed Looms," said a baker's boy, proud of a new insult. "They'll tell us our blankets are sinful unless we let them cut the warp."
"They want to tax the weft," a man opined, because men will invent taxes to make an argument interesting.
A watchman Kaelen didn't know well stood with arms folded, measuring disruption against ordinance and finding the disruption just shy enough of loud to be legal. Sister Anwen was not there; or she was, and she was better at anonymity than the rest of them deserved.
Kaelen took two more steps into the crowd. The hum in his palms flexed, not hungry, alert. The dancers' hum was lower, spread over the square like oil. It made his skin feel taller. He wanted, all at once, badly, to be holding Bren's gauge and drawing a line straight while the world wriggled around him.
He was still hovering at indecision when Tamsin slalomed down the lane like a circus that had decided to come to him personally. Her grin made a sound. She had already braided her hair into the kind of braid that fabric thinks is frivolous and physics grudgingly applauds.
"There you are," she said, linking arms with him at once as if he might flee and she would prevent it for his own good. "Come on, the square is auditioning for a poem and I intend to humiliate it by being better."
"Tamsin," Kaelen began, which is the phrase boys use when they intend to pretend they have brakes.
"Dance," Tamsin said, and pulled him. It wasn't coercion. It was gravity with a human face. She threaded, with him attached, between respectable elbows and over the ankles of three children and into the first ring of the circle where the watchers oscillate between mockery and temptation.
"I don't-" Kaelen tried again.
"Exactly," she said. "No one does. That's their little religion, I think, dancing like you mean it when you know you don't know how. It's charming. It's almost like living."
A boy in a half-mask with a broken ladder woven into his sash stepped forward and offered them space with a tilt of chin. Tamsin tilted her chin back. The drum spoke four soft syllables into the dirt. The drone bent a shade. The dancers' feet drew a small square, then unmade it, then drew a triangle as if arguing with shapes, and everyone laughed because adults will always laugh when ritual resembles children's games.
Tamsin followed. Kaelen, shamefully, followed Tamsin. She mirrored the cross-step, then took too big a backstep and turned it into a flourish, which the crowd appreciated. Kaelen kept his feet under him as if he were carrying a tray in Maelin's kitchen and there were boiled potatoes aboard now petitioning God for gravity. His hands stayed at his sides. The hum in them leaned toward the drone and then looked at him to ask permission. He didn't grant or refuse; he tried to be a decent country for two citizens who were poor at sharing.
"Look at their hems," Tamsin whispered as if conspiring with cloth. "They've left the threads open. On purpose!"
"I can see that," Kaelen said, unable not to sound like a boy overwhelmed by an arithmetic he couldn't count to yet.
"They're saying something with it," Tamsin declared, spinning once, practicing the art of not overbalancing in public. "Can't you hear the sentence?"
The sentence was a hum and four drums of three notes each in unruly cycles. It was this: 'break, tie, break, move, return, break, laugh, tie.' Kaelen's body listened without consent. He didn't want to like it. He liked it because it felt like returning to something he hadn't known he'd lost. He even smiled, briefly, and hated the relief that accompanied it.
A woman in a mirrored half-mask came close, not touching, that would have earned a lecture from four different kinds of Stonebridge's manners, and danced a small circle around Kaelen and Tamsin, investigating with her feet. Up close, Kaelen could see that the mirror over her eyes had been polished so carefully it made his face into an argument he could not win. Her shawl was woven with a pattern that had decided to stop halfway and wait for someone to care enough to finish it. She smelled faintly of clean linen and dust. When she crossed in front of him again, she slowed, as if presented with a word she had read once and wasn't sure she had liked. Her head bent the smallest degree.
"Stitch-witches," someone jeered from behind Kaelen, eager to prove he was not participating. "Go fix your own bedsheets."
The percussion didn't falter. The drone went on being itself. The dancer's lips parted as she passed Kaelen the next time around and a whisper crawled out like a thread being pulled from a seam.
"Child of the Unwoven Thread."
It was no louder than breath. It found him anyway. The words hung in his chest for one beat before they made meaning, and in that beat his hands went cold as if the air had invented a draft just for him. The phrase had the shape of religion without the comfort.
Tamsin didn't hear; she was busy kicking a heel at a perfect angle to make an old woman laugh and clap. Kaelen heard with all of him. His palms flared with a small, defensive hum. The dancer's head turned as if she'd expected that. It wasn't menace, recognition, like finding a knot in wood exactly where you thought it would be because you've held boards before.
Kaelen's mouth went dry, which he resented because drinking from fear's cup in public is indecorous. He kept step because he did not know how to stop without being seen stopping, and a passerby who didn't know his name would write a story about it and sell it to a neighbor by nightfall.
Another dancer, this one older, lines bracketing the mouth like parentheses around a joke he had told too many times, slipped along the rim, handed a ribbon band to Tamsin with a little nod. She stuck out her wrist at once because you cannot challenge a Tamsin with accessories and expect to win.
He tied it gently, and murmured as he pulled the knot: "May loose ends teach you." She whooped at that, which was a very her thing to do, and lifted her arm to show she had been improved by ritual regardless of its dictionary.
The older dancer's gaze slid to Kaelen's hand as if the hand had raised itself to be counted. He offered a band across the breath of space, a question. Kaelen flinched and covered his wrist with his other hand, then felt ridiculous. The band dangled between them like a small bridge that refused to choose its town. The dancer didn't push. He let the offer hang and then, when Kaelen didn't move, tucked the ribbon over his own palm as if reminding it how fabric behaves when rejected, and passed on.
"What did he say," Tamsin demanded in a stage whisper that would be audible to cooks at the Blue Heron. "My loose ends are perfect. They are lively. I will never let them teach me anything useful."
"He's wrong," Kaelen said, and his voice had too much salt in it. "Your loose ends have taught you everything."
She laughed, pleased either way. "Come on," she said, grabbing his fingers and trying to make him spin. He let himself be pulled half around and stopped as if pretending a dignity he didn't have. She booed. He smiled, which was a lie he wanted to be true.
A cluster of men at the back feigned kneeling to the rhythms and then exaggerated their prostrations until their friends cheered.
"Weaving us a tax bill," one shouted.
"Ain't enough heap of thread in the city to knot my tongue," another shouted back.
A woman lifted her toddler and made the child wave at the dancers and it broke Kaelen's heart because children are always being taught to joke before they're ready and he was in no mood to like jokes.
The drums turned subtlety up a sliver. The drone bent in a way Kaelen felt under his ribs. The dance shifted, steps that had been away and back became cross and cross again, a mock tangle, then release, the body's way of laughing at knots. The mirrored woman returned to his orbit, her gaze still wrapped in his face, and as she slipped past she breathed again, softer.
"Child of the Unwoven Thread."
The words didn't ask for response. They placed something in him like a pin and moved on.
His hum, treacherous, answered to the drums now with a shiver that did not belong to dancing. He willed his hands to be furniture. They obeyed to the extent possible for hands that had been taught wrong-fire two days before and had been asked not to show off.
Tamsin's band caught the light and transformed her wrist into something ceremonious. She lifted it like a torch. "I'm going to start a club," she announced. "We will meet weekly and be insufferable about patterns."
"You already have that club," Kaelen said, distracted. "And it meets hourly."
She cackled and then, catching his face properly for the first time, sobered the smallest degree. "Hey," she murmured. "Too much?"
"No," he lied. "Just... unfamiliar."
"You look like you've seen a philosophy." She bumped his shoulder, small and precise. "Shall we heckle kindly instead. I'm good at that."
They both watched then, giving their feet a rest and their eyes work. One of the drum-bearers, barefoot, his heels stained with indigo that had struck permanent bargains with skin, began to chant under the hum. Not words a person could catch and keep; phrases that fell apart on purpose and reassembled crooked.
"Warp cut, weft wandering... pattern loves breaking... mend with bare hands, mend without... oh loom, oh loom, fray us gentle."
It was either nonsense or truer than sense in a way that made the mocking men uncomfortable for a blink before they remembered they were supposed to have learned how to prefer sarcasm to awe.
Kaelen didn't move his mouth and his hum raised a question. The dancer nearest him looked up as if he'd heard the thought in the way people hear water thinking. The mirrored woman lifted both hands and, palm in palm, made a very small cup in the air and then opened it, emptiness revealed, nothing brighter inside, only the invitation to put something in. The crowd murmured as if they had agreed to be charmed for exactly one breath.
"Fractured Loom," a stall-keeper said to a neighboring cobbler. "Nothing but a traveling pocket for old cloth."
"Better than old knives," the cobbler said, and their voices braided amiably, their disagreement small enough to be pleasant.
Mirel was not in the square, which Kaelen realized later he had half expected. Seraine would not have come to watch this, she'd have read it, then measured it, then told it to tidy up. Rowan might have stood at the edge and disapproved respectfully. Nyx would already be tying ribbons onto the goats in the alley. The thought that his world and the dancers' world would meet properly later gave him indigestion and a small, treacherous hope.
The kneeling ribbon-tender slid past again and placed a length of broken-diamond band in Kaelen's palm without touching skin, leaving it there like a dare. Kaelen stared at it as if he had never seen fiber. The pattern was deliberate sabotage: every other line broken and resumed one thread off, so that if you let your eyes relax you could see two patterns at once, a correct one and another with humor. From some pockets in the crowd came very small coins; from others, glances sharpened by this and that. A boy tried to sneak into the circle, tripped on his own laughter, and was rescued by a dancer who taught him two steps and then sent him back to his mother decorated by competence.
"Look," Tamsin said, and pointed to the ribbon stand, less stand than small hollow log where the bands lay in tangled company. "They tied some around the hawk."
Kaelen looked. One band hung from the fountain hawk's stone ankle as if even statues need permission to fly. A watchman took a breath and then released it, no ordinance, no law against dressing a bird in intentions. The hawk didn't mind. The fish did not appear insulted.
The mirrored woman's path brought her near yet again, and Kaelen felt suddenly like a rock in the river, not because he wanted to be, but because he had become something the current had to work around. He considered stepping back. He did not, because backing away is too often the same as letting a bully win, and this woman was not a bully, only an advocate for a sentence he did not yet speak.
Her whisper this time was almost a hum, phrased on the drone's chord: "Child of the Unwoven Thread. Not ours. Not theirs. Mind your hands." It carried the kindness of a warning and the gall of presumption in equal measure.
"What did she say," Tamsin demanded, because Tamsin is a person who would ask a thundercloud which part of the sky it thought it owned. "I swear she breathed at you like a cat that has chosen you without your consent."
"Something about my hands," Kaelen said truthfully. "I mind my hands."
"You do," Tamsin said, dissatisfied because she'd wanted witchery. "She should mind hers; she will clip herself on all those tassels."
The drum patterns shifted again, as if choosing to argue with the square's heart. Faster now, then sudden stillness, four precise beats cut out of the clamor, then resume as if nothing had happened. The crowd applauded without consensus.
A man shouted, "Wrap us in your blanket, Looms!" and someone else told him to hush because his mother had work to do and did not raise him to embarrass her.
Kaelen stood under the drone and let it pour through his ribs. His hum sat up once like a dog whose ears have chosen to attend. He told it gently to stay, and it did, with the consideration of a guest who can hear that a host means please. He lifted the ribbon the dancer had left him and turned it between his fingers. The broken rhombuses shifted as he moved it: first order, then mischief; then mischief, then order. A thing could be both.
"Are they a cult," Tamsin asked, deliciously scandalized, because nothing improves a day like being able to declare something a cult without any real consequences.
"Everyone is a cult," Kaelen muttered, surprising himself.
"You've been reading slates," she accused. "Or talking to Sister Anwen with your serious face. Is this about your new talent, the one you might or might not have, which I am definitely not asking about directly in case the square is writing everything down in chalk."
"It's about my feet," he said, which was both nonsense and a mercy. "They hurt."
"Then we will be spectators," she decreed, and folded her arms in the gesture of a judge who has spared the guilty out of hunger.
They watched as the Faith danced three more figures: a braid made of bodies, a knot that untied itself, and a circle that walked backward as the drums went forward, which made the knees of the crowd disagree with their owners for a heartbeat. At the end of the last figure they all lifted their hands palm up, as if holding out bowls for criticism, then turned their palms to face the ground together and lowered them once, slow, a gesture like setting dust where it belongs.
An absence followed, one beat longer than comfort. People coughed, realizing they had been trying not to be respectful and failing. Someone clapped too early. Someone else threw a coin as if returning something that had fallen out of a pocket. The ribbon-tender collected the money without gratitude and without disdain. The dancers bowed without apology.
The mirrored woman's path took her along the circle toward Kaelen and Tamsin one last time. As she drew even, she lifted a hand and the beads on her cuff made the small seed sound again. She did not touch Kaelen. She faced him without the courtesy of looking aside.
"Child of the Unwoven Thread," she said very softly, and this time the words plucked something inside him with the certainty of a finger on a string that knows its note. "When the pattern frays, mind the scissors."
He had no reply. If he had been clever, he would have produced one. If he had been Garrin, he would have made a joke and let it float away like a leaf. He stood and accepted being named by someone with worse manners than family and better manners than prophecy. He closed his hand on the ribbon to hide the small tremor the drum woke in his palm.
Tamsin elbowed him once, not to dislodge him, only to hand him back to himself. "We could start heckling now," she offered. "It's unfair if mockery has no turn."
"No," Kaelen said, and startled himself with how certain. "Not now."
"Fine," she said, graciously allowing sincerity to exist within sight of her. "We will make better jokes in private. I have a new one about rope that will set the square on fire."
"Please don't," he said, and wished he'd chosen a different verb.
The crowd loosened as people remembered they had other lives to supervise. Children imitated the steps and tripped one another into dignity. The watchman shifted weight from one foot to the other and decided to be glad nothing had to be written down in a report. Vendors resumed their sales with the arrested fervor of people who have been interrupted by art and suspect art of being lazy. Mrs. Kettle passed with her cat in the basket because the cat had decided baskets were boats and this was a good day for sailing; she gave the dancers a look that said, 'I have seen worse and better, thank you.'
Kaelen and Tamsin let themselves be pushed by the dispersal. He folded the ribbon and slid it into the inside pocket of his cloak, where Daran kept a spare nail and a small slate with three words he never showed anyone. The hum in his hands quieted the way rain quiets when it leaves and promises to send a letter. He felt... not safer, not braver. Seen, which is its own kind of danger and mercy.
"They were good," Tamsin admitted, sighing like a critic granting four stars. "Even if they are all about threads, which is just rope with performance."
"They were," Kaelen agreed, because it cost nothing to pay art its coin when it had worked.
As they walked toward pears and the stall that lied less, a ribboned child stepped in front of them and announced he was now High Priest of the Blanket and demanded a tithe of crumbs. Tamsin tithed a crumb and a cheek pinch. The child ran off to bless a dog by calling it fish. The drone lingered in the square's trusses, a memory of music rather than its presence.
"They called you something," Tamsin said finally, because Tamsin doesn't let a sentence die when it can be practiced again. "What was it?"
Kaelen considered telling her. "Child of the Unwoven Thread," he said, low, so the square couldn't afford the chalk. It sounded foolish out loud, like a coat too large. It felt inside his ribs like a weight that hadn't been there in the morning. He expected Tamsin to mock and he wanted her to, a little, to sand the edge down.
Tamsin rolled the phrase in her mouth as if tasting the recipe. "That's a brand," she said. "You could sell pears in winter with that." Then, more gently, "You don't have to let them name you. People who show up in squares don't get to be your roof."
"I know," he said. He didn't.
"Good," she said. "Now we will buy pears and lie about how many we have eaten, and then we will go to the river because it is my rest day and I wish to scandalize the heron by being prettier than it is."
He followed her toward the stall that always somehow won arguments with fruit. He tried to put the whisper out of his mind and found he could not, exactly; he could only set it on a shelf and promise to deal with it later the way you promise to mend a rip in your sleeve soon and mean it and mean that you will force yourself not to forget.
The dancers packed their drums with the peculiar neatness of people who will move again within the hour. The mirrored woman unwound her half-mask and, for the smallest flash, Kaelen saw a face that was not dramatic at all, tired, lined by weather and laughing, no menace in it, only the belief that her work mattered. She looked toward him and did not do the impolite thing of holding him with her eyes. She nodded once, like a wave in reverse, and turned away.
Stonebridge resumed being itself with the vengeance of markets, which is to say it pretended nothing unusual had happened and then told everyone about it anyway. The hum in Kaelen's hands remained his. The ribbon in his pocket lay against his ribs like something he had promised to remember.
The day held. He and Tamsin turned down the lane armed with fruit and uglier jokes than they deserved, and behind them the dancers of the Faith of the Fractured Loom shouldered their instruments and left the square the way weather leaves, by saying nothing and changing the air a little in their wake.