The pine path drinks the moon.
Stone-Reed leads with his chin up like men who can hear knots. Lupa moves at my right shoulder in the half-shape—stride longer, fingers clawed just enough to tear cloth and not people. Kirella's thumb writes calm at my wrist. One—two—three—four. The lantern warms good-heavy between our hands, an honest bowl in a forest that remembers lies for a living.
Ash-Fletch's horn brushes the night from somewhere behind us—two short, one sharp. Stone-Reed answers with a single low pulse.
"Gate?" I ask.
"Holding," Lupa says without slowing. "Prism bite's faster."
The howl-road threads through young pines and old ones that hate admitting it. Moonlight falls in loose coins. Stone-Reed flicks his fingers at the ground where glass ribs pulse faint under moss—mirror taproots. The soil hums the way a mouth hums when it wants to hear itself sing.
Kirella tips his head, reading the chain angle of those ribs with eyes that learned iron like a language. "Listening roots," he murmurs.
I set my palm to the dirt and pull a thin seam of WAIT over each rib as we step. Not bright. Not brave. Just a no the earth believes in for a breath. The hum drops to a lazy tick and we pass.
"Don't give them our feet," Lupa says. She means: no names to the ground tonight.
We cross a ditch where water tried and failed this season. Stone-Reed holds up a hand: stillness. He points two fingers through a screen of fern.
The feeder sits in a clearing like a bad picnic—waist-high table welded from old braces and fresh pride. Bits of mirror set into its top like eyes. A scent chimney no wider than a wrist. A chain keeper plate. A small idler wheel to keep the feed steady. On one leg, a ledger slot waits for obedience.
Four men tend it. Two in levy jackets, one supervisor with ink on his cuff, one guard whose baton has seen more doors than ribs. They talk soft. They smell like tired.
Lupa's head dips—no kill—with the finality of law read aloud.
Kirella's thumb finds me. One—two—three—four. My bones settle into we.
We step out of the trees like people on an errand no one should be ashamed of.
"Evening," I say.
The guard turns. We meet close because distance is where paper lies.
Shaft bind his wrist, hip turn to redirect all the work he did at his calves into the ground, quick knee tap that betrays his balance without betraying the man. He lands on his back with his breath escaping like a rabbit. I plant the boat hook through the ring at the end of his gaff and staple it to a post—wood to wood, not flesh to anything.
Kirella catches the nearer levy as the man makes the mistake of thinking height is an argument. Cloak wrap, twist, figure-four on the wrist; the baton falls into Kirella's other hand as if it wanted to be there all along. "Drop," he says, not loud. The man drops the rest of his pride because it's easier.
Lupa slides under the supervisor's arm the way rivers slide under bridges and pins him face-down with her knee neat across his triceps. "This is the part where you behave," she tells him pleasantly. He behaves because the alternative is a story he'll have to tell to people he'd rather impress.
The last levy is brave and reaches for the ledger slot with two fingers and a thought about names. Stone-Reed smacks his knuckles with a stick like an aunt. "No letters," he says. "Go to the corner and think about dinner." The levy blinks, then obeys because he was always going to if someone asked correctly.
"Quick," Kirella says.
We sweep the three locks.
Mirror eye first: a round lens the color of wrong frost. I swipe the moon balm across it with the hook—the pine-mint bite makes the glass fog as if the forest itself breathed on it. The eye keeps looking and forgets how to tell a story anyone can sell.
Scent wick second: a thin rope in the chimney, faintly perfumed with that counterfeit-holy sweetness the city loves. I dab brine on my fingertip and touch the wick. It gags like a liar asked to repeat the truth and refuses to drink.
Chain keeper last: the bracket that teaches the prism wedge how to chew steady. Kirella lays his palm on the lantern with mine. Two vows in a voice stones mind.
"We won't pay."
"We won't sell."
I press the WORD plate to the bracket—WAIT warms into iron that barely remembers learning patience at all. Kirella ties a neat kept-loop from keeper to support. The loop looks innocent. It is actually a sleep.
The feeder hum slides down the scale from purpose to polite. But the prism bite still scrapes at the edge of my nerves—there's a whisper of power coming through a side line.
Kirella's jaw ticks toward the idler wheel. "Aux feed."
My wrapped palm tightens. He feels it. He reaches for my hand without making it a scene and pulls the cloth snug, thumb firm over the heel that still throbs where metal taught me a lesson in the inlet. I tip my forehead to his temple—one breath that belongs to kitchens. "Keep me on four."
"Always," he says, and the count hums into my skin. One—two—three—four.
I give the tırpan one handspan of extension—no more—and wedge the hooked spine under the lip of the idler. Lever, not slice. Metal answers truth, not drama. The wheel pops half-off its pin with a sulky squeal. Sting jumps through my palm and climbs my forearm like a spark. Lupa shoves a peg wedge into the skew with her free hand and seats it with a small, satisfied grunt.
The hum slumps to a slow, obedient purr. Somewhere far behind us, Ash-Fletch's horn sings a different shape—bite easing—and my lungs try to take too much air at once. I refuse to let relief be loud. It has bad manners.
The ledger slot chooses that moment to spit two greasy paper moths with wings rubbed in mirror dust and numbers. They fishtail toward our mouths like kisses you didn't ask for.
"Circle," I say.
I draw a small ring on the table with the lantern's warmth; the moths hit the edge and remember they're tired. They land inside the circle and forget their job because kept is a verb and we are doing it. Kirella tips them into a SORRY pouch with the back of a blade. Lupa lays a reed tile over the pouch and presses with the weight of a hand that knows how to end an argument gently. The moths flatten their opinions and go quiet.
A bright smear the size of a hand blinks on a bark shard at the edge of the clearing. The tall mask's reflection stands up inside it like a man who found a window and taught it to care.
"Finder's claim," he says, voice pleasant, the way late bills are polite. "Restart on my—"
"No mirror," Stone-Reed says, and rubs moon balm across the shard with his thumb. Ash-Fletch's far horn answers the rule in code the trees like. The reflection starves the way candles starve in jars.
"I do admire local ordinances," the mask says, which is the kind of sentence only men who never get fined enjoy. He leans his cheek into nothing and watches.
We make it kept.
Chalk on the feeder leg where hands grope for proof:
WE KEEP EACH OTHER →
Arrow points along the wolf path. Kirella sets a release-knot under the table lip that will slip after three friendly touches and refuse the fourth without an apology. I freshen WAIT on the bracket and draw a thin audit-quiet seam around the base so any rule that wants to speak has to whisper.
"Tell your supervisor," Lupa says mildly to the man under her knee. "You met a kitchen. It didn't eat you. It ate your bad idea."
He nods, wide-eyed and glad to have a story that won't make him spit teeth to prove it happened.
Stone-Reed cups his hand to his ear. The night carries Ash-Fletch's horn again—this time the sound of a gate holding. Lupa's shoulders loosen a thumb's worth.
"Move fast," Kirella says, listening with his jaw.
"Always," I say, and I mean it like a habit.
We turn to go—
—and the standing stone at the edge of the clearing scratches itself.
We all hear it because stone is rude and doesn't care who is sleeping. A pale line that used to be a half-letter MI— takes a curve toward R as if the forest borrowed our breath to write with.
"Name-scribe," Stone-Reed says, voice dry with old anger. He taps the feeder's ledger slot and it flickers like a worm under a board. "Remote audit. Backfeed from Auction."
The levies flinch at Auction the way house dogs flinch at the word bath. The supervisor licks his lips. "We don't—" he starts.
"You do," Lupa says without cruelty. "You all do, until someone shows you another job."
The stone ticks another whisper across the surface. MI— grows toward MIR like a vine that learned arithmetic. The itch under my skin that has been my name since I was small and wrong crawls toward my throat.
"Not here," Kirella says. His hand is already on the WORD plate; his other hand is already looking for rope. He thinks in knots when other people think in noise.
"Not now," Stone-Reed adds. He listens to the forest and the forest gives him a direction like a friend you owe a drink. He points east by north. "There's a relay. Roadside oath stone the lockwrights pretend is historic. It eats vows and feeds ledgers. That's your backfeed."
Lupa's claws ease—sheath instead of show. "We pin it," she says.
"We teach it WAIT," I say. "And we keep it for three."
"Prism will sleep for a while," Kirella says, looking at the idler and the knot like a doctor who knows how long tinctures last. "Not forever."
The tall mask sighs from the shard like a lover who wasn't invited in. "You are all so industrious," he says. "It would be charming if it didn't make the books so—untidy."
I step to the standing stone and set my wrapped palm flat against the cold. The lantern's warmth backs my hand like family at a door. I do not try to pull the scratch away from the letter. I tell the stone what we are.
"No names to paper or stone," I say. "We keep doors open; we return for three."
The scratch hesitates, offended. It does not erase. It waits. That is the best the world offers most days: a breath.
Lupa lays her hand above mine, claws sheathed. "Pack law under it," she says. "No coin. No mirror. No blood to boast."
The forest lifts its chin a little, not much, enough.
Kirella ties a kept-loop at the stone's base and tucks the tail into a crack in a way that will make someone swear later when they try to unpick it without apologizing. Stone-Reed plants a little sprig of pine and a bitten mint leaf in the seam as if to feed a stubborn child.
"Signal," Lupa says.
Stone-Reed blows a short, forked horn phrase toward the Reach. The echo comes back through pines and water—Gate holding. Ash-Fletch folds two notes into the reply that mean I am bored in the language of wolves who are lying.
The scratch on the stone shivers a fraction closer to R through all our caution. We don't get our way just because we said please.
"Relay next," I say.
"Fast," Kirella agrees, thumb already warm at my wrist. One—two—three—four. The floor returns to my bones.
Lupa rolls her shoulders and her mouth almost smiles in the ways that count. "First Fang," she says softly to herself again, as if it were a blade she's learning the weight of. She nods at me. "We hunt a stone."
"We cook it first," I answer, because kitchen is the only law I ever wanted.
We leave the feeder sleeping in its ring of WAIT, moths pressed tidy, ledger quiet under a tile, men breathing and surprised to be grateful. The pine path opens like a thought we can still have.
The standing stone breathes another half-inch of insult into the letter that pretends to be my name. The lantern in my hand says we without asking permission. The count under my skin writes calm where panic wanted its initials. One—two—three—four.
And the chapter ends there—with the prism wedge's bite fading at the Gate, the feeder drowsing in kept, the tall mask watching from a starving shard, the standing stone scratching toward MIR like a mouth learning to talk about me without my consent, and our feet already turning toward the oath relay that thinks it can write kitchens into ledgers and keep its teeth.