Chapter Text

“Some bonds are not severed by death, but passed on like a torch. One shield breaks so another may rise.”

Lanterns guttered in Sharlayan’s sea-washed wind, throwing soft coins of light along scholar’s corridors. Night Moon stood at her window and watched the harbor breathe; gulls slept; ships rocked and muttered quietly to their lines. Her hair—black as a midnight river—poured loose down her back, shot through with fine, sun-burnished strands that caught the lampglow when she moved. The red diamond at her brow—Rava born, royal-marked—glimmered faintly.

A knock came, careful and steady.

She knew his cadence before the sound finished echoing. When she opened the door, Estinien stood framed in half-shadow—broad shoulders, a face made of hard planes softened by uncertainty.

“You summoned me,” he said, voice low. “I thought you meant counsel… not company.”

“You doubted,” she answered, eyes wine-dark and sure. “You didn’t misread.”

He wavered—a heartbeat balanced between retreat and surrender. Then her quiet, “Come in,” drew him like gravity. The door closed.

What followed was not delicate. Armor gave way to leather; buckles yielded; steel rang soft against stone. She pressed him to the wall, the heat of him answering hers; he lifted her as if she weighed nothing. Their mouths found each other with a hunger they had both outlived and out-suffered, a fierce undoing years in the making. His breath rumbled from somewhere deep—the dragon’s soul braided with his own—while her fingers mapped scars and strength like old constellations learned by touch.

When the storm gentled, they lay in the hush they’d made. He rested his brow to hers.

“I want more than this night,” he said, rough and unguarded. “If you’ll have me, I would walk beside you. As yours.”

Her hand drifted to the diamond at her brow. “My people don’t bind themselves. We take what comfort we’re given, then go.”

“I know,” he murmured. “But you are not them.”

She swallowed. The wish to say yes rose like tide. “Then wait—until after. If I live. If you do. I’ll give you my answer.”

His jaw set with the finality of a vow. “After.”

They slept for a few hours, if sleep could be called the thin, trembling rest that takes pity on those who march toward dawn.

—

The battle was not one the star had ever learned to name. Silence without air; light without warmth; an edge where wills met and either broke or became something new. They fought anyway. That is what mortals do.

Estinien’s lance burned bright as a picked star. He moved like a promise kept, every turn and strike a refusal to yield. And always, his gaze sought her. Night Moon cut forward with the serenity of someone who has bled enough times to be on speaking terms with death; her hair streamed black and gold in the astral glare, the diamond at her brow a small red certainty.

When the blow took her—when the light hit just wrong and ripped through defenses that had never failed—she didn’t cry out so much as breathe his name and fall.

“Moon!”

Estinien broke through the fray like a thrown spear. Alphinaud reached her first, and then Alisaie; their hands were quick and shaking, their aether bright and raw. They gathered her in, both of them, but her weight felt wrong: slack, chilled, as if the flesh had come home and the soul had wandered on.

“She’s ice-cold!” Alphinaud’s voice frayed. “Her pulse—gods—”

“Don’t stop,” Alisaie snapped, bracing his hands with hers. “Keep her with us.”

Estinien dropped to his knees at her side. His gauntlets clattered uselessly away as he took her hand in both of his. It felt like stone that remembered winter. An old wound split open inside him and bled: the Vault, the lance, blood running bright over holy floor. He had been elsewhere then, tearing Aymeric from inquisitors; his heart had stayed with her. Haurchefant had stood where Estinien should have stood and smiled while dying.

Not again.

“Don’t leave me,” he said, a vow spoken like prayer. “Not you.”

—

Night Moon opened her eyes to no sky at all. Hard stone. The echo of nothing. Xenos lay beside her, his body already cooling, a prince of emptiness gazing at a ceiling that wasn’t there. She felt a quiet settle—the odd peace that comes when the fight is over and the cost tallied. Perhaps this was right. Perhaps the star had asked too much and she had given it, and that was the end.

“Not here, my lady.”

The voice warmed the air. She turned.

Haurchefant knelt beside her as if nothing as small as death had ever been allowed to keep him. Light made the shape of him and kindness filled it. He smiled the way he had smiled in Ishgard—unwavering, as if certainty were a shelter one man could make for another.

“I’m so tired,” she whispered. “I thought—”

“You thought to stop,” he said gently. “But it is not your end. Not yet.”

He brushed a hand above her brow; the light of him rippled where it met the red diamond. “You carried my memory until it grew heavy. You don’t have to anymore.”

Tears stung. “I didn’t want to let you go.”

“And I didn’t go,” he said with a soft laugh. “I lingered. Stubborn, even here. I asked the stream to wait while I watched over you. But there is a knight now who will do what I did, and more. He will walk beside you when you leave the battlefield, not just on it. Let me be what I should be—blessing, not chain.”

“Estinien,” she breathed.

Haurchefant’s smile deepened. “A good man. Fierce where it matters, gentle where you least expect it. He has loved you a long time, though he would never have burdened you with it.”

Light gathered around her like hands lifting her from the cold. The void began to crack and brighten.

“Go,” he urged, the edges of him already feathering to starlight. “Live. Choose. And tell him I asked this of you—so he’ll stop apologizing to a ghost.”

The void shattered. She fell upward.

—

Her form burst back onto the ship’s deck with a shudder of aether—then crumpled. The stars wheeled above the rigging; the hull groaned; wind tore the heat from her skin.

Alphinaud caught her, nearly buckling with the sudden weight. “She’s freezing—she’s not—”

Alisaie’s aether flared, steadying what she could. “We need warmth, real beds. This wind will undo everything.”

Estinien’s helm hit the planks as he tore it off. “Hard for Ishgard!” he barked to the helmsman. “Now.”

No one argued. Sails cracked; the ship leaned into the wind with a fierce, eager lurch. Estinien gathered Night Moon’s hand in both of his and did not let go.

—

The sky over Coerthas was a banded gray when the ship cut through the last of the clouds. Frost took at the lines, glassed the railing. Estinien stood unflinching in the gale with her in his arms, descending the gangplank as House Fortemps’ colors came to meet them.

“Bring her,” the steward urged, voice breaking on the last word. “Quickly—my lord has readied the winter rooms.”

Stone corridors. Steam lifting from braziers. The scent of wool and cedar. They laid her in a high, quiet chamber lined with old tapestries. The fire already burned like a held sun; blankets were piled like armor. Alphinaud and Alisaie set to work again—slower now, surer, letting warmth and time do what spellcraft could not.

Estinien stepped back only far enough to stop being in their way. He took the chair at her bedside, as if the whole manor were arranged around that place.

“She was always welcome here,” the steward murmured, eyes damp. “A ward of our house. But she… she stayed away.”

“I know,” Estinien said softly, not looking up. “Guilt has a longer winter than Coerthas.”

He stayed when they left. He stayed when the fire burned down and was built again. He stayed when the first dawn put a faint, milk-white edge on the shutters.

—

Night deepened outside the mullioned glass. The manor quieted to the small creaks and sighs of a great house at rest. Estinien held her hand between his, counting the warmth returning one breath at a time.

Something changed in the room—air shifting from the old cold of the Vault to a hearth’s steady glow.

He lifted his head.

Haurchefant stood at the end of the bed, formed of pale, living light. The smile was the same as it had been in life, and perhaps a little wider for being home.

“Haurchefant,” Estinien said, and his voice was not the Dragoon’s but the man’s.

The spirit looked first to Night Moon, and the affection there could have thawed the Sea of Clouds. Then his gaze took Estinien in, steady and warm.

“You saved Aymeric,” Haurchefant said, as if naming a plain truth. “I saved her. Each as we must.”

“You died on the Vault’s stone,” Estinien answered, the words rough with years. “She has carried that floor in her bones ever since.”

“And now she has returned to the only hearth that can warm it.” Haurchefant’s smile gentled toward mischief. “You were right to bring her here.”

Light brushed Estinien’s shoulder—no weight, only steadiness. “Guard her well. Love her as I could not. I asked the stream to wait so I might watch over her until this night. It needn’t wait any longer.”

“Will you rest, then?” Estinien asked, shamefully young for a heartbeat.

“When she no longer needs me to stand watch,” Haurchefant said, eyes fond. “Which may be… now.”

He glanced once more at Night Moon, a farewell like a benediction, and faded into the firelight.

Estinien bowed his head over her hand. “I will,” he promised into the hush of the winter room. “By my life, I will.”

—

Her fingers flexed against his palm—a slow, testing curl. Estinien looked up so quickly the chair creaked.

Her lashes lifted. The red diamond at her brow caught the firelight like a coal remembering flame. She found him the way a needle finds north.

“You’ve been here,” she rasped. It wasn’t a question.

“I could not leave,” he said simply. “On the ship, there was little we could do. Here… the house remembers how to keep people warm.” He hesitated. “And it is your house, whether you claim it or not.”

Shame flickered across her face; grief followed on its heels. “I stayed away,” she admitted, voice thin. “Because every hallway held his echo.”

“I know,” he answered, and let the knowing be soft. “But not every echo is a wound.”

He added, quieter, “He was here. Tonight. He told me to guard you. To love you as he could not.”

Her eyes shone, wet and bright. “I saw him too. On the other side. He said he would give me back—not for his sake, but for yours.” She drew a ragged breath. “He asked me to choose you.”

Estinien laughed once, helpless and broken-open, and pressed her knuckles to his lips. “Then no more ‘after.’ No more waiting.”

She held his gaze. “No more running from these halls,” she added. “Not from the Fortemps. Not from his memory. I am done letting grief pick my roads.”

He nodded, something easing in his shoulders that battle had never loosened. “Then we begin here. With the people who loved him. Who love you.”

—

They let the city tend to one of its own.

Edmont’s letters arrived first—ink fluid, words a blanket rather than a blade. Then shy knockings; bread left warm under linen; a scarf knitted poorly and with great, earnest care. Honoroit brought books and left before she could say thank you; Emmanellain sent a bottle and a note that managed, impossibly, not to be foolish.

Night Moon took these offerings like a woman relearning a language. Some she read. Some she held to her chest. Some she laid by the hearth and watched until the house’s warmth made them part of it.

Estinien kept his watch—but not like a guard at a gate. He learned the rhythm of the manor and let it hold her. He fetched water, and stoked fires, and disappeared just long enough for her to speak to those who needed to see her without a Dragoon shadowing the doorway. When she was tired of voices and well-meant fussing, she found him in the winter garden where the stone benches remembered bodies and the snow remembered footsteps.

They sat there often, under a sky the color of unspun wool.

“Garlemald,” she said one afternoon, voice unfurling. “You watched me and decided I wasn’t made for winter.”

“I decided winter wasn’t made for you,” he corrected, faint smile easing the words.

“And Sharlayan?” she asked, later.

“You told me to wait,” he said. “So I did.”

She smiled; this time it reached her eyes. “And the Vault?”

He didn’t look away. “I carry the floor in me too. But these stones,”—he touched the bench—“they remember laughter better than blood.”

She leaned against his shoulder. “Then let’s teach them more of it.”

—

On the night she was strong enough to walk the upper corridor alone, she stopped before a window where the city curled in frost below. Estinien joined her without being called; he had always known where she would be.

“He loved you,” he said quietly, meaning Haurchefant, meaning all of them, meaning Ishgard itself. “And gods forgive me, so do I.”

She turned. The firelight from the hall set a soft crown on the black and gold river of her hair. “Then we carry him with us,” she said. “Not as a chain. As a blessing.”

He nodded. “And we let Ishgard carry us, when we’re too tired to carry ourselves.”

Her hand found the back of his neck and rested there with that small, decisive weight he had come to love. “Together.”

Down in the courtyard, someone laughed like a person surprised to find joy in winter. The manor breathed. The city held its own. And in a high room where warmth won, a knight and a ward of the house stood shoulder to shoulder, letting love and grief live in the same skin without tearing it.

The longest vigil ended as all true vigils should—not with a lonely dawn, but with a hearth relit and a home reclaimed.

Chapter Text

Chapter 2 

The manor learned her again the way winter learns its first fire—slowly, carefully, as if afraid to spook the heat. Hours gathered themselves into small rituals: broth ladled into a warm bowl; wool laid over linen; steam rising from her hair while the brazier hummed.

Night Moon sat propped against pillows that smelled faintly of cedar and soap. The red diamond at her brow caught the hearthlight like a coal remembering work. Her long hair fell heavy as a river over her shoulders; when she breathed, the room seemed to breathe with her.

Estinien had the look of a man teaching his body the art of standing still. He moved only when he must—to stoke, to fetch, to refuse a kitchen tray for being salted like seawater. The rest of the minutes he kept near enough to be reached, far enough to let the house do what houses do.

“Eat,” he said at last, nudging the bowl closer. “Not Sharlayan fare, but tavern stews taught me enough.”

She took a spoon. Thyme and marrow rose warm and patient from the bowl. Comfort she’d never had to ask for. A breath later, the scent turned oddly sharp, as if the thyme had overgrown the room; heat surged at the back of her throat, a quick wave of too-much. She set the spoon down. Steady, but quick.

“Too rich?” he asked, catching the slip without catching at her.

“Not the stew.” She swallowed, waited for the air to steady. “Just… too close to the fire.”

He shifted without comment, drawing the chair—and the bowl—two handspans from the brazier. The air cooled. The churning passed. She tried again and found the taste had gentled, as if it had been asked to lower its voice.

—flashback (steam rising; Sharlayan’s scent)—
Lamps guttered in sea-wind; the room smelled of ink, parchment, and the faint, salty steam of fish stew she’d never admit she liked. Estinien stood at the window, a silhouette carved out of lanternlight, too self-possessed for how unsure his hands were when he finally reached her.
“Are you certain?” he’d asked, voice rough.
“If I wasn’t,” she’d said, leaning into him like a cliff takes the first wave, “you’d still be in the corridor.”
—end—

The spoon paused halfway. Estinien didn’t press. He let the quiet hold what it had found.

Outside the mullioned windows, Coerthas wore its gray like armor. Inside, the fire put a gold edge on everything that dared be soft.

A knock. The Fortemps steward stood at the threshold with a roll of parchment sealed in blue wax and a face composed for neutral weather.

“From Lord Edmont,” he said, and became fascinated with the embroidery on his cuffs.

Estinien took the letter and set it within Night Moon’s reach as if it were not a blade that could cut either way.

She broke the seal. Ink flowed like the man himself: steady, unshowy, capable of lifting a fallen room to its feet.

My dear,
The house and its old heart are yours, as they have always been. What you do not have strength for today, we will keep until you do. Stay as long as the winter asks; we will make it brief where we can, bear it where we can’t.
—E. de Fortemps

“He writes like a hearth,” Estinien murmured.

She folded the letter with careful fingers. “I ran from that hearth,” she said. “It felt like treason to warm my hands at it.”

“You weren’t running from it,” he said. “You were dragging a winter no house could warm.”

Her mouth tilted—half acceptance, half ache. She set the letter where the light could touch it and not burn it.

“Walk with me?” she asked. “Only the gallery.”

He offered his arm without making anything of it.

The winter gallery’s long strand of windows showed a city stitched in frost. Portraits kept company with tapestries; a worn bench waited where tired feet always know they’ll find it. They took it slowly, the way people do when a day could shatter.

At a niche where an old Fortemps lantern stood—blue glass, iron ribs, a wick trimmed almost to nothing—she stopped.

“Do you remember the first time you saw me take a lance?” she asked, eyes on the lantern’s ribs.

Estinien’s hand flexed—no reach, just the ghost of one. “Yes.”

—flashback (iron rib ↔ lance haft)—
Not a holy yard. Trampled grass. Chocobo stink. A sun like a dare. She stepped into the ring and picked up the lance as if it had been assembled to the bones of her hand. No flourish. No swagger. She set the butt down, adjusted her grip twice, then moved—clean, spare, without a wasted gesture.
Something in Estinien took a small, startled step toward a ledge it had never meant to approach.
—end—

“I thought I knew what vows cost,” he said. “Watching you, I realized I’d never made one that mattered.”

“And then you did?”

He nodded once. “Silently.”

They reached the end of the gallery and the bench remembered them. He let her sit first and stood long enough to watch her breath even out from the walk. When he sat, he did it the way a soldier lays down a spear: close enough to touch, careful not to crowd.

She tipped her head until wool brushed his shoulder. A tightness rippled low in her belly—not pain; a strange awareness, as if a second heartbeat had entered a quiet room to listen. It passed, leaving her oddly breathless.

“Garlemald,” she said into the wool. “You watched me and decided I wasn’t made for winter.”

“I decided winter wasn’t made for you,” he said, and she felt the corner of his mouth move where it touched her hair.

—flashback (wool against cheek; the Garlemald scarf)—
Garlemald’s wind came razored, clawing for seams. She wrapped a scarf twice around her throat in defiance; frost still found her. Estinien watched from a doorway with the quiet focus he gave to threats and miracles alike. When she turned, the red diamond on her brow burned against a sky that could not imagine such color.
He remembered what he’d learned of Viera—they do not stay. He also realized he had already made peace with wanting something he might never be allowed to keep.
—end—

They sat until the room changed—lamplight deepening, footsteps softening, the house putting itself to bed. When they rose, she didn’t offer him his arm; she simply took it, as if they’d been walking that way for years.

At her door, he started to say rest and found the word too small.

“Stay,” she said, sparing him the choosing. “Not in the bed. Just… don’t leave the room.”

He nodded. The chair by the hearth accepted his weight like an old friend. She eased under the blankets like a soldier easing into kindness. The fire spoke quietly to itself.

“Good night, Estinien.”

“Good night, Moon.”

He kept the first watch of the second night as if the world depended on it. Perhaps it did.

By morning her strength had returned enough for the small downstairs—a bowl of oats, letters, a brief audience with a worried Honoroit and a relief-drunk Emmanellain who managed, against all odds, not to say something foolish. When the chamberlain asked—carefully—whether the winter tailor might take her measure for warmer garments, she nodded.

“Two sizes,” Estinien said before he could stop himself.

She arched a brow.

“In case you favor layers,” he amended, ears going faintly pink.

The tailor arrived with pins and good cheer. Night Moon endured wool at the throat and sleeves at the wrist until a sudden wave of heat rose under her skin, bright as embarrassment but not. She breathed through it; it passed. The tailor pretended not to notice and fussed over hem-weights like a conspirator.

In the afternoon, she met the house chirurgeon—gray-plaited, ink-stained, hands that had learned how to be kind a very long time ago.

“May I?” the chirurgeon asked, thumb hovering above Night Moon’s wrist.

Night Moon offered her arm. The woman listened first with patient mortal fingers, then with a soft hum of aether that seemed to ask the room to be quieter. Her gaze touched the red diamond, returned to Night Moon’s face, softened.

“Your strength mends,” she said aloud, for the ledger—and for the listeners who always hover near closed doors. “Heat and broth. Less cedar smoke.”

Then, lower—pitched for Night Moon and the Dragoon alone: “Two lights. The smaller carries a familiar warmth. Rest. Let the house hold you.”

Night Moon’s hand found Estinien’s without looking. He did not smile or speak; he turned his palm up and let her anchor there, as if a vow could widen without a sound.

After the chirurgeon left, silence held. Estinien busied himself with the fire until it was thoughtful rather than proud and set the kettle where it could learn patience.

When he came back with tea and honey—both placed a measured distance from the brazier—Night Moon had drawn her knees close, palms folded over her middle, fingers curved like instinct.

He didn’t ask. He poured and waited for the cups to cool, the way a man waits beside a gate he would never force.

“Tell me one thing,” she said at last.

“Anything.”

“If there were a law,” she said, eyes on the steam, “that said outsiders cannot be loved. And a threat that punished the child more than the mother. What would you do?”

He didn’t have to ask which law, which child.

“I would bring the law to a house that owes you nothing and loves you anyway,” he said. “I would put you both behind Fortemps stone. If the Wood sent warders, I would ask Aymeric to invite them to parley and keep them at a table until they learned our winter. If they forgot their manners, I would teach them.” A beat. “But none of that matters unless it is what you want.”

She turned her head, studying him like a map she meant to commit to memory. “What do you want?”

“To be where you are,” he said simply. “To keep the fire. To make tea correctly, once.” His mouth tilted. “To learn how to be gentle when the world doesn’t deserve it.”

Her throat worked. “Then stay.”

“I will.”

That night sleep took her like a tide and left her standing in a snowfield that could not stay cold. Haurchefant walked toward her across the melt, sunlight burning out of the gray. He carried no shield. He cupped a small lantern in both hands—the kind you set in a window so someone can find their way home.

“For the nights that still come,” he said, and placed it warm against her palm. The light slipped through her skin and settled low, where new pulses are kept.

“Rest,” she whispered, and for the first time the word did not snag on grief.

“Gladly,” he answered, already turning toward morning.

She woke with her hand on her belly and a steadiness under her own pulse that hadn’t been there the day before. A memory stirred—the Fortemps winter room, the breath after his visitation when the glow at her brow had split into two tiny sparks. Firelight, she had told herself then. She knew better now.

When Estinien returned with a tray—tea, bread, honey—he found her looking at the window as if the glass looked back.

“Too much cedar?” he asked mildly.

“Less today,” she said, and took his hand.

He let her keep it. The ordinary minutes kept. Outside, Ishgard shouldered its winter without complaint. Inside, the house wrote down a new rule in the language of warmth and didn’t bother to tell the cold.

The chirurgeon returned in the morning with a basket of oranges that had crossed half a continent to arrive on a sill rimed with frost. She set them down as if they were nothing at all, then took Night Moon’s wrist again, listening for what replies.

“For the ledger,” she said—crisp enough to satisfy duty. “Strength sound. Continue the regimen.”

For them alone: “It is well.”

When she was gone, the room seemed to exhale. Night Moon guided Estinien’s hand to the low, quiet place where a softer tempo answered her own.

He bowed his head—not to the floor or a god or a memory, but to this ordinary miracle. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

“Together,” she said softly.

His fingers tightened. “For three.”

Outside, the bells spoke the hour. Inside, a promise widened to make room for a life.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3

The training yard lived under a sky the color of unspun wool. Snow kept its promise, soft and steady, filling old footprints until the stone looked newly made. House Fortemps had cleared a rectangle of flagging and laid sand over it; the sand steamed faintly in the cold, a trick of breath and frost and sun pretending to be warm.

Night Moon stood in the center with a spear in hand. Not a full dragoon’s lance—heavier than necessary while her strength returned would be pride disguised as foolishness—but a practice haft cut to balance like truth. She flexed her grip once, twice, and let it become the bones of her hand.

Estinien watched as if the yard were a map and she the line he meant to follow to the end.

“Again,” he said, not correcting yet, only asking for the shape of her motion.

She moved through the first form—clean, spare, the way a scribe draws a line that doesn’t wonder if the page will accept it. The shift from high guard to low teased at the scar in her side; she felt it tighten, acknowledged it, kept the line. When she recovered to center, her breath showed white and steady.

“Good,” he said. “Three measures slower.”

She arched a brow. “Slower?” Patience was not a language her body chose first.

“In winter,” he said, stepping into the ring to stand at her shoulder, “speed is a lie men tell themselves while they fall. Ground gives; air steals; muscle cheats. We learn what stands when the quickness leaves.”

He reached without hurry and touched her lower hand, nudging her grip a thumb-width along the haft. Heat snuck where his glove met her skin. “There,” he said. “Let the weight do more of the work.”

She tried the form again, and the spear answered differently—same arc, less fury, more fact. Something eased inside her, as if a door she’d been shouldering had been meant to pull all along.

“Better,” he said. “Again.”

They worked until the sand’s steam thinned. He let her rest without saying the word; she let him wait without thanking him for it.

Across the yard a squire scattered grain for birds and tried not to stare. Knights passed along the colonnade, their voices leather-soft. Somewhere a bell counted the hour as if numbers could keep the day in joint.

“Once more,” Estinien said when her breath was ready. “Then we walk.”

She rolled her shoulders. The move sent a faint warmth creeping under her skin—brief, bright, not an ache. Lately the brazier’s nearness had done that too, the same almost-heat under her throat, a body learning a new conversation. She put it aside and finished the form with a neatness that made his mouth want to smile and his discipline refuse.

“Walk,” he said, and took the spear to carry so that her hands were free for her cloak.

They left the ring and crossed into the cloistered arcade where winter was an idea rather than a law. The stone remembered people; the wind remembered it had other errands.

“Your grip,” he said as they paced, “is sure. Your feet are lying.”

“My feet,” she repeated, as if they’d betrayed her for the first time.

“You want to finish before you begin,” he said. “You step as if the ground will move to please you. It won’t. Winter makes petty enemies of our assumptions.”

She laughed once, low. “Then you will have to teach them manners.”

“I will,” he said, as if she’d handed him something simple.

They circled back to the far edge where a low wall held a drift of snow that had taken to itself the shape of a sleeping hound. Estinien set the spear carefully upon it, as if not to wake it.

“Again?” she asked.

“Not today,” he said. “Lessons in winter end before pride notices.”

She pretended not to hear the grace in it. He pretended not to see the thanks.

A footman arrived with a basket and departed with the secret speed of household staff who knew when to vanish. Inside they found oranges that had crossed a continent to be bright in a gray country, and bread with a crust that felt like a good decision. Estinien broke the orange as if it might resist, then offered a segment. She tasted sun. The scent was sharp—pleasant and not, both at once. She had to swallow twice to make it stay.

“Too much?” he asked.

“Just enough,” she lied, and then, because lying to him had started to feel like misusing her tools, added, “If I breathe through it.”

They stood there, looking like people who had meant only to train and somehow found themselves learning to be alive.

—flashback (trigger: the quiet counting of steps; Estinien’s voice teaching patience)—

The Inquisitors’ hall swallowed noise and gave back doctrine. Estinien’s boots made no sound he could not justify, but his breath came hard, and the men behind him breathed as men do when they are about to do something the law will later call necessary. He tasted rust and incense and the memory of open air.

Aymeric was ahead somewhere, caged in iron and rhetoric, paying for the sin of asking the right question. Estinien had told himself duty was a clean word—and found in that corridor that it meant the same thing as love, only said in armor.

They broke the last door like a dawn finally elected—steel and will and an insult to restraint. Aymeric looked up with the calm of a man who has practiced standing in the fire. “Took you long enough.”

“Come,” Estinien said, and his voice shook as if he’d been cold for a year. “We are late.”

“You are early,” Aymeric murmured, smiling because the alternative was fury. “Save your breath for the stairs.”

They did. Stairs were honest, and the men upon them, less so. At a landing the world turned into the simple mathematics of striking and not being struck. Estinien added quickly. Blood answered.

Halfway down, the cathedral’s bell found them and rang with a clarity that could not be ignored. The sound drew a memory through Estinien’s ribs like a red thread—the Vault, a lance, Night Moon’s voice breaking, his own breaking quieter. He realized, while he hauled Aymeric forward with a grip that was both friendship and reprimand, that he had made a vow he’d never said aloud: If one must choose, I will choose the man who holds a city together. It had been the right choice. It had been the worst choice. Both could be true, and were.

When they reached the street, the air had the taste of forgiveness. Aymeric steadied his feet and his sword in the same motion and clapped Estinien’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said, meaning the words the way a blade means steel.

Estinien nodded once. He would bleed later. There was other work.

—end flashback—

The memory’s echo loosened in his chest. Beside him, Night Moon studied his profile as if the story had shown on his skin.

“You returned with Aymeric,” she said.

“I did.” He kept his gaze on the winter courtyard, the orange in his palm.

“And I fell on the stone while you were not there,” she added, not accusing, not forgiving—only bringing two facts into a room so they could be introduced and maybe like each other one day.

“You did,” he said. He set the orange peel down as if it had become a page too heavy to hold. “And I have carried both truths ever since.”

She took his hand because she knew which thing he would not say. “We carried them together today,” she said. “That is more than before.”

He closed his fingers around hers like a man who’d been offered a tool he’d thought he couldn’t afford.

They returned the spear and the orange basket and let the house take them back. The day thinned toward afternoon; the fire learned their names again; letters arrived and were opened and were sometimes answered and sometimes left to sit like guests who might be less awkward tomorrow.

When the steward brought word that a courier from Foundation had glimpsed strangers on the Snowcloak road—cloaks cut in a Wood fashion, silent as rules—the steward’s voice did not change. Neither did Estinien’s.

“Offer them parley,” he said, as if discussing the state of a gutter. “At the Gate of Judgment. In daylight.”

The steward bowed as if he had been handed a recipe for forgiving winters. “As you say.”

Night Moon’s hand found the arm of the chair and kept it. Her chin lifted by a degree. “We’ll not craft fear into a fine cloak,” she said. “Let them shiver.”

Estinien did not smile, but something like gladness took the set of his shoulders.

Later, when the household had retreated from the business of watchers and words, Night Moon returned to the yard for a last slow walk. Estinien followed because he always did, and also because he wanted to see whether the yard would offer them a lesson it hadn’t earlier.

The light had leaned away from the stone; shadow arrows lay between the columns. She paused on the sand and listened. Not for enemies; for instruction. Sometimes the floor tells you which foot to trust.

“Left first,” Estinien said, unprompted.

She moved as asked, and the ground agreed. Her balance took purchase; her ribs loosened. She took the full form once more and did not chase the finish. She let it come to her like the next breath.

“Better,” he said. “Do you feel it?”

“Yes,” she said. A heartbeat later: “And… something else.”

He looked up. “Pain?”

She shook her head. “No.”

It was the double-echo again—hers, and then beneath it, a second, softer answer that didn’t time itself to necessity so much as to invitation. It wasn’t a sound. It was sensation learning to sign its name.

He didn’t ask. He crossed the sand and set his palm to the small of her back for the briefest possible calibration—not a claim, a measure. Where his hand rested, warmth resolved into steady. The second echo matched the first like a foot finding the right stone in a stream.

They both exhaled.

“Enough for today,” he said.

“Enough,” she agreed.

They left the yard and the cold drew their breath into white isles behind them.

—flashback (trigger: steadying palm; Dravanian rock ledge)—

The Forelands disliked people in a way that was almost courteous. It put the rocks where they belonged and expected you to read them. Wind came in sentences you could learn to translate if you made time.

They moved along a spine that had once been high and now was ruined into suggestion. Below, blue-green conifers held the slope together as if patience could be muscular. She set her foot on a tilt of stone that had decided to be a knife. It shifted. She didn’t swear. She didn’t flail. She reached.

Estinien’s hand was already there—just below the center of her back, the exact place where a person stops falling if someone who loves them knows where to put pressure. His grip didn’t clutch; it convinced. The stone changed its mind and became a path again.

“Thank you,” she said without turning, because turning would have made it into something that might break if examined. She took the next step. He let go a breath after he should have, because sometimes it is a discipline to hold, and sometimes it is a discipline to trust what you held to keep itself.

At the ridge break, the wind tried a different sentence, one spelled like drop the lance or drop yourself. She chose the third verb. “Catch,” she said, and threw the lance. He laughed—a sound that didn’t belong to armor—and caught it. When she jumped, he put it back in her hand mid-air as if they had practiced a hundred times and not once. They landed like one person who had never been two.

—end flashback—

By the time they returned indoors, the light had thinned to the color of old parchment. Someone had remembered the way she liked tea when the world was too loud; someone else had remembered the honey. Estinien sat in the hearth chair—not the one by her bed, the daytime one that allowed for a view of the door and the fire both.

They spoke of ordinary things—linen, and whether the kitchen understood that cedar smoke was not a sauce; letters from the chirurgeon in a hand that had scolded nobler patients than Night Moon and found them less brave. The house returned itself to order without making a production of it.

When evening settled, she rose. The motion tugged a stitch inside, and she made a face she would not show the enemy but would allow him.

“Enough?” he asked, not about the day, about her stubbornness.

“Enough,” she said. She touched the back of his hand and found warmth there that answered hers like a word used correctly.

She turned for her chamber; he stood as if he meant to say he would be in the chair by the fire—just there, just reachable, not intruding.

“Estinien,” she said at the threshold.

He looked up. He had never been good at not expecting to be dismissed.

“Stay,” she said. “Not for vigil. Not because I might vanish if you look away. Because I sleep better in a room you’re in.”

He didn’t move for the count of a heartbeat, which is how long a man takes to put away every answer that would make the moment smaller. Then he nodded.

“I will.”

He banked the fire to a low, generous glow. He set the cup where it would not burn its own shadow into the wood. He took the chair that had learned him and let himself belong to it.

She eased under the blankets, lay on her side so she could see the door and the window both, and put her hand to the place where a second tempo had begun to make itself known. She did not hide it this time.

He saw. He didn’t speak. He was a Dragoon; he knew how to watch the sky for signs and keep the spear ready without frightening the clouds.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night,” he returned.

The house learned the shape of them: the quieting of breath, the patience of a room that understands what it keeps. Outside, snow practiced falling until it forgot it had ever needed instruction. Inside, two people—one human and dragon-braided, one Viera and royal-marked—practiced a lesson that winter teaches better than war:

To endure is not only to hold. Sometimes it is to be held.

He drifted after a time, chin on his chest in a soldier’s sleep, hand still laxly open on the arm of the chair as if awaiting the weight of hers. When she woke once in the night, thirsty but not unhappy, she found him there and did the smallest thing that constitutes a vow: she reached, touched his knuckles, and laughed very softly when his fingers closed around hers without waking.

“Together,” she whispered to the ceiling that had heard other oaths and liked this one more.

In the quiet under her own pulse, another answered. Not loud. Certain.

“For three,” he murmured—dreaming or listening or both.

The fire agreed. The stones remembered. And winter, which forgives almost nothing, forgave a little.

Chapter Text

Chapter 4

The Fortemps library wore its warmth discreetly: a pair of braziers that didn’t boast, leaded windows catching a pale noon, shelves that kept the smell of old linen and older paper. A long table had been cleared for Night Moon; her journals—some salt-wayed and swollen, others crisp from Sharlayan bookbinders—lay open like maps that remembered every road. A pot of ink settled beside a blotter. Oranges pooled sun in a blue bowl.

Estinien took the end of the table with the quiet ease of someone who’d learned to belong in rooms that weren’t built for him. He turned pages for her when the binding stuck; weighted corners with neat coins when the vellum curled. He didn’t read unless she angled a book toward him. He looked, instead, at her hands: how they had returned to steadiness without losing the softness convalescence had taught them.

“The cedar’s gentler in here,” she said.

“I bribed the steward with oranges,” he said, and the corner of his mouth betrayed him.

She smiled, then stilled as the smell of ink rose—salt at the edge of it, as if the bottle remembered the sea. The library swam for a breath, and settled.

“Too much?” he asked.

“It’s the tide,” she said, surprised by the truth in it. “Coming in, going out.” She laid her palm low on her belly for a moment, then drew it back, not hiding—only keeping.

They began sorting pages into tidy drifts: field notes (sand-grit in the spine), letters unsent (creased, but never sealed), lists (clean, strictly practical, as if half-convinced survival were clerical work). At the bottom of one sat a journal bound in Sharlayan blue. Night Moon set a hand upon it and the room tilted again—not with nausea, but with memory.

“From the night before,” she said.

He waited.

She opened it. Her neat hand strode across the first page—two sentences, then a gap she had never filled.

If I do not speak to him tonight, I will spend another winter pretending silence is mercy. If I do speak, the law I carry in my blood will have one fewer place to hide.

The ink had bled at the dot after mercy, as if the quill had paused there and trembled.

—flashback (trigger: Sharlayan blue leather; the smell of ink and salt)—

Sharlayan’s lanterns swayed in the wind off the water. Night Moon stood at her table and watched ink dry. She had packed with the efficiency of someone fleeing not a place but a hesitation. The room smelled of paper and sea and the faint steam of fish stew that a woman at the market insisted she take, “for luck.”

A knock threaded the air—steady, known. Her pulse answered with its little flag of recognition.

She opened the door, and Estinien filled the threshold like a question carved out of shadow. “You summoned me,” he said. “I thought you sought counsel… not company.”

She let the quiet do half the work. “You doubted,” she said. “You didn’t misread.”

He drew breath as if the night had thinned. She stepped back. “Come in.”

Armor gave. Leather sighed. Steel found stone and was forgiven for it. They came together with the precision of people who had survived too long by being sure. His hands were careful until hers told them not to be. Her mouth was brave until his told it it could rest. The dragon’s low rumble lived under his breath; the god’s stillness lived in hers; where they met was mortal and exactly enough.

“Are you certain?” he asked, the last of his restraint cutting through.

“If I wasn’t,” she said, “you’d still be in the corridor.”

Later—heat gentled to warmth, dusk to night—they lay with their foreheads touching. He said he wanted more than this night in a voice that had learned how to carry grief without spilling it. She touched the red diamond at her brow—the law she wore even while she slept.

“My people don’t bind themselves to outsiders,” she told him. “We take what comfort we can and go.”

“You are not them,” he said. It wasn’t an argument. It was the only fact in a room full of choices.

She could have said yes then. The word hovered—light as a moth, dangerous as a spark. But tomorrow had teeth, and the law had memory, and in its shadow the right truth felt like a trap.

“After,” she said. “If I live. If you do. I’ll give you my answer after.”

He nodded like a knight receiving his charge. “After.”

—end flashback—

Back in the library, the window light made bright squares on the table. Night Moon’s fingers rested on the blue leather, coaxing the page to open flat.

“I wanted to say yes,” she said, not looking at him. “My mouth was full of it. I swallowed the word because I thought duty would choke on it later.”

He didn’t reach for her hand; he set his palm near and let the warmth rise. “I know,” he said. “I would have waited a decade and called it a good use of time.”

She huffed a breath that might have been a laugh if it had less history in it. “You don’t even like waiting for tea.”

“I’m improving,” he said solemnly, and one of the coins keeping a page flat slid, as if agreeing.

They went on sorting. The drifts became tidy stacks; the tidy stacks became a life that had always been shared, even when the sharing was done silently beside separate fires.

Among the unsent letters, she found one addressed to Lord Commander Aymeric and another to no one—just a line that trailed off the page as if it had tried to name him and decided names were too small.

“May I?” Estinien asked, nodding toward the Aymeric draft.

She angled it toward him. His eyes moved, and the library put itself at attention.

I cannot take your city’s warmth without confessing I do not yet know how to be warm in it. I am grateful, and I am not ready. Please accept both truths as honestly as I can give them.

“He accepted,” Estinien said quietly.

“He always does,” she answered, affection uncurling like steam.

A knock at the library door. The steward again—composed, grave. “A courier from Foundation, my lady. Word from the city watch: strangers on the Snowcloak road. Their cloaks are—the watch believes—of the Wood.”

The room cooled by a degree. Estinien did not turn his head.

“Invite them to parley at the Gate of Judgment,” he said. “Tomorrow. Daylight.”

“Yes, my lord Dragoon.” The steward dipped, the hard news wrapped in House Fortemps’ particular courtesy. “Lord Edmont is with the Temple Knights even now.”

When the door shut, Night Moon traced the blotter’s edge with a forefinger. “We knew this would happen.”

“Yes,” Estinien said. “It will not happen on their terms.”

“What if the law they bring is louder than the law of this house?” she asked, not because she doubted the answer, but because saying the question in the library made it less a specter and more a thing that could be measured and opposed.

“Then we will speak louder,” he replied. “We have friends who know how to be eloquent in steel and in parchment. And this is your house.”

She tipped her head. “Our.”

He let the word stand, taller than either of them, and was content to be held under its roof.

They returned to the journals because work is a kind of courage. She found the last page of the blue book—the place where she’d left the sentence unfinished—and took up her pen. The nib kissed the paper and bled a small dark bloom.

“You don’t have to,” Estinien said.

“I know.” She wrote anyway.

After is now. I choose, and the choosing does not unmake the warrior, the ward, or the law I was born into. It makes a third thing: a hearth I carry wherever he stands, and a lantern I keep for two lights.

She set the pen down, and the room expanded to fit the confession.

He didn’t read over her shoulder. He glanced only when she set the journal between them as if laying bread at the center of a table.

“You write like a commander,” he said.

“Better than a thief?”

“Much.” He reached—slow, deliberate—and took up a blank book from the stack the steward had provided. He opened to the first page and placed it in front of her. “Start a new one. For winter learned, not winter survived.”

She looked at the empty paper and felt it look back. “What should I call it?”

He considered. “Together,” he said. Then, as if correcting himself without negating the first truth: “For three.”

A flush rose under her skin—not heat-sick this time, not the near-vomit of cedar or the vertigo of ink. Warmth. She set a hand low, and the answering steadiness met her palm as if invited.

“Write the title,” he said softly.

She did. The letters sat simple and exact, more vow than decoration.

—flashback (trigger: the smell of ink; the sea beating against Sharlayan’s quay)—

Morning after. Not soft, exactly, but proof that softness could survive a night and find its way back. The sea beat its old drum against the quay. She rose first, quietly, and wrote the line about mercy and law and the word she had swallowed. She thought, then—briefly, foolishly—of simply staying. Of writing to the Fortemps and saying I will come later. I have found a place to rest my head that is not a wound.

Estinien stirred. It was a fragile thing, watching him unarmored by sleep. She reached and touched a lock of hair that had fallen over his brow, and the dragon’s breath rumbled low, content and very far from war.

He opened his eyes and did not pretend he didn’t know where he was or what had happened. “Good morning,” he said, the two most ordinary words made into something like a prayer by the way he didn’t force them to be bigger.

“Good morning,” she answered.

He didn’t ask for promises. She didn’t pretend the day wasn’t waiting with its ledger. They shared the stew cold from a bowl, laughing once when a gull shouted like a disapproving aunt.

When he left, he did it the way a man leaves a temple: not because he believes less, but because belief is something you live in the world, not only behind a door.

—end flashback—

The library returned. Snow freckled the window glass. Somewhere downstairs, the kitchen discovered that cloves in tea should be counted, not poured.

“Do you regret it?” Estinien asked, voice careful—about the night, about the after, about all of it.

“No.” She set the new journal square with the edge of the table. “I regret waiting as long as I did to say the word I meant.”

“Then we are even,” he said. “I regret learning so late how to wait without turning to stone.”

They sat a while longer, doing nothing and therefore much. When the light leaned toward late, the steward returned with a neat report: Aymeric would stand with Edmont at the Gate; the parley would be conducted with Ishgard’s old manners (which were armor that looked, from a distance, like courtesy).

“Will you go?” Estinien asked her, no pressure in it—only the offer to share the edge.

“Yes,” she said. “If the Wood wishes to speak of law, it can look me in the eye when it does.”

He nodded as if she’d chosen a stance and he approved the weight distribution.

“After,” she added, almost smiling at the word now that it had learned better behavior, “we will come back here and write it down. Not as victory, but as weather passed through.”

“Agreed,” he said.

He carried the stack of finished, sorted journals as if they were something fragile that could make a room fuller without making it crowded. She picked up the blue book and the new one, Together — For Three, and the pen that had finally learned her hand.

At her chamber door, she paused. The corridor’s quiet had the thickness of night on its way.

“Stay,” she said again, easy now in the saying. “It helps.”

He inclined his head. “It helps me too.”

He banked the fire; he set the tray where steam would not make everything taste like damp bread; he took the chair that had become his second post and let the day’s weight run out of his shoulders without shame.

In bed, on her side, she laid her palm to the small place where certainty answered. She did not question it. She did not apologize to the law she’d been born to. She thought instead of a lantern placed in a window and the way a city looks different when you know which door will always open.

“Together,” she said to the room.

“For three,” he replied, not asleep at all.

The ink dried. The tide went out. The house kept its watch.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5 — Ash & Snow

Coerthas set its jaw for the morning. Snow laid a clean edge on every stone; banners hung heavy blue from the lintels; the air wore that cathedral hush Ishgard keeps for days when words will be weighed.

Night Moon let Edmont’s people lace her into a Fortemps winter coat—wolf-gray, lined in patience. She left the hood back; the red diamond at her brow showed clear, not flaunted, not hidden. She took no helm, no veil. On her shoulder, a small pin: the house sigil, simple as heat.

Estinien waited in the antechamber, helm under his arm, armor disciplined to silence. He looked at her once—the way men check a line before battle, not to correct, only to confirm—and offered an arm. She didn’t take it; she laid two fingers lightly at his wrist instead, a touch that said with me without saying shield me.

The Gate of Judgment rose from the snow like an old sentence someone had decided to read more kindly. Temple Knights stood in quiet rows; standard-bearers held blue and white. Aymeric wore steel that looked like mercy by force of will alone. Edmont stood at his right hand, gray and grave and warm.

Opposite—beyond the threshold where parley made a narrow island of law—three Wood-warders waited. Tall, cloaks of bark-gray and leaf-dark, faces cast in the privacy of their own forest. The one in the center carried authority like a blade she did not have to draw.

Aymeric stepped first into the island. “You are welcome to parley under Ishgard’s peace,” he said. “Name yourselves, and we will know whom we greet.”

“I am Silva of the Hara, Wood-warder by charge of elders you do not know and laws you will not contest,” the woman said, voice flat as winter light. “We seek one marked by the royal diamond who has broken the Green Word and bound herself to an outsider.”

Estinien’s dragon-breath rumbled very, very low. He did not move. Aymeric’s eyes flicked once—I hear you—and returned to the emissary.

Edmont spoke without stepping forward, which is how old houses advance. “She is Night Moon, ward of Fortemps. This gate will hear you as guests so long as you speak as such. But it will not trade wards like coin.”

Silva’s gaze passed over Edmont as weather does over stone; it landed on Night Moon and stayed. “Child of the Wood. You were not given leave to bond. The mark you carry is not yours to wager. Return with us; release what you have taken. Our law may yet be merciful.”

Night Moon’s first breath tasted like the inside of a church; the second tasted like cold iron put between the teeth. She stepped to the very lip of the parley island and made her voice level.

“I walked your shade-paths,” she said. “I kept the hours your law kept. But you never stood guard over my nights the way the dead man from this city did. You never lifted me from a floor that remembered his blood. I am Night Moon of the Fortemps hearth now. I do not return.”

A brief sound—steel shifting to a more attentive ease—ran through the Temple Knights. Aymeric did not look away from Silva. Edmont’s chin lifted a degree: not pride; declaration.

Silva took in the coat, the pin, the uncovered diamond, the way Night Moon’s stance found ground instead of asking it to move. “You will be taken if you cannot be invited,” she said. “We do not barter for our own.”

Aymeric smiled, very slightly, and made courtesy into armor as only he can. “Your grievance is noted. Your claim is not. Ishgard recognizes no authority here but its own—and the law of the hearth that has taken her in.”

“The hearth harbors a thief,” Silva answered.

“A ward,” Edmont corrected, so gently it could have been affection.

Night Moon let the men speak for a breath; then she gave the room a truth it could not avoid. “Your law would punish what is not yet born,” she said—not admission, not denial; a stone placed where the foot must reckon. “If that is mercy, I ask the forest to name another word for it.”

Something moved in Silva’s eyes then. Not softness. Recognition. As when a hunter realizes the thing across the clearing is not prey but a mirror.

“Our law remembers,” Silva said. “It will remember this day.”

“Then let it remember the whole of it,” Aymeric said, and his voice took on that clean, ringing clarity that can hold a city together. “It will remember that Ishgard met the Wood with courtesy and did not yield its people to threat. It will remember that House Fortemps keeps what it keeps. And it will remember that we spoke while the bells were rung for parley, not for war. Take what memory you prefer; keep your hands to yourselves.”

Silva let silence work for her a long breath more. Then she set a palm to her heart—not a bow, not to Ishgard, but to the custom that says leave while leaving is still a choice. “Winter keeps what it catches,” she said. “We will come again when the snow thaws.”

“You may come,” Edmont answered, “and you will be received. But you will not be obeyed.”

The Wood-warders turned as one creature with three bodies and went back down the white road without looking behind them.

Only when they were past the last standing stone did the Temple Knights let out the quiet, collective breath of men who would have rather fought and are relieved they did not have to.

Aymeric turned to Night Moon and softened his posture by a fraction, which is the same as a bow from him when he means it. “You stood as if you had always stood here,” he said. “Thank you.”

Edmont’s hand hovered, hand of a father who remembers how not to presume. “Let us get you out of the cold,” he said. “There are letters to write, and men to place, and fires to keep.”

Estinien had not spoken. He did not need to. He moved at her side as they left the Gate—half a step behind, exactly placed to be between her and anything that required a spear without looking like a wall.

They took the long corridor under the outer keep—a passage that remembered storms and how to refuse them. Aymeric and Edmont fell behind with the steward to begin dividing the city’s manners into a strategy. Night Moon slowed near a narrow window where winter light fell like a benediction on old stone.

“Here,” she said, which meant stop, and also now.

Estinien stopped.

She faced him and set both hands to the collar of her coat, unhooking the clasp so the winter light could find her brow. The diamond burned quiet red.

“In Garlemald,” she said, “they saw this and called me by a law.” A thin smile. “You chose me anyway.”

He didn’t pretend not to know the memory she meant.

—flashback (trigger: the way winter light breaks on stone; Garlemald alley)—

Smoke made alleyways of the city’s sky. Night Moon came out of a doorway with her jaw set, the scarf at her throat too thin for the cold and too stubborn to admit it. Two Legati strayed wrong and tried to make a law with their hands, not their book.

“You—Dalmascan stock,” one sneered, seeing the diamond and naming it wrong on purpose. “Bought or stolen?”

She didn’t answer. She lowered her stance and turned so their grip had to move through her instead of on her. The second reached. She let the first’s wrist slide and caught the second’s elbow in a neat piece of geometry that broke his certainty, not the bone.

Estinien was there before the third breath—he did not shout, did not posture, did not declare a war he could win louder by being quiet. He took space the way weather does and the men found themselves outnumbered by one man and his intention.

“Leave,” he said. No threat. An offer to stop being a mistake.

They were not brave; they were bureaucratic. They decided against paperwork, spat something about wild blood, and went to find a safer cruelty.

She rolled her shoulder once, checked her own bones with the care a carpenter gives a good beam, and looked at him.

He did not ask are you hurt. He looked at the diamond, then back to her eyes, and moved his helm to his left hand so the right would be free if she wanted it.

“Drink?” he asked. A cup, an inn, a here-is-where-people-are-kind.

She took his hand instead. “Walk,” she said.

He walked. An hour later, in a dark that smelled less of fire, he realized the decision had been made, and it was his and it was hers and it did not require minutes spoken aloud to keep it.

—end flashback—

“Choose me again,” she said now, Ishgard light on her brow.

Estinien’s mouth didn’t tremble, but something in the way he breathed told the truth for him. He lifted a hand, not gauntleted, and set two fingers just below the diamond, not touching skin until she tipped her head so he would have to. When she did, he bent and pressed his mouth to the mark with a reverence that had nothing to do with obedience.

“Blessing,” he said against her skin. “Not chain.”

Heat walked deliberate circles under her sternum—neither fever nor fear. Lower, a softer tempo answered, sure as dawn when you’ve known too many nights. She caught his wrist and kept it there long enough for truth to cross skin to skin.

He stilled, the dragon in him going quiet the way dragons do when they recognize a flame from their own hoard. He didn’t say I know. He didn’t say I will kill for you if asked. He let the kiss be the vow, and the answering be the benediction.

She closed the clasp of her coat and the light left the diamond dull as ash under wool. “Edmont will want letters,” she said, voice steady again. “Aymeric will want patrols.”

“And you?” Estinien asked.

“I want to sit where the window catches afternoon and copy down what was said,” she answered. “So I don’t forget how my hands were not shaking.”

He nodded. “I’ll fetch the ink that doesn’t smell like the quay.”

She smiled, small as a secret someone intends to keep only until it can be gifted. “Thank you.”

The study received them like a signet takes impressions: soft wax, firm seal. Edmont stood over a map of the Snowcloak road with Aymeric, who made neat notes in a hand that looked like a strategy learning how to be legible.

“Your Grace,” Night Moon said, with the old title that still felt right in this room. “May I add a thing for the record?”

Aymeric lifted his quill.

“The emissary said winter keeps what it catches,” she recited. “Let it be written that this winter keeps what it chooses to keep.”

Aymeric’s mouth did that near-smile that is functionally a treaty. “So written,” he said. He signed the page: A. de Borel, a line precise as a blade.

Edmont sealed letters for the commander of the watch, for the quartermaster, for a lady in the Brume who owed him a favor it would make her day to repay. He turned then and put the full weight of a father’s kindness where it belonged.

“Child,” he said to Night Moon, and the old word made the room warmer by a degree. “If the Wood sends visitors while I sleep, wake me. The house speaks better when its master is noisy.”

She laughed; the sound surprised her. “I will.”

Aymeric set the quill down and came around the table, a breach of command etiquette that signaled friend rather than lord. “We will be plain,” he said. “You are not to be touched. Not by law, not by presumption. If your kinsmen must speak, they will do it where Ishgard can hear, and they will do it kindly or not at all.”

She bowed her head. “Thank you.”

Estinien folded himself back into the room’s edges the way a body learns to be furniture in a place it intends to guard. He watched words become logistics, and logistics become men at gates, and men at gates become an afternoon that would pass without incident if the gods remembered their manners.

When the business dwindled to errands, he touched Night Moon’s sleeve with two fingers. “Library?” he asked.

“Library,” she confirmed.

The Fortemps library received them with the same discreet warmth as before. The table remembered their elbows; the blue bowl remembered the oranges. She set her Sharlayan journal down beside the new one—Together — For Three—and uncapped a bottle of ink that didn’t smell like tide.

She wrote:

Parley in winter. Law tried to name me—house named me back. I did not tremble. My hands remembered how to be sure.

Estinien read the line because she left the book turned toward him. “Accurate,” he said.

“Flatter me,” she replied.

“You stood,” he answered, “as if the floor had practiced for you.”

She set the pen down and let the silence thicken to comfort. The two lights kept their quiet conversation below and behind and within, a steadying duet that asked nothing of the room.

“Tonight,” she said after a time, eyes on the window, “I would like you to stay again. Not because of warders. Because the house is teaching me how to sleep without listening for doors.”

“I will,” he said, immediate as breath.

“And—” she touched the diamond, not coy, not theatrical; simply acknowledging a place on her body that had been law and was now blessing “—you may kiss this again, when we’re alone.”

He did not close his eyes, but the moment took him the way mercy takes a knee. “I will,” he said again, and the repetition felt not like habit but like learning a language very carefully so you do not break it.

Outside, the snow remembered how to be gentle. At the Gate, men in blue and white exchanged shifts and polite insults and did not have to draw. In the Brume, someone found enough for dinner and called it luck. Far down the road, three shapes became trees again when they were far enough away to be mistaken for anything but themselves.

And in a library where oranges looked like small suns in a blue bowl, a Viera who had been told she could not choose set her hand to a page and chose, and a Dragoon who had taught his body to be a spear taught it the easier, harder craft of staying.

The ink dried. The ash kept its counsel. The snow forgot how to be cruel for an afternoon.

Chapter Text

Chapter 6 — A Ward Returned

House Fortemps wore celebration like a well-mended cloak—visible in light and lines and the way servants moved a fraction faster when there was joy to be done.

By evening the great hall had learned warmth again. Braziers made low suns along the walls; blue and white banners held their breath; long tables pared themselves down to something intimate. Edmont insisted on a smaller board near the hearth—room enough for family without the echo of ceremony.

Night Moon let the house dress her in wolf-gray and patience. The red diamond at her brow was not hidden; a simple Fortemps pin settled at her shoulder like a compact. When she stepped into the hall, the hum gentled—no hush, just an adjustment as if the stone was remembering a step it had missed.

Edmont came to meet her, not waiting behind the table like a lord. “Child,” he said, the old word fitting as if the years had kept it polished. “You are home.”

“Thank you,” she answered, small and exact. “For keeping the hearth when I could not.”

Emmanellain arrived in a coat too fine for sense and somehow entirely right, a bottle in hand and nerves tucked mostly away. “Please don’t make speeches, Father,” he stage-whispered, doing his best not to look at the diamond. He failed and managed to look reverent instead of foolish. “You look… well,” he told Night Moon, and then, with relief, “Dragoon.” He clasped Estinien’s forearm with a sincerity that used to hide; it didn’t tonight.

Honoroit bobbed in their wake, face bright. “My lady,” he said to Night Moon, producing a parcel of paper and twine. “A book of winter recipes—Madame Trovair swears the broth on page six wards off every ill in Coerthas.”

“I will test its claims,” Night Moon said, smiling as if she meant to pass or fail a saint.

They dined like people mending: good bread, a stew that took its time, wine Edmont measured instead of poured. Estinien sat at Night Moon’s left, a half-breath farther than intimacy, nearer than duty. No one remarked on the place he kept. Their talk braided small things and necessary ones: patrols at the Gate; a Brume family who needed wood; the courier way to Camp Dragonhead—still passable.

Twice during the meal Night Moon set down her spoon and breathed carefully through a heat that rose and receded like weather. Edmont noticed and pretended not to; servants altered the braziers as if in response to draft. Estinien did nothing visible except match his own breath to the pace she asked for.

When the servants brought pears poached in wine and honey, Emmanellain leaned back with his glass and tried to be idle with dignity. “A toast?” he asked the room, then focused, correctly, on Night Moon. “To those who return. And to those who waited.”

Edmont lifted his cup a fraction. “And to those who kept the door unlatched,” he added, eyes soft on old stone.

Night Moon did not drink. She touched her cup to the table and let the sound be the agreement.

—flashback (trigger: the word “door” and the warmth on old stone)—

The first winter she crossed the threshold of Fortemps not as guest but with her name written into the ledger as ward, Night Moon stood just inside the entry and could not make her feet understand that the floor would take them. The air smelled of cedar and old linen, a hand extended and not withdrawn. She held still like a creature who has learned not to belong anywhere for too long.

Haurchefant found her there—the one man who could make stone seem like a kindness rather than a test.

“Come,” he said with that warm certainty he lent like a glove. “We keep doors unlatched in winter, lest joy be late.”

He shrugged out of his cloak and set it around her shoulders without making her responsible for the gesture. “We keep cloaks, too,” he added, delighting in giving as if it were sport. “If you return it, I will accept it. If you don’t, I will accept that as well.”

Bread appeared from nowhere, as it always did for him—crusted, warm, as if a baker had decided to be the sun for a living. “Eat in the hall, or by the fire, or in the garden in defiance of sense. If you choose the corridor, I will stand here and pretend it is an excellent dining room.”

She laughed despite the ache in her chest. The sound surprised them both; he looked every inch a man who had just seen a star move in daylight.

“The room at the bend,” he said, voice easy again. “It has a window that refuses to freeze even when the world tries. It is yours while you are ours.”

He went ahead to lift the latch and did not close the door behind her. Later that night, waking to the soft knock of regret, she found the door still open by an inch—enough to see light, enough to make the dark behave.

—end flashback—

Edmont was telling an ash-dry story about a wayward chandelier when Night Moon’s mouth lifted without intent.

“Something funny?” he asked, pleased at the possibility.

“Only that I’ve remembered how this house cheats winter,” she said. “An extra log, a door unlatched, and someone who refuses to let the dark have the last word.”

Edmont’s gaze turned briefly toward the portrait that held Haurchefant as a boy—mischief tamed by painterly affection. “We were taught by a good master,” he said.

Emmanellain toyed with his glass, then set it down before it could become a problem. “I’m not that master,” he said carefully, “but if you need a door to stay open, I am—remarkably—competent with doors.”

Honoroit whispered, “He tells the truth,” and earned an elbow for his honesty.

After the plates were cleared and the wine offered then withdrawn with mutual relief, Edmont rose. “Walk a moment?” he asked Night Moon.

Estinien stood instinctively. Edmont shook his head. “Let me be old in peace,” he said, affectionate. “You’ll get more exercise than I will.” Estinien sat, exactly as asked.

They took the long passage that uncoiled toward the family study. Portraits kept watch without judgment; torches learned to be quiet.

“I owe you plain words,” Edmont said once the study door closed. The room was small for a lord, large for a father; the desk had known better uses than command. “This house keeps what it keeps. We will not open our hands because a forest knocks loudly.”

“I know,” she said. The words came easier here.

“I owe you more plainness,” he went on. “You left because grief turned every step into an apology. You have returned because apology turned back into a step.”

Night Moon exhaled, something like a burden rebalancing itself on the back where it could be carried. “Yes.”

Edmont poured tea as if it were counsel. “There is one place this house cannot make warm for you,” he said softly. “The Vault. But it can make going there less cold.”

She did not answer at first. The room listened with them; even the fire let its wood be quiet.

“I thought,” she said, “that if I never set my feet on that stone again, I could unlearn what it kept. I was wrong.”

“You were tired,” Edmont replied. “Rest makes poor plans and should not be held to them.”

She looked down at her hands. They had learned to be strong and gentle in the same week. “I will go,” she said. “If I go alone, I will make a pilgrimage of penance. If I go with family, I will make a blessing.”

“We will go as family,” Edmont said. “And if blessing eludes us, we will try gratitude. It is less eager to hide.”

He set his palm over hers across the desk—a contact light enough to be refused, steady enough to be felt. “When you stand there, remember this: he died saving a ward he loved because he could not imagine doing otherwise. He bargained no pride, traded no future. He smiled, because that is how he spoke when speech was not wanted. The rest belongs to the gods.”

Her breath shook and settled. “Thank you,” she said. “For knowing how to speak of him without breaking him.”

Edmont’s mouth creased. “He was very hard to break.”

They left the study by the quiet door used by servants who do not like to intrude but must. In the corridor Night Moon paused at a window where Ishgard’s roofs shouldered frost like obligations they had chosen. Estinien waited where she would expect him: not enough to shadow, enough to be reached.

“How many stairs is the chapel these days?” she asked.

“Fewer when taken together,” he said.

“Walk, then,” she answered.

They climbed, not hurry and not ritual—just the ordinary work of placing one foot and then another. The small chapel off the upper hall smelled of beeswax and stone that had heard every kind of prayer and kept them all.

They sat in a pew that fit them because it had been made when men were a fraction narrower. Estinien kept his hands easy on his knees; she kept hers content in her lap until the room spoke memory and she set one palm low, where a new rhythm met her own and made a third.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We go to the Vault.”

“I’ll arrange the escort,” he said. “Cloaks, mounts, a priest who can keep his counsel and his footing.”

“No priest,” she said gently. “Only us. And Edmont, if he wishes.”

“He will wish,” Estinien replied.

They were quiet then—two people letting a small room do what small rooms do best.

—flashback (trigger: beeswax, stone, a young laugh caught in wood grain)—

First winter again, later that same day. Night Moon had tried to navigate Fortemps as if it were a test she might fail. She found herself at a hallway window watching men teach boys how to be brave when the lesson should have been how to be kind.

Haurchefant joined her in the reflection more than in the glass. “There is a trick to staying,” he said, unasked. “You pick a place that doesn’t feel like it needs you to earn it every hour.”

“And if no such place exists?” she asked.

“Then you counterfeit it,” he said cheerfully. “You pick a window and a bench and sit there every day until the house gives in and begins to think you were born with it.”

He led her to the small chapel and showed her where the bench remembered a family. He set a single candle and lit it as if he were ushering the sun in without fuss.

“This can be yours,” he said. “When I am away, when I am near, when I am no longer either. Let it be the place where you don’t have to be useful to be welcome.”

She had not known how to do that. He had known how to teach it.

—end flashback—

Back in the small chapel, Night Moon touched the pew’s worn edge, feeling grooves smoothed by care rather than neglect.

“He taught me this,” she said.

“He taught many of us,” Estinien replied. “Some of us remember at better speeds than others.”

She smiled, a sound made with her mouth. “You remember at the speed that keeps me.”

He inclined his head, accepting the merit and the charge.

She took his hand then and guided it to the place where two lights made one answer. He did not startle. He had expected the world to be arranged like this in time.

“For three,” he said.

“For three,” she returned.

A bell chimed somewhere inside the stone—a small hour, unimportant to anyone who had to count more than memory. The sound moved through them and out.

They sat until the bench warmed under them. When they rose, the chapel let them go with the economy of a place that knows it will see you again.

In the corridor, at the turn where the window learned morning earlier than the rest, she stopped and looked down on Ishgard holding its winter without complaint.

“I am ready,” she said—not a brave face, not performance. Inventory.

He nodded once. “Then we’ll go at first light.”

They returned to the room that had learned their night-quiet. Estinien banked the fire to a generous glow. Night Moon laid the new journal—Together — For Three—on the table and wrote a single line:

Tomorrow we carry our warmth into a cold room and refuse to set it down.

She left the book open to let the ink say its piece to the air. At the door to sleep, she hesitated only long enough to make the smallest vow a person can make and keep: “Stay.”

“I will,” he said.

He took the chair. She took the bed. The house kept them both.

Outside, Coerthas rehearsed another snowfall. Inside, a ward returned to the only hearth that could hold what the stars and the gods had given her back. In the quiet, between one breath and the next, the two lights kept their duet.

Tomorrow, the Vault. Tonight, warmth.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7 — Benediction

Dawn hadn’t chosen a color yet. The manor lay in that held-breath gray where even tea forgets to steam.

Night Moon woke without being called. The room knew her and didn’t insist; the fire had banked itself to embers that remembered their lesson. She sat up slowly, palms open on the quilt as if accepting terms. When she stood, nothing protested. That was new and kind.

She wrapped a shawl and walked the corridor to the small chapel Haurchefant had once shown her—the bench that remembers families, the beeswax that remembers every prayer and forgives most of them. No servants. No footfall but hers. She lit a single candle because that is what you do when you mean to ask a room to speak plainly.

She set her hand, almost without thinking, to the low curve of her belly.

There it was again. The not-quite-sound. A second tempo under her own. Not insistence. Not demand. Answer.

She closed her eyes.

Pieces aligned the way stars do when you finally step far enough from the city to see them:
— the chirurgeon’s soft words: Two lights. The smaller carries a familiar warmth.
— the winter room when Haurchefant faded and the glow at her brow split into two sparks.
— the dream where he pressed a small lantern into her hand and the light slipped through skin and settled where new pulses are kept.
— the way the house itself had recognized something, altering braziers and bread and silence to accommodate a rhythm it did not name.

It was not a voice that told her. It was not an apparition.

It was recognition so complete it didn’t need a name.

“Ah,” she said to the quiet, as if a knot had finally confessed what it was tied to. Her throat worked once; the next breath didn’t hurt.

She didn’t ask is it truly you. Haurchefant had never been a riddle. He had always been a gesture: an open door, a cloak placed without making you responsible for it, a laugh that warmed a stone room and then lingered as if the room had learned how.

She smoothed her palm and felt that familiar warmth answer, shy and sure.

“My brave knight,” she whispered, and the words were not possession and not worship. “Not away from me. Through me.”

The candle’s flame leaned as if something in the room had agreed.

She sat with it a long time, not praying exactly—more like keeping company. When the bell counted the small hour, she stood. She did not wake Estinien. She wanted to carry the knowledge alone for a little while, the way you carry a letter from someone you love down a hallway because paper deserves the time it takes to become a message.

By the time she returned to her chamber, the sky had chosen a thin blue. Estinien stirred in the chair like a man rising from a watch he hadn’t slept through so much as survived. He meant to say good morning and caught himself. He saw her face and let the words be smaller.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. It meant for the Vault, and also for something that didn’t have a staircase.

They left after the house learned breakfast—bread, broth, a fruit that tasted of a country with fewer rules about winter. Edmont rode with them because he was a father and because some acts are not delegated. No Temple Knights beyond two who knew how to be quiet; no priest. The road to the Vault knew their mounts. Snow cleared its throat but did not speak.

At the crest where Ishgard looks like a saint cut from ice and patience, Night Moon set her jaw against the wind and against the stone that already remembered more than anyone should. Estinien rode a half-length ahead when the path narrowed, a habit learned from cliffs and kept for grief.

Near the great doors, Edmont lifted a hand. “Here,” he said. “We walk from here.”

They did. Boots on old steps. The doors knew their weight and did not argue. The vestibule smelled the way religion always does when it’s been asked to house too much: incense and apology and time.

She did not crouch under the weight. She did not rush.

In the nave, the light fell cold and honest through stained glass that had watched better days and worse. The floor was the same floor. All the lye and scrubbing, all the priestly words, none of it had convinced the stone to forget.

Night Moon stood where she had once fallen to her knees and learned that all the grace in the world cannot be made into a bargain. She laid her palm flat on the stone as if taking an oath to it.

“Listen,” she said—not to the gods. To the floor. To herself.

She let the room come as it would: the bright, obscene silence after a lance has done what lances do; the impossible warmth of a man’s hand holding you up as he fell; the way his smile had refused the role of tragedy even while tragedy insisted. She let the memory arrive and did not make it a weapon.

Estinien stood back where she couldn’t see him, because even love can be too close when you’re making an old pain look you in the eye.

Edmont placed a hand on a pew like a man laying claim to a piece of his own heart in public so that it would behave. He said nothing.

Night Moon lifted her hand from the floor and placed it over the diamond at her brow. The mark felt warmer than the air. A pulse ticked there, steady—the house’s pulse, her own, the unborn one learning the tempo.

“I would have kept you,” she said into the stone and the glass and the years. “I would have kept you until I vanished under the weight. But you asked me to live.”

Her palm lowered—to the low place where the new rhythm answered.

“I know who you are,” she said, quietly. Not a decree. A recognition. “I know what you’ve chosen. I will carry you as blessing, not chain.”

A draft, where drafts don’t go, circled her ankles like a laugh. The colored light off the glass warmed by a degree, or else her eyes learned to receive it that way. Somewhere beyond the nave a bell gave a single, decisive note, as if the building had apologized for something and been forgiven.

Then, deep inside, the second tempo shifted—no pain, not even discomfort. A settling. Like a bird testing air and deciding it would hold. Night Moon’s breath broke once and re-knit. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and laughed the smallest, irreverent sound anyone has ever made in a church.

Edmont looked away with the careful politeness of men who know when they ought to be furniture.

Estinien stepped forward to stand near—but not on—the memory. Night Moon reached without turning and found his fingers the way a needle finds north. She placed his hand where hers had been, low and careful.

He went absolutely still. Not fear. Recognition of a different sort.

“Two lights,” she whispered, and then, for him alone: “One of them is Haurchefant.”

He shut his eyes because sometimes the only way to look straight at joy is to close them. When he opened them again, there was water there and something steadier under it.

“Not away,” he said, the words learning themselves in his mouth. “Through.”

“Yes.”

He swallowed. The dragon in him, which had learned to be loud when it had to be, made a sound more like purring than any battlefield noise had taught it. He set his brow to hers briefly because there are only so many appropriate gestures in a church and he had just used the one that mattered.

Edmont cleared his throat softly and found that his eyes had chosen to be useful rather than dry. “Shall I… leave a tithe that covers three?” he asked, entirely practical.

“Leave bread,” Night Moon said, smiling with a dangerous amount of gentleness. “The hungry find their way to this floor more reliably than coins do.”

“Bread, then,” Edmont said, and if his voice made him sound more like a father than a count, no one corrected the record.

They stood a few breaths more because leaving too quickly teaches a room the wrong lesson. Then they made for the doors, not as fugitives and not as victors—just people who had finished a necessary thing and could now do the next ones.

Outside, the cold was interested in them, but not cruel.

At the bottom of the steps, Estinien lifted a hand to help her mount. She set her boot in the stirrup and paused—not for balance. For words.

“Listen to me,” she said. “This is not haunting. It is not penance. It is gift.”

“I know,” he said, and he did. “We will make him a childhood that understands doors left unlatched.”

“We don’t know he,” she began, habit taking the reins; then she stopped. Haurchefant had never been an argument. “But yes,” she said. “We will.”

He vaulted to his saddle like a man whose knees remember how. Edmont took his mount with all the dignity of a grandfather who had chosen not to pretend to be forty. They turned back toward home.

Halfway down the path, Estinien reached across open air and found her glove. He did not grip. He linked. A ridiculous gesture on horseback, impractical and blessed. She laughed—Freely. He grinned like a man who had stolen a minute from a long war and meant to spend it.

The house met them with bread already set aside, because Edmont had sent a boy ahead with a bare sentence and the kitchen had translated it into kindness. Night Moon broke the first loaf herself and carried it back out to the chapel, set it in a basket where people with nothing to trade might find it tonight.

When she returned to her room, the light had chosen afternoon. Estinien stood by the window with his helm under his arm, not because he intended to leave but because some part of him thought one should always have the right tool to hand.

She closed the door behind her and leaned there a breath. Then she crossed to him and took the helm away, set it on a chair, and set her palms to his face with the easy authority of a person who has finally believed a truth and now intends to live it.

“It’s him,” she said, not as revelation but as a thing that will organize the furniture of their lives from now on. “He asked to be carried. The star and the gods obliged.”

Estinien’s smile broke slow and unsteady and absolutely sure by the time it finished. “Then we will carry him,” he said. “We will carry him until he can carry us by asking for bread at an ungodly hour and insisting the garden wants a fort built in it.”

She laughed, and some thread in the room snapped and retied itself in a better pattern. “He will be insufferable.”

“He will be loved,” Estinien said, and the word put new weight in the floorboards in the best way.

She touched the diamond with two fingers. “Blessing,” she reminded, though neither of them needed the reminder now.

He bent and kissed it once—no theater, no plea. Then, gentler, he lowered and kissed the place where the second light made itself known. Not worship. Welcome.

“Together,” he said, and this time the room added the rest on its own.

“For three,” she answered.

Outside, the bells told a practical hour: time to set tables, time to call children in before snow learns the trick of getting lost. Inside, a vow did not get larger; it got simpler. And in the quiet under Night Moon’s pulse, the smaller one kept time, steady as a man who once held a cloak to a shivering shoulder and said stay.

The hearth, which had been waiting to be told its work, got on with it.

Chapter Text

Chapter 8 — The Oath We Keep

Morning found the manor already about its work. Snow tried its best against the windows; the fire pretended it had never once needed coaxing.

Night Moon woke with steadiness instead of caution. The room answered with the soft industry of a house that has learned people’s breaths and keeps time by them. She rinsed her face at the basin, paused as the cool climbed her wrists, then let a palm rest low—a reflex becoming rite. The smaller tempo answered: not loud. Certain.

Estinien stirred in the hearth chair, hair a touch unruly in a way only sleep and relief can manage. He lifted his head and did not ask a question. He could see the answer.

“Good morning,” he said. The words were ordinary; the tone was not.

“Good morning,” she returned, and it felt like a promise made in plain clothes.

A tap at the door. The chirurgeon entered, gray plait neat, hands gentled by long practice. She was efficient in the manner of women who keep households alive by making miracles look like chores.

“May I?” she asked.

Night Moon offered her wrist; the chirurgeon listened—first with mortal fingers, then with that quiet hum of aether that always made the room tuck its shirt in. Her eyes took on that softened look again.

“For the ledger,” she said, crisp: “Strength sound. Avoid cedar. Eat when you do not wish to; rest when you think you needn’t.”

For them alone, voice barely above the fire: “Two lights. Both steady.” A brief, amused warmth. “The smaller enjoys oranges and disapproves of cedar smoke and pride.”

Night Moon huffed a laugh that startled itself. Estinien looked, for a moment, like a man given an order he would be proud to follow.

“Return tomorrow,” Night Moon said. “We will do as told.”

“I’ll return,” the chirurgeon promised, and left a small parcel on the table—dried ginger, willow-bark, a note in a hand that had scolded dukes and consoled paupers with equal skill.

When the door shut, quiet stood with them. Estinien reached, palm up. She placed hers in it.

“Today we tell the house,” she said. “Not the city. Not the Wood. The house.”

He nodded. “Edmont first. Aymeric after. Alphinaud and Alisaie—when you wish.”

“Before night,” she decided. “The day should learn its own news.”

The study held them as if it had expected this conversation since the foundation was set. Edmont stood by the window with a letter already half-drafted, the ink behaving.

Night Moon didn’t make a speech. She crossed the carpet, took his hands, and pressed them—without drama, without apology—over the place where certainty answered. He didn’t gasp. He closed his eyes and the years at his temples eased.

“Ah,” he said, and the one syllable learned a dozen kinds of joy. When he looked up, his face was all father. “We will keep three warm, then.”

Estinien stood back, shoulders set in a way that wore pride like good armor, not display. Edmont went to him and did a thing that was not Ishgardian at all—he took the Dragoon’s forearm and then, briefly, his shoulder.

“You are family,” he said.

“Thank you,” Estinien answered, voice rough at the edges because life had not trained him for this kind of honor. “We will keep your house’s trust.”

“We will keep each other,” Edmont corrected. “The house merely assists.”

They set to the small work that keeps storms from getting ideas. Edmont drafted a private order: the watch would receive Warders with tea and the kind of manners that make people reconsider bad choices. Aymeric would be informed that House Fortemps’ ward required no interventions save the ones already in motion. Two additional hearths would be lit in the Brume “in honor of winter’s future” — a tradition invented on the spot and immediately old.

“And if the Wood knocks very loudly?” Edmont asked, businesslike.

“Then we talk louder,” Night Moon said. “And if they try to touch what is not theirs, Ishgard will remember its armor.”

“Ishgard never forgets its armor,” Edmont said mildly, sealing the letter. “It sometimes forgets its hearth. We will not.”

Aymeric received them in a room that had clearly been convinced to hold warmth against its better instincts. He read Edmont’s letter once, twice, and then tucked it where important things go.

“Congratulations,” he said, not making a ceremony of it and yet turning the air a degree warmer by the way he meant it. “You will not be troubled. If trouble insists, it will learn diplomacy at great length.”

Night Moon inclined her head. “Thank you.”

Aymeric’s gaze flicked to Estinien, gentled by an old battlefield and a thousand unspoken moments. “If I ever accused you of being ungovernable, I withdraw it. You are perfectly, admirably governed.”

Estinien’s mouth almost smiled. “By very few.”

“The best governments are small,” Aymeric said. “Go home, both of you. Let me write letters until my quill needs a barber.”

They left with the peculiar buoyancy that follows a kindness delivered as policy.

Day folded itself into the kinds of hours people forget to write songs about, and which therefore are the ones worth living: a walk in the winter garden where bare branches held snow like lace; a kitchen lesson in how much cinnamon is not too much (more than Estinien thought, less than Emmanellain hoped); a visit to the tiny Fortemps oratory where a shelf of worn hymnals smelled of beeswax and generations of clean hands.

Estinien, who had slain gods and befriended dragons, learned how to brew tea without scalding it. He failed once and apologized to the pot. Night Moon, who had walked the edge of the star, learned the trick of taking the stairs slow in a way that didn’t make her feel hunted by weakness. She did it twice, and the second time the house’s creaks sounded approving.

—flashback (trigger: the oranges on the kitchen table)—

Sharlayan market. A woman who sold fish and luck had pressed a bowl of oranges into Night Moon’s hands the week before departure. “For journeys,” the woman said. Night Moon had laughed and bought a second bowl so luck wouldn’t go hungry. Estinien had carried both as if they weighed more than stone and meant more than that, and when they reached her room he’d peeled one awkwardly, fingers suddenly too big, trying not to waste the skin. She had taken the mangled thing and eaten it like holiness, laughing into her wrist.
—end—

Midafternoon, Honoroit arrived at the library with a bundle shyly offered. “A blanket,” he said to Night Moon, ears pink. “My stitches are… learning. But it is warm.”

“It’s perfect,” she said, and meant perfect as a particular — the thing made by these hands, now. She set it over the back of the chair Estinien favored, and the chair accepted it as if that had always been its coat.

She took out the new journal and wrote a line: Today we told the house. It already knew, the way stone knows whose footsteps it expects.

Estinien watched her pen move, then reached into his cloak and produced something not quite shyly—wood, shaped and not yet stained. A small lantern, carved by hand, its panes left open for light that would one day exist.

“I am… learning,” he said, as if confessing to a crime against artistry.

Night Moon took it like a summons to joy. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a beginning,” he agreed. “We can set it in a window when the time is right. He always liked… windows.” He didn’t say Haurchefant’s name; he didn’t have to.

She set the lantern on the sill where winter light made a promise of its edges.

—flashback (trigger: the lantern’s cutouts)—

A night in Foundation. Haurchefant had stayed late past any sensible hour to light a small lamp in a window overlooking the Brume. “For a boy who runs messages at a poor time of day,” he’d said, and grinned when the boy arrived two breaths later, cheeks bright from the cold and the relief of a light saying here.
“Lamps in windows save more souls than sermons,” he’d told Night Moon then. “You’ll see.”
—end—

The afternoon drifted into evening. Alphinaud and Alisaie arrived without fanfare, as if they were simply two young people calling on a friend. Alphinaud’s relief was the kind that steadies your hands when you cut bread. Alisaie’s hug made a point of not being careful and was precisely careful, which is her paradox and her gift.

Night Moon didn’t tell them; she didn’t have to. Alisaie’s eyes flicked to Estinien, then to Night Moon’s face, then softened in a way that looked a lot like triumph under manners. Alphinaud, who had learned to know when not to be clever, bowed his head as if to a good plan. “We will be discreet,” he said, which from him meant a thing as binding as ink.

“Thank you,” Night Moon said. “For the ship,” she added to both, and the word hung in the room for a second—the place where body returned before soul. Alphinaud’s mouth trembled; Alisaie cleared her throat in a way that could have been anything.

When they left, the house felt briefly larger without getting colder. Estinien banked the fire; Night Moon drew the blanket over the hearth chair’s back. The day had put itself in order.

“Walk?” he asked, meaning the upper corridor where the window learned morning early.

“Walk,” she said.

They moved unhurried through the halls. Portraits looked on without test. Winter breathed its measured breath at the glass.

At the window, Night Moon stopped. Below, Ishgard kept its patient rituals: lamps lit, doors checked, a child called in with a scold that was mostly love.

“Once,” she said, “I thought vows lived on battlefields or not at all.”

“And now?” he asked.

“Now I think they live where tea doesn’t boil over, and where a house knows your step when you are only thinking of entering a room.”

He stood with her in the quiet until the window learned their reflections. Then he reached into his belt pouch and took out a small thing: a clasp, simple, iron worked into the shape of a lantern. Fortemps make, humble and exact.

“I would not ask marriage while the Wood is counting laws,” he said, careful with each word. “But—if you will have it—I would make a token for the oath that already lives in our days.”

She studied the clasp the way you study a path you mean to walk no matter the weather. The iron held the soft sheen of good intent. She lifted the edge of her cloak and drew it closer to her throat; he stepped nearer and fastened the clasp. The lantern sat there, neat, brave.

“Together,” she said.

He bent, kissed the diamond, then the clasp. “For three.”

They stood until the house dimmed the corridor of its own accord, as if to give the scene its ending.

Night put itself on without fuss. In their room, the fire learned the trick of keeping company; the chair learned the trick of not creaking when a Dragoon tries not to look like he’s guarding a door.

Night Moon opened the journal and set it on the small table between them. “Will you write?” she asked.

He hesitated—the hesitation of a man taught that words are a battlefield he hadn’t trained for. Then he took the pen and wrote, in a neat hand that made room for truth:

I will stand where warmth is needed and be taught how to keep it. I will fight when asked and wait when asked. I will carry what is given, and not make of it a chain. — E.W.

She read it, and the room altered—no magic, only the physics of two people making a shape that fit them.

She added beneath:

We will set a lantern in the window for him who comes, as it was once set for us. We will keep doors unlatched.

She signed with a small diamond. It wasn’t vanity. It was the mark as blessing, recorded without apology.

“Stay?” she asked, although she knew the answer.

“I will,” he said.

He banked the fire; he set the tray where steam and ink would not quarrel; he took the chair that had become a post and a home both. She lay down, hand to the place where the two lights kept their duet.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night,” he returned.

The house kept them in the uncomplicated way a good house does. Outside, snow fell as if it had never been cruel. Somewhere in the Brume, a hearth was lit earlier than needed because a Fortemps letter had asked it. At the Gate, men in blue and white shifted, cracked jokes too low to carry, and felt bored, which is the best kind of victory.

Inside, a vow small enough to live in pockets and big enough to shoulder winter settled into the work of being kept.

Together.

For three.

Chapter Text

Chapter 9 — Blood & Bark

The parley left a clean bruise on the day—nothing broken, everything tender. Ishgard put the gate back in its hinges and pretended not to watch the road. House Fortemps returned to its chores with the particular zeal of a house that has chosen a side in daylight and means to keep choosing it after dusk.

Night Moon walked the winter garden with Estinien at sundown. Snow stitched lace along hedge and lintel; the air smelled faintly of iron and thaw—hope’s trick of arriving early just to be contrary. She had learned to read her body’s new conversations: the warm surges, the soft refusals, the steady second tempo under her own. Today the duet felt more sure than yesterday, and yesterday had been sure enough to live.

“Window light will be good tonight,” Estinien said, squinting at the sky’s idea of a color. “You’ll want your desk.”

“I will,” she said—and stopped. A sensation that wasn’t fear brushed the nape of her neck; not danger, attention. The garden had learned two daily guardians; now a third presence stood in it, quiet as bark.

“Don’t draw,” she told Estinien, too soft for the hedges to gossip. “He’s family.”

Estinien didn’t move a finger. His breath altered by a fraction, which for him amounted to drawing a sword very politely.

A man stepped out from the arbor shadow, tall and piecewise camouflaged in the way Warders learn as children. His cloak wore the forest rather than merely depicting it; his hair had taken on the color of ash leaves in winter; his eyes were the kind that count how many exits the day has. He pulled his hood back, slower than a threat, quicker than shame.

“Saran,” Night Moon said, and the garden decided not to freeze.

“Little star,” he returned, using a name that would have gotten him bitten when they were small. His gaze flicked—Fortemps pin, uncovered diamond, Estinien at her shoulder—then came back to sit steady on her face. “You stand in another’s hearth.”

“I do,” she said.

“You stand alive,” he added, and something in his jaw unknotted—the smallest mercy men allow themselves when they’ve watched roads too long.

He looked to Estinien, gave him the measure men trade before introducing themselves proper. “Saran of the Hara. Her elder.”

“Estinien,” the Dragoon said, which required no surname. “Her… partner.” He picked the plain word on purpose and let it be big enough.

Saran inclined his head: not permission, not blessing. Acknowledgment. “I was at the gate,” he said to Night Moon. “I did not speak.”

“I heard your silence,” she answered.

They stood in the odd geometry of three people who would all kill for the same life and were trying to decide in what order to speak about it.

Saran broke it with the older-brother skill of pretending he was here by accident. “I came because Silva will come again,” he said. “With more words. With hands, if words fail to amuse. I thought to advise you to go quietly now, while quiet still can be chosen.”

“And now?” Night Moon asked, testing him the way one taps a wall for hollows.

Now Saran did what Warders aren’t encouraged to do: he told a story on himself. “In the Wood, a hunter listens to the same birdsong all his life,” he said. “One day, a new note sounds. If you tell the elders it is nothing, they sigh and agree. If you tell yourself it is nothing, you go hungry. I have been listening for… a new note.”

Night Moon’s hand settled where it always strayed now, not defending, not declaring. “And you heard it.”

“I did.” The words flinched and stood anyway. “At the gate. And in you.” He flicked a look at Estinien as if the new note might have come from steel. “Not his. Yours. And something that…” He trailed. Laughed once, ragged. “You will call me a fool if I say it.”

“I might,” she said, gentle.

He squared up the way boys do when they know a sister is about to hit them with a cushion and they mean to deserve it. “I think the forest itself has sent a light with you. It smells like winter bread. It feels like a door left unlatched.”

Estinien’s dragon made a pleased, private noise in his chest. Night Moon swallowed once. “You’re not a fool.”

Saran’s eyes widened by the width of a breath. He understood too quickly, which is why he’d survived this long. “Then the elders will not have to argue law,” he said carefully. “They will argue mystery. They don’t do well with it.”

“Few do,” Estinien said.

Saran’s posture shifted. Some of the hunter left his shoulders; some of the brother returned. “I thought to pull you home,” he admitted, to Night Moon, “by the scruff if I had to. Now I think home will have to be cleverer.”

“You came alone,” she said, not a question.

He nodded. “Silva believes in announcements. I believe in doors no one else remembers.” His gaze ticked to Estinien again—not hostile, not friendly. Auditing. “What will you do when we come with laws and let the word sister be reason to press rather than to stay?”

“Stand,” Estinien said. “And refuse. And keep refusing until you run out of manners or I do.”

Saran huffed; it might have been approval hiding from itself. “You’ll need allies with less patience than the Lord Commander’s quill.”

“We have them,” Night Moon said.

“Good,” Saran replied. He took a step closer and then stopped with the exactness of a man who would not push a boundary even to save a life. “I want to see you. Properly.”

Night Moon lifted her chin and let her brother read her face—the tired places, the mended ones, the new light under the old. He read the way he always had: not just the skin, but the weather that made it.

“I should have come sooner,” he said. “I told myself you were safer for not being seen by me. That was a lie I liked because it let me stay obedient.”

“I would have bitten you,” she said, and he startled into a real laugh.

“True,” he allowed. The laugh faded; the man remained. “Will you tell me his name?”

Night Moon considered and did not pretend reluctance. “Haurchefant.”

Saran blinked. “The knight of the smiling stories? The one who stood in front of lances and made boys into men by complimenting them until they could not bear to disappoint him?”

“That one,” Estinien said softly.

Saran’s mouth did something complicated. “I met him once in the Brume,” he said. “He gave me bread and asked if I was lost without making me feel it. If he chose to—” The word return got lost finding the right track. “If he chose a door and it was you, then I am less afraid of our elders.”

“They will be afraid enough for all of us,” Night Moon said.

“Yes,” Saran agreed. He looked at the Fortemps pin, the diamond, the man. “They will call this theft. You will call it blessing. I will call it a storm moving over timber we can afford to lose.”

Estinien regarded him—warily, kindly. “And where will you stand when Silva knocks next time?”

Saran exhaled. “Between the knock and the door,” he said. “Long enough for Aymeric to find the right speech. Long enough for Edmont to remember a cousin who needs an extra chair at table. Long enough for the Forest to miscount its children by one.”

He reached into his cloak and drew out a small thing: an ash-leaf braid, plaited tight, old enough to remember river water. “From Mother,” he said, softer than law ever allows. “She keeps it on the sill for when stars come late. She told me to give it to you if I found you—if you were… if you had chosen a different sky.”

Night Moon took the braid. It smelled like rain that had been patient. “Does she know?”

“She always knew,” Saran said. “She gave the braid to a son who obeys and hoped for a daughter who doesn’t when the world demands it.”

That hurt and healed in the same breath. Night Moon tucked the braid at her cloak’s throat beside the Fortemps clasp. “I won’t ask you to choose me over the elders,” she said. “I will ask you not to choose against me.”

“I already failed at that once,” Saran said. “At the gate I kept my hood down and my tongue still. That was me choosing the wrong silence.” He squared. “Let me try a better one.”

Estinien said nothing, which for him is blessing.

A bell counted the hour from somewhere that had decided to be a church today. Saran turned his head to listen; Warders are taught to keep the time by things that cannot be bribed.

“I should go,” he said. “If Silva counts me, she will not count long.” He slipped the hood up, became less man and more outline. “I will leave a token when I can come without making noise. If a leaf on your window turns sideways, it means get Edmont to the small chapel and keep him there a while. If it’s the ash-leaf braid, it means burn the tea and pretend it’s dinner—someone will come to complain who needs to be listened to.”

Night Moon smiled. “You always were insufferable with codes.”

“They keep you clever,” Saran said. He looked at Estinien a last time. “If you hurt her, I will plant you like a standard and let crows hold parliament upon you.”

“I won’t,” Estinien said, as if reciting a law he’d carved on his own bones.

“I know,” Saran said—and was gone, the garden taking him back with the brisk affection of old trees.

They stood in the place he had left, letting the air return to three dimensions. Night Moon put her fingers on the ash-leaf braid at her throat, then on the Fortemps clasp: bark and hearth; both truths.

“Well,” Estinien said, which for him was loquacious.

“Well,” she echoed, and then, quieter: “Thank you for not drawing.”

“I wanted to,” he admitted.

“I know,” she said. “He would have dodged and then scolded you for making him dodge.”

“Family,” Estinien said, and did not sound put out.

They finished the circuit of the garden. The house learned their steps and arranged the corridor’s warmth ahead of them. At the library window, Night Moon set Saran’s ash-leaf braid beside the carved lantern Estinien had made, and the two looked at each other like old neighbors—bark measuring iron, iron admiring bark.

“Do we tell Edmont?” Estinien asked.

“We tell him a brother came,” she said. “We do not burden him with the codes. Edmont will invent better ones by supper.”

“True,” he said, and smiled.

That night the wind went around the manor like a dog taken with the idea of a new friend. In her room, Night Moon lay with her palm low and felt the familiar warmth answer, and somewhere not very far away, in a room that smelled of leaf and leather, Saran sat with his back to a door he had no right to hold and held it anyway.

When sleep came, it brought a hedge-path that did not end in a wall but in a window lit from within. A lantern hung there—iron and carved and slightly uneven. An ash-leaf braid lay as a sill-mat. Haurchefant, who had never been fussy about forms, leaned in the frame as if architecture were a suggestion.

“Good,” he said to her, and to the house, and to the brother in the cold, and to the man in the chair. “Good.”

The window brightened because windows do that when told they’re doing well.

And winter, which had been practicing generosity, applauded in the only way it knows—by letting morning arrive without a fight.

Chapter Text

Chapter 10 — Leaf & Law

Morning set itself down gently on House Fortemps. Braziers breathed like well-trained dogs; the kitchen argued with cinnamon; somewhere, a boy ran messages as if the day might forget itself without him.

Night Moon sat at her desk with the window open two finger-widths to the kind of cold that wakes ink. The ash-leaf braid from Saran lay beside the carved lantern Estinien had made — bark and iron in companionable truce. She had a letter begun and abandoned three times:

Mother,
I stood in the Vault and did not go under. I lit a candle in the chapel you would like for its stubborn beeswax. I am…

She waited for a word that didn’t make her feel like she was stealing from a better sentence.

Behind her, the small sounds of Estinien repairing a strap on his pauldron — leather creak, quiet scrape, a curse spoken in a dialect that never reached his mouth. He had a pot of tea learning manners at his elbow and an orange half-peeled like a compliance exercise.

“Try the ginger,” he said without looking up.

“I’m not ill,” she replied.

“No,” he said. “You’re impatient.” He pushed the saucer toward her anyway.

She took a slice to make him feel useful and because he was correct.

The leaf in the window box turned sideways.

Her hand stilled. Estinien didn’t move, but the room felt the way it feels just before a spear decides it will be necessary.

“Chapel,” she said, already rising. “With Edmont. Now.”

They found the count in the small study inventing a tradition about lanterns and the Brume. He rose at once, no questions, only coat, gloves, a gesture that told the house they were walking the quiet corridors today.

The small chapel had learned them already. Beeswax and old wood waited without telling stories about who had cried here last. Night Moon set a candle as if that were the price of admission and sat in the pew that fit them because it had been asked to for generations.

Saran came the way brothers do when they don’t want you to feel watched: from the service stair, hood back, hands empty.

“Count,” he said, giving Edmont a bow shaped out of caution and courtesy. “I am Saran of the Hara. I owe your house my bluntness.”

Edmont inclined his head. “We welcome bluntness that protects ours.”

Saran stood with the posture of men who would rather keep moving. “Silva is coming at vespers. She will not ask the gate this time. She will stand at the edge of your city and sing the Recall.”

Edmont’s face did not change. Estinien’s did not either, which is how you know something mattered to both of them.

Night Moon folded the ginger napkin and set it beside the candle. “Name it.”

“The Recall is a calling we keep for children who wander too far and for the lost when the Wood wants them back. The law says the blood hears it.” He looked pained by the next thing, said it anyway. “Sometimes the blood obeys even when the heart won’t.”

She touched the diamond at her brow, not to defy, not to submit — to make the conversation sit where it belonged. “And in a city of stone?”

Saran’s mouth tilted, humorless and fond. “Stone confuses it. Bells drown it. Hearths make it forget what it came for. But it tries.”

Estinien’s knuckles flexed once on the pew rail. “What do you need of us?”

“Bells at vespers. Loud and honest. Not pretty — true.” His gaze moved to Edmont. “Open windows with light in them down the east corridor — lanterns in every sill. Set a table in this chapel with bread. I know your house does not refuse men for lack of coin.”

Edmont nodded as if told the order of seasons. “Done.”

Saran took a breath like a confession. “I should not be here. I am breaking things that tell me they crack poorly.” He reached into his cloak and brought out something wrapped in cloth — a small, rough token. An ash twig burned and quenched, its end charred, tied with waxed thread. “Mother, for when the leaf couldn’t reach you. She says: the door is unlatched; the kettle remembers how to sing.”

Edmont pretended to adjust the candle so that a drop of wax could attend to his eyes. Estinien looked at the twig as if it were a treaty worth an army.

Night Moon took it and felt the forest’s patient weather on her palm. “Tell her,” she said, “that I will bring the child to her one day. Not to be judged — to be loved.”

Saran’s throat moved. “She will set bread at the window until then.”

He shifted to the business that allowed him to stand in rooms. “At vespers, I’ll be at the south parapet. If Silva brings hands, I will put mine between.”

“You’ll be counted a traitor,” Estinien said, flat.

“Only by people who like their laws better than their daughters,” Saran returned, equally flat.

Edmont stepped between iron and bark with the skill of a man who had kept a house through three decades of people being themselves. “Our bells will ring,” he said. “Our windows will light. Our table will be set. And if a song doesn’t understand Ishgard, it can learn.”

Saran bowed the way a tree does when it has decided not to fall today. “Thank you.”

He was gone with the same economy that had brought him.

They did the work that keeps storms from getting ideas. Edmont sent boys flying with messages to Sainte Reymanaud’s bell captain. Estinien took lanterns down from a storeroom shelf and set about wicks and oil with the concentration of a man preparing a line of defense. Night Moon wrote a three-sentence letter and sealed it with wax pressed by the diamond, a seal no elder had ever intended to witness.

Mother,
The forest sings; the city will answer. I am safe. The house is warm. Keep the kettle.

Honoroit appeared to be everywhere at once — in the gallery lighting blue glass, in the oratory instructing a choirboy who had somehow arrived, in the kitchen commandeering loaves like a general with a sweet tooth.

By late afternoon, Ishgard began to hum: a different pitch in the air, a readiness that felt like liturgy sharpening.

They were in the chapel before the bells, all three — Night Moon, Estinien, Edmont — sitting in the humble pew like a family who had chosen a single place to put their courage while the city did its part. Bread on the table. Lantern small but honest in the window. The ash-leaf braid set between them like a mediator who liked them and meant to be fair.

The first bell struck — not with polish, with force. Another answered from somewhere farther off; a third from a tower that had been sulking since a frost and now remembered how. The notes did not harmonize so much as agree. The city’s ribs vibrated with it.

Between one clang and the next, a sound entered through the stones. Not a voice — a pull. The old word turned into air and tried to lay hands on blood.

Night Moon felt it — a tug at the edge of her scalp, a prickling at the diamond, a coaxing that didn’t speak her name aloud but assumed it had the right.

Come.

She sat very still. The second light under her hand steadied like a palm on a table.

Come.

The bell answered No.

The pull tried a different approach, clever because it had been keeping track of children for a thousand years: it bent itself toward the small, new rhythm.

Come, little one; the Wood is warm.

Night Moon let her mouth curve and did not show her teeth. “It is warm here,” she said, low, for the child and for the air. “We have bread and bells and a man who sets the fire right the first time.”

Estinien’s hand closed over hers — not to keep, to weigh. The dragon in him made a sound like a furnace deciding it likes you. Edmont, who had never been shy about unorthodox prayers, leaned into the aisle and said to the floor and the roof and the city, “Hold.”

The bells did what they were built for: they held. Their clamor filled the recall’s hollows; their honest iron bruised the elegant insistence of the song until it tripped over its own certainty. The lantern flame in the window bowed and straightened like a dancer unfazed by a gust.

The pull frayed. Once more — a last try, almost petulant: Come.

Night Moon breathed out and let go of something she had been carrying so long she had mistaken it for armor. “No,” she said. “Not away. Through.”

The bells paused in their pattern, as if to hear. Somewhere, over the city’s rooftops, a second choir began — not voices. Hammers. Someone had decided it was a good time to mend a shutter. Ishgard is better at counter-rituals than it admits.

The recall broke. You could feel the exact breath where it gave — a ribbon snapped clean, a knot finally conceding nobody wanted it. The chapel grew five degrees warmer in a single heartbeat.

Night Moon’s shoulders lowered. Estinien pressed his brow to her temple the way men do when their bodies cannot enlarge to carry any more gratitude. Edmont sat back in the pew and let two tears happen because he could.

The bells finished properly, like craftsmen putting away tools. The city exhaled.

They waited, because leaving too fast teaches victory bad habits. When the lantern decided to burn like itself again rather than like a struggle, they rose.

In the corridor outside the chapel, Aymeric leaned a shoulder against a column, reading a note, pretending he had not just rearranged half a city’s timetables.

“It would seem,” he said mildly, “that Ishgard’s bell captains remember their catechism.”

“They remember debt,” Edmont said. “And bread.”

Aymeric’s eyes slid to Night Moon’s face, then to her hand, then back with the kind of softened respect that has no word in command languages. “Will there be a second attempt?”

“Not tonight,” Saran said from the shadow of the arch. He stepped into the light with the economy of a man who had been running without letting you know. “Silva’s song broke on your iron. She will change instruments.”

Aymeric tucked the note away. “Then I will change schedules. If the Wood insists on improvised recitals, Ishgard will relay the favor.”

Saran took in Aymeric the way Warders take in threats and weather: inventory first, opinion later. He gave a small, surprised nod — the rare tribute one professional pays another across different alphabets.

He turned to Night Moon and Estinien. His gaze found the ash-leaf braid tucked at her throat, the Fortemps clasp, the way light from the chapel wrote itself on the diamond.

“You didn’t move,” he said to her, approval disguised as report. To Estinien: “You knew not to pull.”

Estinien allowed himself one half-smile. “Sometimes the right fight is to stay.”

Saran’s mouth did that complicated thing again — half brother, half man who had to return to people he would disappoint. “I must go,” he said. “If I am counted missing, I will be counted wrong soon after.”

“Leaf sideways?” Night Moon asked, touching the window’s code.

He shook his head. “No. Feather on the sill if I need you to bring Aymeric to the Gate with a smile and too many witnesses. Braid if the house should expect kindness disguised as complaint.” He glanced at Edmont. “You will handle kindness.”

Edmont patted his chest as if checking for a spare. “Always.”

They parted in the strange intimacy of people who have survived the same hour for different reasons.

That night, the house observed small ceremonies as if it had invented them. Lanterns stayed in windows longer than needed. Bread went missing in a way that proved it had found the right hands. A girl in the Brume told her brother she had heard the bells say “no” to the wind and the wind say “fair enough.”

In the library, Estinien sanded the last edge of the carved lantern and set a fine pane of oiled paper into its ribs. He cut awkwardly; he did not apologize. Night Moon watched as if he were etching the word safe into the air with a small, stubborn knife.

“Hang it,” she said, when it would no longer cut anyone by accident.

He did. The lantern took the sill like a declaration without a trumpet.

“Law can knock,” she added, almost to herself. “Light answers.”

He stepped behind her, palms light on her arms the way a man touches a person who has already proven they can stand. “And if law shouts?”

“We serve it tea,” she said, smiling without barbs. “And we ask it to define its terms.”

He huffed a quiet laugh. “Aymeric will enjoy that.”

“Aymeric was born enjoying that,” she corrected.

She reached for the new journal and wrote a single, exact line:

At vespers, the Wood sang; Ishgard answered in iron, bread, and bells. We did not move.

She left the page open, as if the ink had one more thing to say on its way to being permanent.

At the window, the lantern’s small light decided it could be seen from the road. On the sill beside it, something new had arrived without ceremony: a feather, gray as fog, laid true north.

Night Moon tapped it once with her fingertip. “He moves quickly.”

“He’s your brother,” Estinien said. “You move faster.”

They banked the fire. The chair learned a new way of being occupied: not as a post, as a place a man sits when he knows the door does not need guarding to be safe. In bed, Night Moon lay on her side and set her palm where the smaller rhythm kept time. It answered, not loud. Certain.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he returned.

The bells slept. The city kept its own. And winter, having been addressed by law and refused politely, resumed the simpler craft of draping rooftops evenly and making mornings bright.

On the sill, the lantern burned steady — a small, ordinary oath made of wood and thumb cuts and the decision to say stay in a language even the wind understands.

Chapter Text

Chapter 11 — Feather & Witness

The feather lay true north on the sill, a gray line between bark and iron. Night Moon turned it once with a fingertip, then left it as Saran had placed it. Estinien already had his cloak; the city had already chosen a color for the day—blue like a bell’s throat.

“Aymeric first,” she said.

“Edmont with us,” he answered.

They found the count in the study standing over a list of names that had more to do with bread than with blades. “We’ll need witnesses,” he said, before they could speak. “Men who have no minds to be changed and women who make the city do what it ought. Not too many swords. Too many eyes.”

“Aymeric will agree,” Night Moon said.

He did. In the Lord Commander’s chamber, letters flew; a runner went for the bell-captain; a clerk set out the parley charter that hadn’t been consulted in half a century and discovered it had learned to be current on its own. Alisaie arrived as if summoned by arrogance; Alphinaud came with a clean ledger and a gaze that asked history to mind its posture.

“Witnesses,” Aymeric said, approving the word like a blueprint. “Captain, mark the Gate. Cloaks for the Brume women who will stand at the front; bread table on our side; lanterns lit though it’s daylight—symbol out-argues vocabulary.”

“And bells?” Estinien asked.

“One strike to begin, one to end,” Aymeric said. “Let the wind think we’re singing.”

Edmont’s mouth creased. “We are.”

The Gate of Judgment learned a new arrangement of people. Temple Knights in quiet ranks; Fortemps men with baskets of bread; a thin line of Brume women who had learned to stare down the price of heat and would not blink at forest law. Alphinaud, pen ready. Alisaie, arms crossed, delighting in the possibility of trouble doing the right thing for the wrong reason. The little carved lantern from the library, carried down and set in a niche as if it had always belonged there.

The bell gave a single honest strike.

Silva of the Hara walked out of the winter road as if the snow had opened a door for her and would close it if asked. Two warders flanked her; a woman in green-gray with a scrip at her belt came behind—scribe or priest, hard to tell. Saran kept to the left, a half step back, hood up, the posture of a man hoping to be overlooked and prepared to be seen.

Aymeric advanced to the charter-line. “Welcome to parley,” he said. “Name your grievance before our city and its witnesses.”

Silva’s gaze took in the witnesses—bread, blue, Brume, the small lantern—and returned to Night Moon. “Child of the Wood,” she said, voice level as a frozen lake. “You have violated the Green Word. You have bound yourself to an outsider. You carry a royal light not born under canopy. The law calls you home.”

Night Moon stepped into the island of law shaped by paper and bell. She kept her hands at her sides, because a hand over the diamond would grant the law more power by naming its concern for her. She faced Silva and spoke as Haurchefant had once taught her—slow enough to be remembered, plain enough to be repeated.

“I am Night Moon of the Fortemps hearth,” she said. “Ward by bond, daughter by blessing. I am under Ishgard’s peace and House Fortemps’ roof. I do not return.”

Silva didn’t blink. The scribe’s quill moved like a branch in a wind it had long practice with.

“The child you carry,” Silva said, letting the truth sit without leering, “is ours by the Word. The Wood will not tolerate a royal light raised beneath stone.”

Edmont stepped forward like a man who refuses to let a cruelty use polite phrases. “Your law misunderstands itself,” he said. “In Ishgard, children are not made into disputes. They are fed. You will not speak of a babe as property before this gate.”

A murmur went through the Brume—agreement, not noise. Bread moved from hand to hand, which is how cities vote.

Aymeric lifted the old parley charter and read in a voice that had held worse rooms together. “Whereas the city recognizes a ward as kin; whereas sanctuary extends to unborn life; whereas Ishgard claims no right over forests and forests none over our hearths; we decline to cede what is under our roof. Speak argument; we will answer. Speak threat; we will end the day.”

Silva looked past them—to the women, to the lantern, to the boy with ink-stained fingers who was writing everything down. She changed instruments without changing key.

“Night Moon,” she said, and the way she put Night before Moon felt like trying a lock. “Do you remember your wood-name? Does your blood?”

Night Moon did not flinch. “Yes,” she said. “I choose not to answer to it here.”

Something tightened under Silva’s eyes. “The Wood has witness trees older than your city. They have already heard your name and favorable echoes. Leaves do not forget.”

Night Moon’s mouth softened. “Witness is a holy work,” she said. “We do not disagree.” She lifted a hand toward the gate, toward the Brume, toward every window and ledge and lantern. “We prefer ours to have bread.”

A ripple of quiet laughter—kindness’s cousin—ran the line.

—flashback (trigger: the word witness; the memory of shade)—

Forest noon, long before cities. Her mother walked with quiet feet, not as a lesson, only as a habit. “These are the witness trees,” she told a much smaller Night Moon, touching the bark where storms had affixed their signatures. “They do not argue. They remember loudly. If you speak secrets, do it where trees lean back and the ground is rude. But if you tell truths, come here. Let the wood keep them safe from being forgotten.”

“Do they judge?” Night Moon asked, because judgment is what children fear when they first learn adults have rules.

“Rarely,” her mother said. “Judgment is a busybody. Memory is a midwife.” She had knelt then and brushed a leaf behind her daughter’s ear. “One day you’ll need witnesses who prefer bread to birdsong. I hope you find a good city.”
—end—

Silva tried a different cut. “You stand because men of stone prop you,” she said, flicking a glance at Estinien as if he were a particularly egregious slab. “When they tire, the law will hold you again.”

Estinien didn’t alter except where his breath remembered winter and found it good. “If I tire,” he said, “the city stands. If the city tires, the house stands. If the house tires, I left the fire banked so low even pride can keep it. You will go home before we do.”

Alisaie coughed into her glove to avoid turning the sentence into sport. Alphinaud kept writing as if ink could make a covenant—because sometimes it does.

Silva’s attention narrowed. “Then hear the Naming of Return,” she said, and the scribe put down the quill for the kind of ceremony that prefers mouths to ink.

Saran moved—a small, deliberate step—to place himself where her voice would hit him sooner than it hit his sister. He did not draw. He stood.

Silva spoke a string of old syllables that have called fawns from briars and sent children to sleep and made men step back from the cliff’s wrong edge because they thought someone they trusted had asked. The air tried to be flat so it would carry. The lantern flame bowed.

Night Moon felt the tug—and the city answer. Bells did not ring this time; men cleared throats. A woman in the first row set her hand on her child’s head and smoothed hair. Somewhere to the left, a guard slid bread into a pocket he would later pretend had always had bread in it. Hammers lifted and set down in distant rhythms. The Naming hit a wall of witness and dispersed like fog.

Saran spoke—not the Wood’s language, but something simpler and truer. “I am Saran of the Hara,” he said, loud enough for the scribe to have to choose whether to write it. “Elder brother. Witness of the Wood.” He touched his chest, then the gate, then his sister. “She stands. I testify.”

Silva’s jaw tightened. “You overstep.”

“I overstep what I must,” Saran replied. “If the Wood would cut me back, it knows where I sleep.”

Aymeric folded the charter closed. “We are concluded,” he said. “Unless you have a lawful petition that does not involve singing at our citizens.”

Silva regarded the three pillars she had found—hearth, law, witness—and did the only gracious thing left: she bowed to the fact that she had not accomplished what she came for.

“The elders will hold moot when the thaw comes,” she said to Night Moon. “We will invite you as courtesy. We will call you as law.”

Night Moon inclined her head, fine as a blade. “I will decide as a woman.”

Silva’s eyes flicked to the lantern. “Keep that lit,” she said, which almost sounded like a kindness. “Children look for windows.”

She turned; the warders turned with her. The scribe hesitated—curious, irritated, young—then wrote anyway because that is what scribes do when moments insist on being larger than comfort.

The bell gave one strike to end. Parley over. Witnesses dismissed. Bread still warm.

Aymeric breathed like a man who has just walked a beam and finds himself on a roof of his own choosing. Edmont embraced Night Moon with restraint and relief and the steady joy of a father who has kept a door unlatched long enough to watch an entire storm give up.

Saran hung back. When the crowd unraveled into lanes and errands, he came close enough to be a brother again.

“They’ll try a quieter thing next,” he said. “A letter carried by someone who can cry on command. A rumor that looks like a hand extended.”

“The braid code?” Estinien asked.

Saran nodded. “If one appears, expect kindness disguised as complaint.”

“We will answer with tea disguised as law,” Aymeric said dryly. “I have some that tastes like charters.”

“Save me a cup,” Saran returned.

He turned to Night Moon—hesitated—and then did what older brothers occasionally permit themselves when an audience has gone: he put his hands on either side of her face for a heartbeat, as if framing truth so it would not wander.

“You chose with both feet,” he said.

“So did you,” she answered.

He smiled, which happens to men who realize a risk has finally decided to be worth itself. “Feather if a crowd is helpful. Braid if a listener will knock at your door pretending to complain about smoke and then make you weep.”

“And if neither?” she asked.

“Then I will come myself,” he said. “And I will demand bread.”

“House policy is generous,” Edmont noted.

Saran melted into the gate’s shadow, a line of gray rejoining a paragraph of winter.

The city spent the rest of the day feeling like victory and trying not to act like it. Children imitated bell-strikes with spoons. A carpenter on the Brume’s edge found an excuse to repair the lopsided bench outside her door and do it loudly. A woman selling onions invented a discount called witness’s price and then applied it to anyone who looked as if they might have come from the Gate.

In the library, the lantern was returned to its sill. Night Moon set the feather beside the ash-leaf braid and watched how the three—feather, bark, iron—refused to quarrel.

Estinien stood by the hearth with a small pot trying to be tea and succeeding at being warm water in the shape of courage. “You did not flinch,” he observed.

“I learned to look at crowds,” she said. “He taught me.”

“Haurchefant,” Estinien said, not a question.

—flashback (trigger: the hush after a crowd; Haurchefant’s voice remembered)—

Foundation, snow rumor-thick in the air. Haurchefant had handed her a cup and pointed, cheerfully, toward a knot of men arguing dignity in the key of too loud.

“Go stand there,” he said.

“I am no one,” she protested.

“Exactly,” he said, delighted. “Let them see you stand as if you belong. People learn how to behave by getting caught doing it right in public.”
—end—

Night Moon smiled into the cup. “He’d have enjoyed today.”

“He did,” Estinien said, and looked not at the ceiling, not at the window, but at the small place where a second rhythm kept time. His palm found hers and settled there with the weight of a promise that had learned how to be kept.

Alisaie poked her head around the door. “You were unspeakably dignified,” she announced, then added, to Estinien, “for once.”

“I am reforming,” he said.

“Don’t,” she advised, and vanished.

Alphinaud appeared, left a sheet of neat handwriting on the table—names, times, impressions, all the architecture of a day that would not be allowed to un-happen—and bowed as if to a good argument. “For your records,” he said. “History is lazier than it looks.”

“Thank you,” Night Moon said, and meant it the way one means bread.

Evening learned the corridors. Edmont came by with a slate listing which bells had struck cleanly and which needed attention; he showed Night Moon the line he had added: lanterns to be hung at the east gallery every vespers until spring. Tradition, just invented.

When they were alone, Estinien took from his pouch a tiny iron charm shaped like the lantern clasp he’d fastened at her throat. “For the journal ribbon,” he said, awkward to be proud and proud anyway.

She tied it to the silk marker and closed the book on the day. “We’ll need a bigger volume,” she said. “Witness takes space.”

“We have time,” he answered.

She crossed to him and set her hands where they always set first now—one over his, one low where the smaller light answered. “Together,” she said.

“For three,” he returned.

On the sill, the lantern burned a little longer than necessary. Outside, bells made a habit of not needing to be rung to be remembered. And somewhere between wood and wall, a brother kept his watch in a place where law likes to pretend it invented doors.

Witness held.

Bread cooled.

Winter applauded in the only way it knows—by letting morning promise it will come again.

Chapter Text

Chapter 12 — Smoke & Tea

The day arrived wearing a shawl of mildness and mischief. Frost traced the mullions, then forgot to be stern. In the library window, bark and iron and feather kept their quiet parliament: ash-leaf braid, carved lantern, gray plume, each refusing to be louder than the others.

Night Moon was mending a loose thread on the hearth chair’s blanket when the braid appeared on the sill, not sideways, not north—laid across the lantern’s base like a ribbon you use to wrap a gift and to warn a friend.

She set the needle aside. “Complaint,” she said.

Estinien’s helm went to the table, not the arm. His hand found the kettle handle as if cordiality were a spear. “We’ll need tea.”

“We’ll need witnesses,” she added, already rising. “And bread.”

The house moved the way houses move when they’ve practiced for a storm and end up hosting weather instead. Edmont sent a boy for the Brume women who never minded being asked to stand where a city could see them. Aymeric was fetched with a note that said nothing and meant bring a smile and a clerk. Alisaie arrived on the smell of trouble, Alphinaud with fresh sand for ink. Honoroit took the kitchen like a general with flour on his cheek.

They chose the winter room—small enough to keep conversation honest, large enough to hold a law without letting it own the air. Fire set to generous. Windows unlatched two fingers. A table laid with bread, honey, oranges, a teapot that had learned humility under Estinien’s stern tutelage.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. It meant for company that calls itself neighbor and means sheriff.

She came just before noon: a Viera woman in a cloak the color of calm rivers, hood thrown back because some courtesies are keys. Mid-winter hair, no jewels, hands empty except for a little tin of leaf-ash a silversmith might have mistaken for polish.

“I am Maelen of Reedlight,” she said in Ishgard’s tongue that had learned Wood cadence and kept its kindness. “I have traveled far and found the wind thick with smoke near this house. Hospitality will surely forgive one neighbor for calling.”

Edmont himself opened the door and conducted Maelen to the winter room as if this had always been a social call. “We forgive on principle,” he said. “We also pour tea.”

Night Moon stood already; Estinien by the hearth; Aymeric at the window taking quiet notes by looking like a view. Two Brume women occupied the corner as if they had been dusting there all morning. Alphinaud contrived to appear harmless with a ledger; Alisaie did not.

Maelen’s gaze did what Silva’s had done but slower and more thorough—pin, diamond, clasp, lantern—then eased into Night Moon’s face with that patient assessment elder women carry like a walking stick.

“Night Moon,” she said. Not wood-name; not wrong. “You keep winter politely.”

“We have been taught,” Night Moon answered. “Will you sit?”

They sat—Maelen with her tin on her knee, Night Moon with her palms open on the table, Estinien with his hands light on the teapot, which is to say ready.

“I have no song,” Maelen began, a little smile making the words less smug than they might have been. “Only complaint. Cedar smoke wanders. It makes breathing ungenerous.”

Honoroit, who had been waiting to be helpful in exactly this way, whisked the cedar log from the basket and replaced it with apple. The fire approved like a dog finding a familiar hand. Night Moon inclined her head.

“Accepted,” she said. “We will burn apple for as long as apple lasts.”

“Good,” Maelen murmured, almost disappointed the first skirmish had been tidy. She opened her tin and set it on the table: a fine ash with leaf-veins intact. “And this: carry witness ash on your brow when you walk,” she said. “So the trees know you remember them.”

Aymeric lifted his quill. “A symbol,” he said, as if annotating a treaty. “We like those.”

Night Moon touched the diamond, then the ash. “I will wear it on holy days,” she said, making a law of the middle. “Not because I am called, but because I call.”

Maelen accepted the compromise with the grace of women who did not come for easy victories. She folded her hands. “And the child,” she said, finally and without a flinch. “Law says—”

“Blessing,” Estinien said, not loud.

“—law says,” Maelen continued mildly, “we mark and we remember. A Naming Over Water when the sap rises; a leaf laid on the font, the witness bough held above.” Her eyes softened. “Not a taking. Not a chain. A look and a word, so the Wood can stop singing to echoes.”

The room breathed. Of all the knives she might have placed on the cloth, this one had been honed for terms, not blood.

Edmont steepled his fingers, pleased to be invited to invent a tradition. “We have water that remembers winter,” he offered. “Snowmelt from our roofs and the Vault cistern boiled and made polite. We have bread for after. We have a lantern for the window.”

Aymeric added without looking up, “And witnesses who prefer ink to birdsong.”

Maelen’s mouth tilted. “The Wood does not love ink.”

“Ishgard loves bread,” Night Moon said. “We can teach each other to tolerate the other’s vices.”

Maelen glanced down at the tin, then at Night Moon’s hands. “It would have been simpler if you had let us take you,” she said, as if discussing a silly hat chosen in youth.

“It would have been simpler,” Night Moon agreed. “And wrong.”

The older woman’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “You argue like an elder.”

“She was raised by one,” Edmont said mildly, and every stone in the manor wagged its tail.

Maelen looked to Estinien then—not assessing, simply including. “And you, dragon man? Will you bring the child where trees can learn a new winter?”

“I will bring him,” Estinien said—then caught himself, corrected the habit that wasn’t quite a habit. “I will bring the child. With the mother. On her day.”

Maelen’s lashes tucked and untucked. “And if elders sing?”

“I brought bells,” Aymeric said, smiling with all his teeth.

One of the Brume women coughed in a way that was almost a laugh and entirely a threat. “I brought bread,” she added.

Alisaie folded her arms tighter. “I brought myself.”

Maelen’s eyes warmed. “You have good witnesses. The Wood will sulk.”

“Let it,” Night Moon said. “It has earned the right.”

Tea went round. Estinien poured without scalding anything; this left him faintly dazed and secretly proud. Maelen took an orange slice, considered it as if it were a polite lie, then bit. “I had forgotten sun could be kept in bowls,” she admitted.

“Stay until the kettle admits defeat,” Edmont urged. “Then tell us what terms your elders might understand even while pretending not to.”

Maelen’s terms were made of thread, not chain: no hands laid on mother or child; no song directed at stone houses; no summons issued except by letter and under seal. In return: one visit to an Ishgard room chosen by Fortemps, when sap rises and bells agree; a witness bough erected in that room for one day; a leaf laid on the child’s brow with the ash Night Moon agreed to wear in spring.

“And if the moot asks for more?” Night Moon said, because she liked to measure the floor.

“Then the moot will learn to fail in front of witnesses,” Maelen replied. “It will do the Wood some good.”

Aymeric made a note that looked suspiciously like a smile put into letters.

Night Moon set her palm low as a warmth—sudden and light—rose under her hand, not protest, not nausea; a flutter like a small hand turning in sleep. Her breath snapped quiet; she hid nothing. Estinien felt the air shift and steadied without touching, which is how you hold a moment that belongs to two people and not to a room.

Maelen’s eyes widened. Then gentled. “There,” she said softly. Not claim. Witness.

Night Moon laughed once, helpless and entirely alive. “There.”

A knock: Saran, hood down, elbow decorously full of an excuse to have wandered by. He stood in the doorway like a punctuation mark reserved for family.

“Maelen,” he said, as greeting and as warning.

“Nephew,” she returned, and it was almost fond. “You keep poor company and good promises.”

“I keep my sister,” Saran said, and the word sister sat between them like a pledge written on bark.

Maelen rose, set the tin’s lid with care, and offered Night Moon a palm as if to bless without presuming. Night Moon touched it. It felt like rivers under snow: moving.

“Spring,” Maelen said. “Water. Leaf. Bread. Bells.” Her gaze slid to the lantern. “And light.”

“We will hang it,” Night Moon said.

Maelen inclined her head to Edmont—true courtesy; to Aymeric—true caution; to Estinien—true appraising; to Saran—true exasperation. She left the way she came, by the door a house opens when it is not afraid.

The room held a breath and let it go. Aymeric dropped into a chair as if politeness could sit down, too. Alisaie exhaled yesss under her breath as if the day had finally remembered what they’d asked of it. Alphinaud sanded the note and passed it to Night Moon like a certificate.

“Shall we call that progress?” Edmont asked, innocent as a fox.

“We shall,” Night Moon said. “On our terms.”

Saran leaned his hip against the doorjamb, watching the window for leaves that would lie. “Maelen will be scourged with compliments and asked why she did not pull you from the house by your ears,” he said. “She will say the tea was too good to refuse and that she forgot the Wood had ears at all.”

“Good,” Estinien said. “Let them grumble at tea.”

Night Moon reached for the witness ash tin and drew a single vein on the glass, a mark where light could find it. “Spring,” she said, and the word did not frighten her.

—flashback (trigger: the curl of steam; her mother’s laugh behind the hand)—

Her mother had taught the polite forms of complaint when Night Moon was small enough to hide behind a jug. When someone says the smoke offends them, she had whispered, they mean: I need you to admit I exist and to make room for me in your weather. Make room. Then pour tea. If they still talk like axes, teach them cups. If they refuse the cup, let the trees judge.
—end—

The kettle finished saying its piece and fell to simmer. Night Moon rubbed her thumb across the iron lantern charm on the journal ribbon and felt the day’s edges go smooth.

“Walk?” Estinien asked, softer than the winter room required.

“Walk,” she said.

They took the upper corridor where the window learned morning early. Saran peeled from the jamb and didn’t follow, which is how older brothers sometimes bless a thing: they allow it to occur unguarded.

At the window, Ishgard bent to lamps and door-latches and bread—its real politics, conducted in wool and steam. Night Moon placed Estinien’s hand where the flutters had been, and the two lights answered like a chord practiced often enough to forget it had once been difficult.

His eyes closed on a breath that shook and steadied. “Hello,” he said to the space that would not be space for long.

“Hello,” she echoed.

They stood until the corridor dimmed itself to offer an ending. Back in the winter room, the ash-leaf braid lay peaceful beside the lantern. On the sill, the wind found no quarrel with either.

That night, the house slept the way houses sleep when terms have been spoken that do not require spears to stand guard over them. Night Moon wrote one line and left it for morning to dry:

We poured tea; they brought terms; the child turned like a page ready to be read.

She set the pen down, placed her palm low, and found Estinien’s hand waiting, not because he thought he owned the moment, but because he had built a chair there for it.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he returned.

The lantern burned steady. The braid kept its counsel. The feather, faint and practical, pointed north.

And winter—pleased with a day in which complaint remembered its better manners—let sleep arrive on time.

Chapter Text

Chapter 13 — Cradle & Code

Thaw came the way diplomacy does—first as rumor, then as puddles no one had agreed to. The gutters argued water; the wind lost its temper and then remembered it was tired.

In the Fortemps workshop, sawdust learned to be spring. Estinien stood at a bench with a small plane and a larger patience; wood gave up curls that smelled faintly sweet, as if delighted to be made into a future. A blueprint lay pinned beneath a chisel: a cradle, its ribs simple and strong, its headboard edged with a lantern and a leaf facing one another like peacemakers.

“You’re not allowed to make it perfect,” the carpenter told him, cheerful and entirely serious. “Children sleep better in things with thumbprints.”

Estinien grunted—agreement in his dialect—and sanded an edge until it looked like a decision. He had learned to carve the lantern’s small facets without slicing his pride; his leaf still resembled a dragon’s opinion of botany, but he was improving.

Night Moon watched from the doorway with her hands around a mug as if heat could be cradled. The ash-leaf braid lay at her throat beside the Fortemps clasp; the iron lantern charm on her journal ribbon had learned to chime against wood when she walked.

“How many spears did you make before one listened?” she asked.

“All of them listened,” he said solemnly. “Some argued first.”

She laughed, and the workshop liked her for it.

He set the plane down and reached for her cup to trade it for a stool. “Sit,” he said. “The floor is teaching you humility again.”

“It’s teaching me to count,” she agreed, lowering. “Nine steps are fine. Ten are fine. Eleven ask to be asked.”

He knelt to her level—so easy now—and put his palm low, the invitation that had learned to arrive before words. The smaller tempo answered, curious as fingertips against glass.

“Hello,” he said to it. “We’re making you something with edges.”

“Rounded edges,” Night Moon corrected. “The carpenter has preferences.”

“Rounded,” he promised.

She watched his mouth try not to smile and fail. “Do we tell him,” she asked after a heartbeat, “about the Vault? About doors, and what men do for love that is older than law?”

“We tell him the truth that suits his age,” Estinien said. “We tell him Haurchefant held a door open so long the house decided to keep it that way. We tell him the floor remembered—and then remembered better.”

“And that he came back,” she said, the words less like speech than like a lamp relit.

“And that he came back,” he echoed.

A boy from the Brume leaned in, cheeks flushed with the thrill of being trusted with a message and the long climb up a noble stair. “My lord, my lady—Count Edmont asks for you in the library. A letter.”

“From whom?” Estinien asked, already knowing what answer would sit right and which would turn the air to glass.

The boy tilted his head. “From Mother,” he said, as if the word could just be a direction.

The letter was a small, neat thing, wrapped in plain linen, pinned with a thorn that had been softened by handling. Edmont had set it on the table as if it were a rare tea that required a better afternoon.

Night Moon broke the thorn and felt the forest lift its head out of the paper.

Child,

The kettle remembers. The door is unlatched. Your brother has begun to learn that law likes certainty and love prefers warmth. He will practice.

They ask me to ask you to remember your wood-name. I remember the first time I said it into your hair. I remember the first time you told me no and were correct. I will not write it here; the paper might grow too proud.

If you come in spring, I will bring water that tastes of bark and snow. If you do not, I will bring bread to the window and talk to the trees until they are bored enough to leave us alone. Tell the man with dragon breath that I will enjoy scolding him.

—Mother

The page smelled faintly of smoked leaves and the old trick of keeping courage in a tin. Night Moon read it twice and did not wipe her eyes; she let them be useful.

“She will like you,” she told Estinien.

“I intend to like her,” he said, a little pale.

Edmont folded the letter in the way of men who know hands can be privacy. “Write back,” he said. “Use my seal for the parts that deserve a house and your diamond for the parts that deserve you.”

They did. Night Moon said we are well and we will come in spring—to a place Ishgard chose, on a day bells approved. She said, the child turns like a polite storm. She said, I will bring both names, the wood-name and the city one, and mint a third if the day demanded it.

Estinien took the pen when she set it down and wrote four words, square and exact.

Thank you for her.

Edmont sealed the letter as if traditions could be made at a desk. “I’ll send a boy that can outrun ideas,” he said.

In the Brume, hammers had been busy; benches had been dragged to the broken fountain and made respectable by a blanket and a loaf. Aymeric and Edmont were “on a walk” that had somehow arrived where they were most needed. Night Moon and Estinien stood at the edge of a circle that had been drawn by the simple expedient of people choosing to stand in it.

A woman with a shawl and lungs called the thing into being. “We are assembled,” she declared, and the Brume, which knows how to be a court when courts refuse to be, nodded. “Who brings complaint kindly today?”

A man stepped forward—cloak of the Wood, but thinner, less certain. He looked tired in the way messengers look when their message would prefer to be a fight. “I carry a grievance,” he said, “and hope to leave it somewhere it will be looked at.”

“Good,” said the shawled woman. “You’ve come to a neighborhood that inspects things.”

He presented a letter with leaves pressed into its seal and a face that apologized even before anyone read it. Aymeric took it, unfolded it, gave the words dignity without granting them authority.

“The elders,” he read, “seek assurance that the Naming Over Water will be conducted with proper reverences: a bough, a leaf, a witness, a word. They would send a Leaf-Speaker to stand in silence and confirm no theft has occurred: neither of child, nor of law, nor of winter.”

Murmurs. Not anger—geometry. The Brume adjusted itself to accommodate a new position. Edmont lifted a palm and the sound settled.

“And this Leaf-Speaker,” Night Moon asked, “has a name?”

The messenger nodded. “Aelene,” he said. “Sister to Maelen. Elder to Saran in all the ways that can be misused or not.”

“Will she misuse them?” Estinien asked so mildly it took a moment to hear the steel hidden in courtesy.

The messenger looked surprised to be allowed a thought. “She will try not to,” he said. “She likes to win where no one notices she has.”

“Ah,” said Alisaie from somewhere, delighted. “A professional.”

Aymeric refolded the letter. “We have witnesses enough to swallow an elder whole,” he said almost kindly. “We will place Aelene in a room where the window is unlatched and the lantern is hung and the bread is set. If she can behave, she may be the first elder to learn how pleasant it is to be outnumbered by good manners.”

The shawled woman thumped her bench-leg against the stone. “All in favor of teaching elders bread rather than axes?”

Hands. Laughter. A man whistled like a kettle. Somewhere a child clapped because clapping has its own laws.

“Resolved,” she said, pleased to have written a sentence on the street.

“Resolved,” Aymeric echoed, equally pleased.

The messenger exhaled. “Thank you,” he said, and looked at Night Moon as if she might forgive him for a task he had taken because he needed boots more than pride. She did, because she understood economies.

“Tell them,” she said, “we will boil snowmelt in a Fortemps kettle and lay the leaf ourselves. Tell them we will say a word that doesn’t make liars out of our breath. Tell them we will invite them to witness, but they may not summon us.”

He bowed the kind of bow men make when they’ve been seen. “I will.”

Saran appeared in the corner of her vision as if corners were his preferred alphabets. He didn’t step forward. He watched his sister refuse with grace and nodded as if the city and the Wood had, for one afternoon, gotten their definitions mostly right.

They walked home the long way, through streets that smelled of bread and the first wet stone of a new season. Estinien carried the letter; Night Moon carried a coil of white ribbon she had taken from a stall with an argument about price that made the stall-keeper laugh.

“For the cradle,” she said.

“Rounded edges,” he said.

“Thumbprints,” she reminded.

He stopped them in the shadow of the Gate where the parley line had been set, not for ceremony—because the wind cut there and he liked to put his shoulders between it and her.

“What if,” she said into the coat’s wool, “the Leaf-Speaker is my aunt? What if she remembers how to scold me in a way that makes all my good sense choose to be a child again?”

“Then we will remember how to be stubborn in a way that makes your childhood proud of you,” he said, the words unexpectedly deft. “And then I will be rude to an elder in a way she cannot fault because it will be an Ishgardian variety of rudeness she lacks the words for.”

“Tea?” she asked, amused.

“Tea,” he confirmed.

She set her hand low and the smaller light turned—one slow, decisive sweep that made both of them catch their breath.

“Names,” Estinien said, and flinched at his own courage.

She tilted her head. “Not today. We will name him when the water tells us the word doesn’t burn.” A beat. “Or her.”

“Or her,” he agreed, and looked faintly relieved that some edges could still wait to be rounded.

Back in the workshop the carpenter had set the cradle’s two sides to meet. Estinien lifted one—light, strong—and slotted it against the other with the satisfaction of men who love joints that behave. Night Moon tied the white ribbon loosely through the footboard brace, a symbolic bit of future for wood that would carry it.

“Not perfect,” the carpenter praised, running a thumb along the edge where Estinien’s concentration had wavered and left behind a small wave. “Good. The child will find it and claim it as a harbor.”

Night Moon laid both palms on the rim and let the two lights meet the idea of a bed rocked by hands that knew both weapons and patience. The air altered the way it does when a room decides to remember something before it happens.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “hang the lanterns on the east gallery at vespers.”

“Every night,” Edmont said from the door, because he liked to be asked for things he had already done. “Until spring. We might as well make a tradition. Ishgard gets cold without them.”

“You invented this yesterday,” Alisaie accused, entering behind him with a face full of approval.

“Traditions appreciate urgency,” Edmont replied.

That evening, the east gallery learned the shining of a line of small lamps, each with a window polished by a different hand. People paused in the corridor as if light could be a friend you greet in passing and promise to write. Children counted as far as they could and then started again. A man set an orange under the third lantern; a woman stole it later for a child and called that a miracle.

In their room, Night Moon wrote a line before the ink could decide to be shy.

We are making a cradle with places for thumbprints. Mother writes; the Brume convenes a court out of bread; the Wood asks for a speaker and we set a chair by the window. He—she—turns like a small yes.

She left the book open because some words dry better in company.

Estinien banked the fire the way he had learned and set the kettle in its preferred corner. He came to her without hurry and put his forehead to hers, a gesture that had learned to be ordinary without losing holiness.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he answered.

The lanterns along the gallery burned as if they had been given their orders by a benevolent tyrant. Somewhere in the Brume a girl told her brother there were thirteen tonight and he said fourteen and they agreed to be wrong together.

On the sill, bark and iron and feather arranged themselves without argument: code and oath, both kinds of weather the house was happy to keep.

Spring waited in the hallway like someone early to a dinner, smiling at its own nerves.

Chapter Text

Chapter 14 — Bough & Bowl

Thaw forgot its manners and came all at once. Icicles broke their vows; the gutters sang like apprentices. House Fortemps drew its breath the way a city does when winter relaxes its hand but keeps the wrist ready.

They chose the room for spring in a manner that might as well have been ritual: three people walking until stone said yes.

Not the great hall. Not the oratory whose hymnals smelled of beeswax and a century of clean hands. They found it at the turn of the east gallery where lanterns had learned to keep vespers—a small chamber with a good window, a table that took bread without making a speech, and a floor that admitted it had been warmed by morning sun more than once.

“This,” Edmont said, pleased to have discovered a tradition he would be accused of inventing. “Bowl here. Bough there. Lantern in the window. People where they fit.”

“Witness along the wall,” Aymeric added, measuring with his eyes. “Too many of us outside, too few inside. We want the Wood to feel outnumbered by bread, not elbows.”

Honoroit arrived with a cloth and the air of a man given a battle he’d always wanted to fight. He spread linen like a treaty, set a basket for loaves, placed a plate for oranges and stood back as if daring the day to misbehave. Emmanellain tested the room’s acoustics by telling the table it was handsome; the table, to its credit, did not answer.

Night Moon stood by the window. The ash-leaf braid rested at her collar; the lantern charm tapped the journal ribbon once against wood and fell silent. Estinien took her hand as if he were checking a strap; his palm paused low without asking and the smaller light responded—a turning like a tide that had decided who owned the shore.

“Good,” he murmured.

“Good,” she echoed.

Saran slid in by a shadow, made of weather and apology. “Aelene will come at noon,” he said. “She has the look of someone who intends to approve and will be disappointed if deprived.”

“Then we must disappoint her thoroughly,” Aymeric said, too cheerfully.

Edmont sent Saran for a bench no one would miss if the day decided to lean on it. “Your mother sent anything else?” he asked Night Moon, as if the question were a napkin offered.

“A twig of willow bound with thread,” Night Moon said, touching her sleeve. “For the bowl. Says willow keeps tempers from feeling important.”

“Excellent,” Edmont said. “We shall drown pride before anyone speaks.”

The bowl came from the Fortemps vaults—it had been a washbasin for traveling retinues a hundred years ago, hammered silver with a lip wide enough to let a hand float without touching metal. It had never had a better day’s work. Estinien carried it like a standard; Night Moon poured boiled snowmelt—from the manor’s roof and from the Vault cistern, married together over a quiet flame. Willow slipped into the water; its green behaved.

“Bough,” Saran said, appearing with a branch he must have coaxed from somewhere it would be missed. It smelled like shade and memory. He set it in a stand at the room’s edge and the leaves stood as if they approved of the window.

“Light,” Edmont said; Honoroit set the carved lantern in the sill. Its paper panes shivered with the draft and then remembered they were meant to be brave.

A knock: not a demand, not a supplication. Aelene entered with her hood back, her hands empty, her eyes carrying the complicated calm of women who keep ledger and law and listen to both without falling in.

“Night Moon,” she said, polite as a stream you’d forgotten had a voice. “I am Aelene. I come to witness and to forget what the forest insists on when it is tired.”

“You are welcome to parley under our roof,” Aymeric said, because sometimes the old sentences are useful if you make them sit where they should. “We have bread, light, and water. We have too many witnesses to allow mistakes.”

Aelene’s mouth softened. “Prudent.”

She surveyed the room the way a craftswoman reads a table she did not build—testing for wobble, admiring a joint, noting where polish has been left off on purpose so fingers have something to learn. “Bowl, bough, window, bread. A lantern with a decent temper. A father who makes stone behave.”

Edmont inclined his head: guilty as charged.

Her gaze found Estinien. “Dragon.” Not insult. Not title. Plain fact, set on the cloth and left to be what it was.

“I pour well,” he said. “I’m learning not to scald pride.”

“Good,” Aelene said. She turned to Night Moon, to the diamond at her brow and the ash mark she had chosen to draw there, fine as a vein. “And you. Will you wear witness ash the day you name?”

“I will,” Night Moon answered. “Not because I am called, but because I call.”

“That will do,” Aelene replied, and the room let out a tension it hadn’t admitted to holding.

“Terms?” Aymeric asked, already writing where he knew the answer would land.

Aelene set three pebbles on the linen, the Wood’s way of counting to law. “One: no hands on mother or child unless asked by the mother. Two: no song over stone. Three: witnesses name what they see and then eat, so the words do not sour the air.”

“We accept,” Edmont said. “And add: one Leaf-Speaker only. The rest of your elders may attend as persons, not as instruments.”

Aelene smiled without showing teeth. “A pleasant insult. Accepted.”

She moved to the bough, touched it once with two fingers, then took the place set for “Leaf-Speaker” as if she had always been meant to sit on that bench. The Brume women tucked themselves along the wall like saints in practical clothes. Alphinaud found the angle that let him see without being the subject of seeing. Alisaie took station by the window—lantern, leaf, bread, her—daring anyone to argue which mattered most.

“Will you rehearse?” Aelene asked Night Moon, gentled by the ask.

Night Moon nodded. She set her palm low to the curve where the smaller light made itself faithful. She did not hide it. Estinien stood a pace to her right; Saran a pace to her left. Edmont behind, a hand on the chair that had been chosen for rest later. Aymeric by the bowl, a clerk in the theater of water.

“What is said,” Aelene prompted, “when the leaf touches the brow?”

Night Moon looked at the bowl, at the window, at the lantern, at the faces that had learned her breaths by now. She spoke simply, as Haurchefant had taught. “Not away,” she said. “Through. Welcome, and be kept.” She dipped the leaf, lifted it, let one bead fall back—choose—and set the leaf to the diamond gently, then to the low curve, gentler still.

The smaller light turned—decisive, like a hand closing on a thumb. A quiet sound went around the room—laughter, almost, and the respectable kind of weeping that knows when to stop. Estinien’s breath stuttered and righted; Saran’s jaw did a thing it would never admit to doing in public.

Aelene exhaled. “Witness,” she said, as if the word were a seal pressed into warm wax. “It will do.”

—flashback (trigger: the bead of water falling back; the memory of stream)—

A brook in deep canopy. Her mother had shown her how to name a hurt without making it a future. “We speak into water because water remembers how to move,” she’d said. “Stone keeps records; water keeps mercy. We touch the brow because the world asks too much of it; we touch the belly because that is where we keep the next song. We say ‘through’ because away is a lie men tell when they are tired of carrying.” She had dipped a leaf, touched Night Moon’s brow when she’d been small enough to believe doors closed because they forgot about her rather than because men liked rooms to themselves. “Through,” her mother had said. “Welcome. Be kept.”
Night Moon had thought then that welcome was a place. It turned out to be a verb.
—end—

A messenger appeared at the door like a question. Aymeric frowned because he disliked questions during rehearsal, but he took the note. Read. Smiled without showing teeth.

“From Maelen,” he said to Aelene. “She sends regrets that she cannot attend rehearsal because she is busy coaching elders on how to arrive in a city without embarrassing themselves. She asks if apple wood will satisfy as incense for the day, since cedar makes people witless and that spoils diplomacy.”

Aelene made a small appreciative noise. “Sensible as ever.”

“Then we will burn apple,” Edmont said, already instructing the household in his head. “And set oranges. And forbid speeches.”

“Good,” Aelene replied.

Saran edged toward the window, the way brothers do when they think better of advice and finally offer it anyway. “When the elders come,” he told Estinien, “they will say you are not to be so near the bowl. They will say you tilt the water with your breath.”

Estinien considered, then nodded. “I will stand where the window is,” he said. “So they can see who keeps the light.”

Saran looked faintly surprised at how much he liked the answer. “Do that.”

They let the room learn who stood where until the lesson became posture rather than pain. Then they practiced leaving, which is the part of ceremony people forget and which therefore goes badly. Ishgard left well. The Wood left less well; Aelene watched how the city handled doors and made a note to give to Maelen to give to elders who would not take it.

When the rehearsal emptied, Aelene lingered. She reached to Night Moon not with a hand but with a look that had earned its softness. “You have chosen two names,” she said. “Good. Names are tools. You will teach the child to use both and to borrow a third when either refuses.”

Night Moon tipped her head. “Will you come on the day?”

“I will,” Aelene said. “And I will write, afterwards, that no theft was attempted and none could have succeeded anyway.”

They laughed, because some truths like to be dressed up.

Aelene went. The bough stood. The bowl kept its patience. The lantern watched the road the way light does when it has decided to be a kind of law.

In the workshop, Estinien shaped a mobile from thin slats of apple: three tiny lanterns and a leaf, cut with better grace than his first attempts. The carpenter whistled, impressed against his principles. Night Moon sat with her feet on a stool and read the letter from Mother again, aloud this time, savoring the line about scolding a dragon.

“I will present myself for scolding,” Estinien said gravely. “I will take notes.”

Saran leaned in the doorway, arms crossed. “She will like you despite herself,” he said. “She will attempt not to. She will fail.”

Night Moon folded the letter and tucked it against her heart. “What about you?” she asked him. “Will you like a city that invents lantern practice because it needed an excuse to be kinder to itself?”

Saran looked at the east gallery where small lights waited for dusk and did not admit they were eager. “I will,” he said, sounding put out by his own answer.

Dusk arrived as if it had been listening. Lanterns along the gallery kindled one by one—Honoroit at the far end, a scullery maid near the middle, Edmont himself at the bend where Night Moon liked to pause and count. People came to watch the row of small suns take their posts, and no one apologized for standing still.

Night Moon placed Estinien’s hand where the second light kept time and felt the answer—stronger now, less like a question, more like a statement.

“Hello,” he said again, because repetition teaches love to hear itself.

She turned her head, set her brow to his cheekbone where stubble rasped at diamond, and laughed very softly. “Through.”

“Through,” he returned.

They stood long enough for the last lamp to learn how to be steady. Edmont arrived with a ledger pretending to be casual and a smile refusing to be.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we hang two extra lanterns in the gallery.”

“Why?” Alisaie demanded, appearing like punctuation.

“Because the Brume says the number should be fifteen, not thirteen,” he said. “Ishgard has always negotiated with numbers. It makes people feel taller.”

Night Moon smiled into the window. “Fifteen, then.”

“The day after,” Aymeric added, strolling up with the air of a man who had, by sheer force of will, improved someone’s handwriting, “we invite the bell captain to observe how well the gallery’s lanterns agree with his sense of timing.”

“Are we still rehearsing?” Estinien asked.

“We are alive,” Aymeric said. “Which is the more tedious form of rehearsal.”

Saran snorted; it might have been affection.

They went to their room when the lights were done learning themselves. Night Moon wrote:

We chose a room that understands windows. Aelene placed three stones: hands, song, eat. We said through. The child heard the word and turned once like a seal pressed on warm wax.

She left the ink open to the air because some words want witnesses on their way to becoming permanent.

Estinien banked the fire and did a thing he had not known how to do when winter began: he sat, not as a post, but as a man who believed the door did not require guarding to be safe. He held out his hand. She put hers in it. Palm low, the smaller light went on making the sentence they were learning to read together.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he replied.

The lantern in the window looked down the length of the gallery and found fifteen friends. In the street below, a child counted them wrong and was forgiven by the number itself. At the edge of the Wood, Maelen explained to old men how not to embarrass themselves inside a city; Aelene sharpened a quill on which good news could ride. Their mother tied willow to a kettle and told it to behave.

Winter, which had decided to take the compliment, let spring have the next line. The bowl held still. The bough kept green. The window learned how to be a witness. And the house practiced the oldest oath it knew, in the smallest possible ways:

Light.

Bread.

Through.

Chapter Text

Chapter 15 — Water & Word

Morning came clean and busy. House Fortemps moved like a choir that had rehearsed and preferred to pretend it hadn’t.

In the small chamber off the east gallery the bowl waited—silver hammered honest, mouth wide, water calm as a held breath. Night Moon had married boiled snowmelt from the manor’s roof with Vault cistern water and let the kettle’s temper be taught by patience. The willow twig her mother had sent rested in the bowl like good advice. The bough stood in its brace at the wall, leaves a shade that remembered shade. In the window, the carved lantern took light from a sky determined to prove it had choices.

“Apple wood only,” Edmont reminded the brazier with a look that made servants move faster without feeling hurried. “Oranges on the table. Bread where hands can find it without thinking.”

Aymeric arrived with a clerk and the old parley charter, which had learned to wear a ribbon for the occasion. He set it on the side table as if paper could quietly teach a city to behave.

Estinien checked the room the way he used to check sky before leaping: hinges, angles, the precise distance between a mother and the space she needed. His right hand hovered where it always did now; when Night Moon nodded, he set his palm low. The smaller light answered with a sweep he felt in his own ribs.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she echoed, smiling small because big would have let tears choose to be useful too soon.

Saran slid in from shadow, hood back and apology holstered. “Aelene on the inner stair,” he said. “Three elders behind her trying to remember how to be respected without song.”

“And?” Aymeric asked, as if asking the weather for its itinerary.

“Mother coming by the corridor,” Saran added, as if the word were allowed to join its betters at table. His mouth softened in spite of himself. “She remembered the door you told her to look for.”

Night Moon didn’t move. Her breath did. Estinien’s fingers tightened on her hand once, a message, a vow, a rescue rope that didn’t need to be thrown because no one was falling.

A knock, as rehearsed. Aelene entered first: cloak plain, hands empty, eyes brisk. Behind, two elders who wore dignity like a coat that had belonged to a more admirable uncle. After them—Maelen, river-grey and pleased to be busy. And last, unannounced because some entrances are skills, not rights: Mother.

She was not young and not yet old. The color of her hair took its advice from ash bark; her mouth had learned lines from laughter and from keeping counsel. She wore no jewels. The ash-leaf braid lay at her own throat, simple as breath. Her eyes found Night Moon and undid three winters without moving.

“Child,” she said.

“Mother,” Night Moon answered, and the word did not cut.

They stood only long enough to prove they remembered how. Then they went to one another like hands that have broken too many jars and finally learned to lift correctly. Mother’s palm went to Night Moon’s cheek. Night Moon’s to the back of her mother’s knuckles. It was not dramatic. It was correct.

“Gently,” Mother murmured. “There is more day to use.”

“Plenty,” Night Moon replied, voice rough and proud of it.

Aelene cleared her throat—a practical sound. “Terms,” she said, and set three pebbles on the cloth. “No hands; no song; witnesses eat.”

“We accept,” Edmont said. “And add: one Leaf-Speaker, many neighbors.”

Aelene inclined her head, bested and content for now. “Neighbors,” she agreed.

Aymeric moved to the charter-line because his body understands theatre when law requires it. “The city recognizes sanctuary,” he read, not as a spell, as plumbing—mundane systems that keep homes from drowning. “The Wood recognizes witness.” He looked up. “Let us see both work.”

Maelen took place with the Brume women against the wall—knot of shawls and stalwarts, onion-sellers and laundresses and one baker who had dusted his sleeves on purpose so people would think he’d been busy.

Mother did not take a seat. She stood opposite Aelene, hands folded, a person, not an instrument, by the room’s agreed geometry. She nodded once to Estinien.

“Dragon man,” she said, without scorn.

“I pour well,” he answered, almost smiling.

“You will be scolded later,” she promised, apparently content with his answer.

He bowed, already committed to enjoying it.

Saran found the corner that let him see all exits and the bowl in the same glance. Alisaie took the window with the lantern and the habit of daring weather to change its mind. Alphinaud found a patch of sunlight and made notes at an angle that would look flattering in a chronicle drawn by someone who liked justice to be legible.

Aelene lifted a hand and let it fall. The room changed: not sacred, exactly, but awake.

Night Moon set her palm low and made no habit of hiding it. Estinien stood to her right, the exact distance between company and wall. Edmont kept his hand on the back of a chair—rest reserved, as promised. Aymeric placed himself by the bowl as if logistics had become benediction.

Aelene spoke for the Wood in the tone a good midwife uses: plain, unafraid.

“Witness,” she said. “A leaf, a bowl, a bough, a window. A mother and a house.” She turned her head. “Speak what you will speak.”

Night Moon moved the way men move when they have decided a cliff is a road that needs renaming. She dipped the leaf—a clean stroke, a bead trembling at the tip that did not fall until the bowl had time to memorize it. She lifted the leaf; the water held its mirror. She touched the diamond lightly, the way you touch a friend’s shoulder before saying a hard thing. She lowered the leaf to the low curve where the second light kept time, and it became easy to breathe. She said what her mother had once taught and what Ishgard had taught her to say in public.

“Not away,” Night Moon said. “Through. Welcome. Be kept.”

The smaller light moved. Not the earlier flutter. A turn—sleek, deliberate, joyful, like a gull choosing a draft and finding it correct. Estinien’s breath pulled and settled. Edmont made a sound in his throat that might have been a prayer or its less presumptuous cousin. Mother’s mouth parted. Aelene said, simply, “Witness.”

And then the room changed as if someone had opened an invisible door and let a better season in. Not light—the temperature of kindness. A draft circled ankle-height, quick and laughing where drafts do not go; the lantern’s paper panes flexed as if a joke had passed between old friends. Night Moon felt warmth at her brow without heat. She knew that laugh. Edmont’s eyes shone and did not pretend otherwise. Estinien did not look for anyone not present. He looked at now and let gratitude take his knees a fraction.

Haurchefant did not appear. But the better part of rooms he had loved chose to be present without ceremony.

Aelene set her palms flat, claiming, naming. “No theft attempted,” she said, formal. “None possible. The house keeps what the house keeps.”

“And will keep,” Edmont added, not as rebuttal, as habit.

Aymeric dipped his quill and wrote the word Witness with a flourish that would make scribes feel employed for a week.

Maelen exhaled like a river forgetting a bend. Saran blinked with the sudden amazement of brothers who realize one of their jobs has neatly become obsolete without their permission. Mother closed her eyes once, opening them on a bright that left nothing behind but acceptance.

“Eat,” Aelene said softly, a shape of law that tastes like mercy. “So the words don’t sour.”

Bread moved. Oranges moved. The baker forgave three debts spontaneously and looked lofty about it. Night Moon handed her mother the first slice and Estinien the second because hierarchy exists in houses that know what they’re doing. Mother tore her bread and passed half to Estinien with a tiny tch of approval she would deny later.

“You will take a warmer scarf when you come to the Wood,” she informed him.

“Yes,” he said meekly, learning for the future that deference is a kind of armor if you wear it correctly.

Aymeric offered Aelene an orange with the expression of a man inquiring whether a treaty takes citrus. She took it, conceding the point with her mouth full.

Alisaie broke an orange and pressed a piece into Night Moon’s palm like smuggled sun. “For the road you’re not taking,” she said, which came out softer than she meant it to.

Alphinaud presented a folded copy of the charter addendum to the elders with a bow that let them feel tall while being contained: one Leaf-Speaker, many neighbors. The elders bowed back as if returning a favor they hadn’t noticed being given.

When bread had been honored and a little rudeness traded among those who loved one another enough to be brave, Aelene stood and placed her own leaf-mark—a thin vein of ash drawn neatly above the diamond.

“Not for law,” she murmured, as private as two hands around a cup. “For memory. So the Wood will recognize how to be silent in front of a window.”

Night Moon nodded, moved and not required to say so.

Aelene turned to the room. “I have heard,” she said to Aymeric, “that in Ishgard a witness signs even when she is told she does not need to.”

He smiled. “We do enjoy paper.”

“Then give me yours,” she said. She took the clerk’s quill and wrote down what the day had already become: Aelene of Reedlight, Leaf-Speaker, witness: no theft attempted; none possible; leaf laid; word spoken; water remembered; child answered; house kept. She sanded it and did not bother to check it twice.

Maelen kissed Night Moon’s brow because there are liberties you may take as an aunt that courtesy will pretend to object to later and then frame.

Mother waited until the room’s noise became good and useful. Then she crooked a finger at Estinien. He came like a sensible man walking toward something that would fix him.

“You will be scolded tomorrow,” she said.

“Understood,” he answered.

“Today,” Mother went on, “I will say thank you for learning to pour water and for using your hands correctly on doors.”

He blinked.

“You have kept them unlatched,” she clarified. “A city forgets its luck when it nails barricades disguised as thresholds. Do not let it forget.”

“I won’t,” he said, discovering he had been deputized.

Mother set a small thing in his hand—a ring of braided ash bound with a thread of iron. “For the cradle,” she said. “Tie it where a hand will find it and think twice about putting pride near a sleeping child.”

“I will,” he promised, absolutely sincere.

“To you,” she said to Night Moon, “I will say what I have always said. Doors open. Through.”

“Through,” Night Moon echoed, and the word did a quiet good to the air.

The elders, finding they could neither win nor save face noisily, decided to invent a virtue: they admired the bough. It improved them. Aelene gathered them with the practiced gravity of shepherds and escorted them to the corridor. Maelen lingered to pinch Saran’s ear lightly, as a woman does when a nephew’s cleverness has been useful but insufficiently confessed. Saran accepted as if it had been ink, not pinching.

When the Wood had gone, the room exhaled and became a room again.

Aymeric closed the charter and looked briefly, almost indulgently pleased. “We behave well when raids on our sanctuaries are framed as ceremonies,” he observed.

“We behave well when given bread and not asked to pretend it isn’t what we came for,” Edmont countered.

Night Moon leaned her head briefly against Estinien’s shoulder where he had taken station near the window. Beyond the glass, the east gallery had remembered to put on its lanterns even though daylight had not yet turned its pockets out.

“Shall we hang the mobile?” Estinien asked, the voice of a man prepared to do something small and therefore miraculous.

She nodded. “Now.”

In the workshop, the cradle waited—ribs joined, edges rounded to the carpenter’s satisfaction and to the future’s. Estinien lifted the small mobile he’d made from apple slats: three tiny lanterns and a leaf. A thin iron ring joined them; a bit of blue silk steadied the balance.

Mother watched from the door, arms folded in a posture that generally precedes approval among people who refuse to admit they’re capable of it.

“Hang it,” she said, as if they required an elder’s license.

Estinien fixed a hook in the cradle’s frame with a soldier’s precision and a father’s care; the mobile turned once and found its pace. The lanterns rocked like boats that knew the shore; the leaf swung like something used to translating wind into counsel. Night Moon laid a palm on the rim. The smaller light answered with a little push against her hand, curious and convinced.

“Hello,” Estinien said again, because repetition is how vows become furniture.

Mother set the ash ring into the cradle’s corner with a nod. “Pride can snag itself there instead of on a finger,” she declared.

Saran, who had become an expert in pretending not to be moved, looked at the cradle and allowed himself one blatant breach: he smiled like a little brother.

Aymeric and Edmont pretended work elsewhere had become urgent, which was an act of decency, not cowardice. Alisaie stalked off to threaten someone’s handwriting into legibility. Alphinaud left a copy of the witness statement on Night Moon’s desk with a ribbon and a note: For history’s lazier afternoons.

When the workshop quieted, Mother stepped forward and fitted her hand over Night Moon’s on the rim. The two palms held the wood like a field holds the first small warmth of spring.

“Two names,” Mother reminded, eyes kind. “Use both. And if a third comes, let it.”

“It will,” Night Moon said, surprising herself with certainty.

Mother kissed her brow in farewell, then did a thing Estinien would remember until he forgot his own name: she pressed her forehead to his for a heartbeat as if sealing a pact not with grandeur but with domesticity. He closed his eyes because sometimes joy is a glare you can’t face without gentling it.

“Be teachable,” she said.

“I am,” he assured her, and for today the claim held.

Mother left with Saran at her side, two figures walking at the pace of people who have written down everything they will need to remember and can afford to be careful with the turning of corridors. The house watched them go with the dignity of stone that has learned to be soft without apologizing.

Dusk learned its regulars. The east gallery lanterns lit one by one: Honoroit with the solemnity of a man lighting altars; a scullery maid with a giggle she would deny; Edmont with a flourish he had earned. In the little chamber, the bowl’s water went still. The bough kept green. Someone—not the wind—laughed once, down near the floor, and then behaved.

Night Moon sat where the chair had been reserved for rest. Estinien knelt and untied her boot as if untying knots could be a sacred office. She put her hand low and found the answer she had hoped to find—strong, steady, not loud. Certain.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he returned.

On the sill, the lantern looked out over fifteen friends along the gallery and decided to burn a little brighter without asking anyone’s permission. In the Brume, someone told a story about a day when law was fed before being obeyed and behavior improved accordingly. In the Wood, Aelene sharpened her quill to write a report she looked forward to. Maelen folded a shawl and grinned at no one. Mother set a kettle on and told it to mind its business.

The bowl cooled. The bough remembered. The window did what windows do when told a true thing: it held the light and let it go.

Chapter Text

Chapter 16 — Scarf & Sky

Morning arrived with steam and a lecture.

Night Moon sat at the winter room table wrapping her hands around a cup while Mother adjusted the way Estinien wore a scarf. The red diamond at Night Moon’s brow glowed easy; the ash mark above it—Aelene’s thin leaf—had faded to the memory of a promise.

“Not like you’re going to duel the weather,” Mother said, retwisting wool as if strangling a bad habit. “Like you intend to be loved by it against its will.” She turned him toward the window, approved the fall. “There. Coerthas will trip over itself trying to keep you.”

“Yes, madam,” Estinien said, valiantly solemn. Saran leaned in the doorway and did not smirk; Alisaie failed to hide hers entirely.

Mother shifted to Night Moon and touched two fingers to the low, steady curve where the second light kept time. “Still,” she said, a diagnosis and a blessing. The smaller rhythm answered with a sure, polite hello. Mother’s mouth softened. “Good.”

Estinien offered tea like an apology he was proud of. Mother drank, nodded once, set the cup down with the air of a woman who had decided to be pleased in public.

“I’ll be at the chapel,” she said, gathering her shawl. “Arguing with the beeswax.” A kiss for Night Moon’s brow—diamond, ash—then a look that scolded Estinien for any future mistake he might consider. “Be teachable.”

“I am,” he promised, and for today the claim held.

—flashback (trigger: the scarf’s fall; a small hand teaching)—

Years ago, a forest morning that hadn’t remembered to be cruel yet. Night Moon’s mother knotted a strip of cloth at her daughter’s throat and tapped the knot. “A scarf,” she said, “is not a challenge. It’s a truce. Tie it like you mean to let the day pass without one of you winning.”
“What if the day insists?” Night Moon asked.
“Then you untie it and argue properly,” her mother replied. “But you try truce first.”
—end—

By late morning the manor had smoothed its moods. Edmont and Aymeric were practicing the city’s favorite magic—turning errands into policy. Lantern wicks were trimmed; the bowl washed and dried until it shone like a well-kept promise. A faint salt freshened the corridors; someone had decided oranges look better in every room.

“Walk?” Estinien asked, offering not an arm but a pace.

“Walk,” she said. It meant the High Vigil overlook—half a climb, half a test of breath, a view that taught the mind its own size.

Saran joined without asking, the third step in a pattern their bodies had learned: Estinien to windward, Saran set where shadows collect bad ideas. Snow lingered in powders where the sun hadn’t been persuasive; melt ticked down gutters in small, satisfied arguments.

“You’ll have company at the overlook,” Saran said casually as they ascended. “Nothing stupid. The kind of stupid that wears shoes and asks for directions too loudly.”

“Stealth that hopes to be noticed,” Estinien translated.

“Mm,” Saran said. “We’ll let it be seen by witnesses who enjoy bread.”

The High Vigil promised its clean horizon. Ishgard’s rooftops shouldered the sky; somewhere a bell practiced the next hour under its breath. Night Moon paused one landing before the top, set a palm low, smiled at the answering turn — sure now, less flutter than statement.

“Fine?” Estinien asked.

“Fine,” she said, and meant it.

On the stone lip of the overlook, two strangers tried on the clumsy politeness of people who believe costume is character: forest-cut cloaks too new by half, boots that didn’t know this city’s stairs. They made conversation at the air: the shipments that must be difficult, the smoke that must be hazardous, the law that must be lonely so far from home.

The Brume had arrived before them. A woman with onion hands peeled an orange with disciplined patience. Two boys set a game of jacks directly under the best eavesdropping spot. A man repaired a bench too loudly. Honoroit appeared with a basket as if a corner of the city had requested bread and he’d said yes.

Night Moon stepped into the overlook’s plain center. Estinien kept windward. Saran evaporated until needed.

“Good day,” said the bolder of the two cloaked men. “We were told a… Leaf-Speaker might be here. We carry concern.” His smile was the kind you wear for loan officers and trees.

“You missed the day by one,” Night Moon answered. “Witness has eaten. What concern remains should be written and delivered under seal.”

“We thought a private word might be more… respectful,” the second offered. He glanced past her—counting windows, doors, witnesses.

Estinien folded his arms in exactly the way that convinces trouble to choose another street. “Respect brings bread,” he said. “Private words arrive with paper.”

Onion-hands clicked her tongue. “And with names.”

The bolder man shifted tactic. “Some among the elders fear for the child,” he said, correctly choosing the only lever that isn’t a lever at all. “We are… charged to inspect the city’s provisions.”

“Provisions,” Night Moon repeated, tasting the word. “Bread?” She nodded toward the basket. “Water?” She tipped her head toward the High Vigil’s cistern spout. “Windows? You’re standing under three.” Her mouth tilted—no barbs. “Worry is welcome here. Inspection is not.”

The man’s smile frayed. “You refuse an elder’s concern?”

“I refuse its disguise,” she said, pleasantly.

Aymeric arrived with the peculiar talent of powerful men for being precisely where theater wants them. He carried a folded charter and a disarming amount of patience. “Gentlemen,” he said, the word tightening politely around their ankles. “I beg you to turn your admiration into letters. Ishgard is built for correspondence.”

“We were told—” the bolder began.

“You were told to behave,” Saran said from their blind side, suddenly present. “You are doing it in the wrong city. Try again in the next one.”

They turned at the voice—hope catching at kinship. Recognition hit a heartbeat later: Hara, elder-blood. Saran’s face did not apologize.

“Brother,” the bolder tried.

“Witness,” Saran corrected, and the Brume, hearing the capital letter, straightened a degree.

The onion-hands woman pressed bread into the second man’s fingers. “Eat or leave,” she said kindly. He ate, surprised into obedience. Bread does that.

The bolder made one last reach for leverage. “If you refuse inspection,” he said, “you leave us only song.”

Aymeric smiled without showing teeth. “We have bells.”

The two men looked at the witnesses and the windows and the sky that had decided to favor the city today. They looked at Saran, who was not going to break and was going to be present at dinners they preferred to make smaller. They looked at Night Moon and found no disputable surface.

“Letters,” the bolder conceded. “Under seal.”

“Thank you,” Night Moon said, and meant it as dismissal and as a small mercy.

They went. The Brume debriefed one another thoroughly without moving their mouths very much. Honoroit passed oranges in a circuit that made the overlook smell like afternoon. Estinien let his breath go slow. Saran tipped his head toward the south parapet.

“Two more,” he murmured to Night Moon. “Decided their boots wanted a different stair. They’ll tell a story of difficult terrain.”

“Good,” Night Moon said. “Let them be heroic on the way home.”

—flashback (trigger: the held-breath after a threat recedes; restraint learned)—

There had been a winter alley once—shadows and insult. Estinien’s spear had wanted to work. Haurchefant had stepped between, palm out, steady enough to move a blade without touching it. “What’s the stronger art?” he’d asked. “To pierce, or to keep a thing from ever needing to be pierced?”
Estinien had wanted, then, to argue definitions. Haurchefant’s hand had not moved. “Wait,” he’d said. “Stand where witness can see you. Let the enemy misunderstand and fall in love with bread somewhere else.”
Estinien had thought it cowardice for half a breath. Then Night Moon had appeared at the alley mouth, whole and annoyed, and heroism redefined itself without asking permission.
—end—

By early afternoon the “inspection” had been demoted to rumor; by evening it would be a story about how Ishgard had inspected the inspectors and found them under-seasoned.

They took the long way back through the Brume, where a boy showed Night Moon a damp scrap of paper with alphabets on it and asked how you wrote “through” so it kept meaning itself. She knelt, wrote the letters slow, let him trace them with a bread-crumb on cobble. Estinien watched with his hands behind his back as if tenderness were a craft he’d always meant to apprentice to and had finally found the right shop.

Back at the manor, Mother ambushed Estinien in the stair with a shawl. “For your pride,” she said, draping it over his arm. “When it gets cold.”

“It often does,” he admitted gravely.

“Good,” she nodded. “Then you know when to put it away.”

He grinned; she pretended not to be charmed and failed.

In the workshop the cradle waited, mobile steady, the small ash ring tied where Mother had indicated. Night Moon sat, boots off, and put her feet on a stool like a woman who had learned the difference between grace and grindstone. Estinien set his palm where it belonged. The two lights answered—a turn and a press, every bit the conversation of people who knew they were expected and weren’t worried about arriving.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she answered.

Saran came as far as the door and then lingered like punctuation. “Letters will come,” he said. “Maelen will edit them with her eyebrows. Aelene will suggest kinder verbs. Silva will sulk in paragraphs.”

“Will you be scolded?” Night Moon asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And fed. It evens.”

“Tell Mother,” she said, “that I will come with both names when the day is right.”

Saran’s eyes did that betraying shine he loathes in others. “I’ll tell her,” he managed, and went to practice not wanting to hurry the year.

Dusk found the east gallery with its lamps in a row—fifteen now, because Edmont had decided numbers were negotiable. People paused as they always did. Aymeric strolled the corridor with a bell captain he claimed he needed to consult about timing. Alisaie declared some handwriting at the steward’s desk a crime and mitigated it with threats. Alphinaud inventoried kindness as if one could stock it.

Night Moon wrote in the new journal:

They tried a quiet hand; bread held it. Saran stood. Bells threatened from their pockets and didn’t need to be rung. Mother taught truce by scarf; Haurchefant taught by palm. The child answered twice: once when the wind turned, once when the city did. We were not moved.

She left the page open for the ink’s sake. Estinien banked the fire with the unshowy precision of a man who understands that heat is policy. When he turned back, she already had a hand hovering; he set his own over it, learned again the feel of certainty.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he replied.

On the sill, the little lantern breathed. Along the gallery, fifteen companions made a line of quiet jurisdiction. In the Brume, the onion-seller taught a girl to peel an orange without breaking the rind; in the Wood, Maelen wrote a draft that disguised victory as etiquette; Aelene sharpened a quill for letters that would be needed and polite. Silva stared at a blank page until it glared back and decided to wait for thaw to argue.

The scarf kept its shape. The sky kept its distance. And the house kept its oath the way good houses do—by making staying feel like a craft worth mastering.

Chapter Text

Chapter 17 — Ledger & Lullaby

Morning put on blue and got practical.

In Edmont’s study a long table had been cleared of diplomacy and set with things that keep weather off a family: a registry, a blotter, House Fortemps’ seal, and a smaller stamp Aymeric had brought that said City—Sanctuary without needing to say anything else. Alphinaud hovered with sand and satisfaction; Alisaie occupied a chair sideways in case anyone required being argued into good sense.

Edmont stood like a door politely unlatched. “This is not spectacle,” he told Night Moon, soft as bread. “It’s housekeeping.”

Aymeric turned a page. “The wardship ledger adds a line for the unborn when a house means to be honest,” he said, with the mild brutality of a principled clerk. “Name: To be declared upon first cry. Status: Under sanctuary; kin-by-hearth of Fortemps. Guardians: Night Moon; Estinien; House Fortemps in perpetuity.”

Night Moon touched the ash-leaf braid at her throat and the diamond at her brow. “It will anger no one we intend to please,” she observed.

“Exactly,” Aymeric said, and dipped the pen.

Edmont nodded to Estinien. “Sign as a man who pours water without scalding pride.”

Estinien signed E. Wyrmblood with careful letters that did not ask to be admired. Night Moon added her mark, diamond pressed to wax—blessing, not chain.

Alphinaud sanded the words as if truth were a wet plank that needed setting. Alisaie offered a single, surgical, “Good.” The steward whisked out with the page as if it were a pie that mustn’t fall.

Aymeric closed the book with a satisfied gentleness. “Guardianship and sanctuary recorded,” he said. “If a letter argues, we will answer with this page.”

Edmont looked down as if reading a prayer he’d always liked. “Housekeeping,” he repeated, and the room believed him.

By noon the city had decided to be neighborly. The Brume invented a “witness net”—a half-moon of benches and baskets arranged by invisible agreement at the foot of the east gallery stairs. Anyone who attempted to pass with too much purpose found themselves holding a child or bread or an opinion about orange prices.

Which is why, when a boy too well-shod tried to wander toward the gallery with a folded broadside tucked in his sleeve, six grandmothers converged like weather.

“What have you there, love?” asked onion-hands, friendliest of interrogators.

“A hymn,” the boy lied, out of practice.

“A hymn?” Alisaie said, emerging from the crowd like a footnote sharpening its quill. “Sing it, then.”

He failed to recall the tune and produced the paper instead. Silva’s seal: a leaf pressed into wax hard enough to try to be threat. Moot at first leaf-break. Night Moon is called; failure to appear admits theft. The hand was neat, the tone pure law.

Aymeric arrived at precisely the moment letters require translation into something livable. He glanced, smiled with all his teeth that belonged to courtesy, and passed the sheet to Alphinaud, who read it exactly once before reaching for his pen.

“We reply,” Aymeric said calmly, “that sanctuary is not an absence. We will send witness and word; the mother will travel when the chirurgeon approves and not before. Ishgard likes to keep its babies inside for a while.”

“Some of us,” Edmont murmured, “for several decades.”

Laughter relieved the air of its pretensions. The boy, who had been given a lemon tart by a person who claimed to be a stranger, found himself forgiven for being useful to the wrong messenger.

Saran appeared, because he had a talent for arriving where weather met letters. He read the broadside, snorted softly, and plucked a stray thread from the boy’s cuff with brotherly efficiency. “If you intend to be a courier,” he advised, “do not wear boots you are unwilling to run in.”

“Through?” the boy ventured, trying the new word on his mouth.

“Through,” Night Moon told him, not unkindly.

Edmont sent the reply with the boy and a bread heel, training diplomacy as if it were a kitchen thing. Alphinaud penned a cleaner copy for the archive; Alisaie considered writing nice try in the margin and refrained, barely.

Afternoon made the house briefly idle in that way busy houses rest: by turning to quieter crafts. Estinien planed a sliver of apple for the cradle’s headboard, the small carved lantern taking better shape under his hands. Night Moon mended a seam Honoroit had misjudged because he’d been helping three people at once. The two lights kept their measured duet—one steady, one responding.

She found herself humming without intent. The tune arrived easy. A little minor curl from Ishgard’s hymns, a lilt from forest rounds—a line that circled back on itself in a way that suggested doorways and people welcome in them.

“What’s that?” Estinien asked, shaving another curl from the wood as if sound could be shaped, too.

“A thing my mother used to braid into chores,” Night Moon said, surprised. “And… something Haurchefant used to hum when he thought no one should be carrying a silence that heavy.”

—flashback (trigger: the tune catching at the back of the throat)—

A winter night in Foundation. Haurchefant, sleeves rolled, wiping a table because he liked stealing work from servants. He hummed three notes—nothing much—then a fourth that turned the first three into home. Night Moon had paused in the doorway as if a spear had recognized its rack.
“Does that song have a name?” she’d asked.
“It has work,” he’d said, smiling. “It makes men keep their backs straight and their tempers uncrooked. Sing it while you fetch bread; see if the bread forgets to belong to you.”
It hadn’t. It had behaved better than some lords she knew.
—end—

She sang the four notes clean; Estinien answered with a fifth he didn’t know he knew; the child turned—quick, curious, then soothed by the shape the sounds made when left to be small and correct.

“Ah,” she said on a laugh that remembered to be quiet. “That.”

“Again,” he asked, the way a soldier asks for a form that will not cut him.

She sang it twice, adding a Wood counter her mother had used when streams ran too fast: a bareness that let the larger line go by and still said here. The house liked it. So did the two lights.

They were still singing when Honoroit knocked to announce a minor emergency—lantern seven in the east gallery had lost its temper to a gust and gone out “in front of guests.”

Estinien rose with an eagerness he failed to disguise. Night Moon came too, cloak thrown, hand finding railing the way a truth finds its own sentence.

On the gallery a dozen small suns burned in row, and one dark space asked to be corrected. Wind toyed with wicks; witnesses leaned on the balustrade pretending to talk about anything else.

Estinien stepped into the gap’s weather as if it were an old adversary he now greeted with bread and a wager. He relit the wick; it tried to be vain; he adjusted the chimney; it remembered it was meant to be humble. Saran blocked the draft with the exact width of his shoulder. Night Moon sang those four notes under her breath; the flame steadied as if it had recognized a familiar kitchen.

“There,” Honoroit said, relieved, and didn’t cry in public.

Edmont declared lantern seven’s recovery an excuse for cakes; Alisaie declared she had predicted the outcome and would like her prize in apricot; Aymeric claimed to be shocked by the indulgence and accepted a slice.

Night Moon, leaning against the window, set her palm low. The smaller light pressed into her hand as if asking for the tune again. She sang it quietly; Estinien’s mouth turned without permission; lantern seven did not misbehave for the rest of the evening.

A messenger from the Wood came before dusk with a cooler letter—Maelen’s hand, efficient and kind.

The moot is set for first leaf-break. Send witness by letter and by lantern. Bring the mother when she wishes, not when we do. Aelene has taught our elders that silence can be an instrument. I have taught them to like apple more than cedar.

Tell the dragon man I will bring him a scarf and a complaint to practice on. Tell Saran that I am watching him stand where he shouldn’t and applauding into my sleeve.

Night Moon read it aloud; the house smiled in three different dialects. Estinien nodded solemnly, as one does on being threatened with an aunt.

“Reply now?” Alphinaud asked, ink already behaving.

“After supper,” Edmont said, which in his house meant while bread is still warm and men are more honest.

They ate like people being mended—stew, slices of pear, laughter handled as carefully as knives. Night Moon kept finding her voice going back to the little braid of notes until the room had learned it. By the end of the meal a footman was humming it under an apology; a guard at the gate was whistling it to a horse; the kitchen made it into a rhythm with spoons.

“Name it,” Alisaie demanded, as if already planning to bully a choir.

Night Moon considered. “Through,” she said. “It isn’t fancy. It does the job.”

“It will live,” Aymeric decided, which is his superior way of saying yes.

The workshop smelled of apple and polish and pride resigned to being usefully imperfect. The cradle stood with its small mobile above—three lanterns and a leaf—turning with the modesty of crafts that mean to be touched. Estinien tied the ash ring Mother had given him where a foolish finger might snag itself and be scolded into behaving. Night Moon set a folded cloth—Honoroit’s stitches, honest and enthusiastic—along the mattress boards.

She sang the four-note line once more. The two lights steadied to it like a pulse learning weather.

“Again,” Estinien asked, voice rough in that precise, useful way he gets when holding a thing he does not intend to drop.

She set her forehead to his, humming. He put a palm low, a hand on her back, and the room changed shape to fit around the sound.

—flashback (trigger: the hum making stone behave)—

Haurchefant again, in a corridor that had seen men break like poor pottery. He’d taken her hand like it was allowed and had said, “We’ll make the air assume better things of us.” Then he’d hummed those notes until the corridor forgot to be cruel.
—end—

Night Moon laughed into Estinien’s mouth without turning it into ceremony. “It works on stone and on pride,” she said.

“It does,” he agreed. He kissed the diamond once—blessing—and then bent to kiss the place where the smaller light answered—welcome.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he returned.

They stood in the door—bark at her throat, iron at the window, feather tucked north—and watched the mobile turn once in approval. In the corridor, the east gallery lamps learned how to be steady from one another. Down in the Brume, the onion-seller taught a boy to hum Through while counting change. In the Wood, Maelen held up two scarves and decided which would vex Estinien more. Aelene sharpened a quill to write no theft attempted on more days than anyone would have predicted possible. Silva stared at a wall and heard, despite herself, a line of notes that refused to obey.

Night put itself on, and the house made room for sleep. Night Moon wrote one sentence and left it open for the air to witness:

We signed the page; the city signed us back. Lantern seven learned its manners. The child prefers songs that fit in one hand.

The ink dried. The cradle waited without impatience. And the oath the house had learned—small, stubborn, sufficient—kept breathing where people could reach it:

Light. Bread. Through.

Chapter Text

Chapter 18 — Accord & Aether

Morning made order of itself and set it on a tray.

The chirurgeon arrived early, braid neat, palms warm from a mug she refused to spill. She set her case on the library table—cloth, a slender listening horn, a shallow dish with a shimmer of aether settled in it like the top of excellent broth.

“Ledger says you’re sturdy,” she told Night Moon, voice that kind of brisk which is love with better posture. “Let’s put numbers beside adjectives.”

Night Moon lay back on the chaise by the window; the ash-leaf braid rested against the Fortemps clasp; the diamond caught the morning and told it to behave. Estinien took his usual place—near enough to be reached, far enough to be asked. The chirurgeon placed two fingers at Night Moon’s wrist, watched the dish, tilted the horn.

“There,” she said after a breath. “Two lights—one steady, one decided.” The smallest pleased curve at her mouth. “The smaller prefers apples to cedar and argument to boredom. Travel: yes, across halls and gardens; no, up towers intended to remind men of their hubris. Walk every day. Sit when you forget you are carrying a city’s favorite secret.”

Night Moon huffed a breath that almost counted as laughter. The chirurgeon turned to Estinien without changing softness.

“You,” she said, “will please continue to be boring.”

He blinked. “Pardon?”

“Predictable. Here when you are here. Useful at kettles. Loud only when bells require it. Men who think they’re storms make poor weather. Be a stove.”

He inclined his head, properly chastened and privately honored by the assignment. “I’ll keep the fire,” he said.

“Good.” She repacked her case. “Send for me if the two lights quarrel or if your scarf learns pride. Otherwise—eat, rest, argue courteously, be adored.”

“We can manage most of that,” Night Moon said.

“Work on the rest,” the chirurgeon replied, and left the house wiser.

Estinien did not make a speech. He poured tea correctly and did not smirk when Mother’s scarf kept his throat obedient to warmth.

“Ready?” Night Moon asked.

“For what?” he said, though he already knew.

“For ink,” she answered.

Aymeric liked to turn weather into paperwork; Edmont liked to turn paperwork into hearth. Between them the witness accord took shape on a side table in the small chamber off the east gallery where the bowl had stood yesterday: not a treaty, which would have required pride, but a letter of practices, which required good memory.

Aelene arrived with a quill that had been forgiven for its previous sins. Saran came with a bench, an excuse, and the posture of a man who intended to intercept exits if exits tried to be clever. Two Brume women arrived as if the window had invited them by name.

Aymeric read the draft aloud the way one spreads a cloth, looking for snags. “One Leaf-Speaker at any Wood rite within Ishgard; no recall or naming songs directed at stone or sanctuary; letters under seal for grievances; open windows and lanterns set by hosts; bread laid before words; witnesses from both communities present; the Wood acknowledges the child under Fortemps protection; Ishgard acknowledges the Wood’s right to remember without permitting it to summon.”

Aelene tapped the page, approving what had the good manners to be true. “Add: hands on mother or child only at the mother’s request,” she said, dropping a pebble in the grammar.

“Done,” Aymeric said, writing as if that had always been the line.

Edmont added without looking up, “And a kettle in the room.”

Aelene’s mouth tilted. “Add it.”

Saran looked like a man trying not to enjoy himself. “There will be a sulk,” he warned.

“We have fifteen lanterns,” Edmont replied. “We can walk a sulk like a dog.”

They were sealing the accord when trouble invented a polite knock. Not a storm—just two figures at the gallery bend, faces unfamiliar, cloaks a shade too eager to be forest. One of them lifted a hand to his throat, and the air learned to prepare.

“Ah,” Aelene murmured, as if an overambitious apprentice had wandered into the wrong kitchen. “Song.”

All it would take was four wrong notes—soft, insistent, meant to coax Hot—Mothers, children, blood. The room exhaled.

Night Moon said nothing at first. She set her palm low and found the smaller light sure and amused, as if the child had been born into a city just to hear what ridiculous things grown men would attempt. Estinien took a step toward the window, not the singers—where the lantern breathed and the corridor could see him be boring on purpose. Saran shifted, an innocent passage that placed his shoulder exactly where the draft would break if it attempted to carry sound like a rumor.

Aymeric lifted a finger, and someone far down the hall struck a single bell—not loud, exact. The sound found the room and settled in it like a spine.

Night Moon hummed Through—four notes, plain. A Brume woman joined, humming harmony that sounded like bread refusing to get stale. Estinien added the fifth he didn’t remember knowing. Aelene did not sing; she stood and watched with the courtesy of a craftswoman being invited to admire another workshop.

The would-be singers tried to coax the air around the notes; the air preferred honesty. The tune skipped their net and played with the lantern instead. One of the men lost his place; the other developed the sudden need to cough. Onion-hands pressed an orange into one palm and a piece of paper into the other.

“A letter,” she said, gentle as a verdict. “Write it down. Or go home and ask Maelen to edit you.”

They went, burdened with citrus and the new sensation of having failed at being subtle in front of witnesses who had better things to do. Saran did not smirk. The corridor remembered it had wanted to be warm.

“Add a line,” Aelene said, amused. “The Wood agrees that any song in a city is a lullaby unless agreed otherwise.”

Aymeric wrote it with evident delight.

They signed: Aelene of Reedlight; Edmont de Fortemps; Aymeric de Borel; Night Moon with the diamond—blessing, not chain; Estinien with letters that belonged to a man learning how to be a stove. Maelen’s name would be added by courier; Saran witnessed in a hand that did not apologize for the tree in it.

Honoroit brought bread at the exact moment the accord demanded it. People ate, which is how a city tells itself it has been reasonable.

“Done,” Edmont said, sealing the ribbon. “Now let’s all pretend we’ve always behaved like this.”

“We are good at pretending,” Aelene agreed.

—flashback (trigger: the bell’s single note; a different hum)—

Dravanian Forelands, a night Estinien had not meant to survive with softness intact. Nidhogg slept inside his bones like a dragon who had learned jokes. A wind came down the valley that could have flayed arrogant men bare. Estinien had stood very still and listened to the low hum the old wyrm keeps for child and for home. It wasn’t a roar; it was a purr large enough to be weather. He’d kept it then, secret. He’d used it once to calm frightened chocobos; once to steady his own hands. He’d never considered humming it to a room. He considered it now.
—end—

Dusk learned the corridor and the corridor learned its lamps. Fifteen small suns along the east gallery caught the hour and made it kinder. In the nursery, the cradle waited, the mobile—three little lanterns and a leaf—turning with a modesty that would one day become a fascination.

Mother’s scarf had been draped by stealth over the hearth chair; it made the chair look like a man who had learned to be kept. Night Moon sat and set her feet on the stool without pretending stairs weren’t opinionated. Estinien took his usual place and this time let the hum from the flashback night into his chest, very low, the kind of sound that invites rather than insists.

He pressed his palm where it belonged. The two lights answered—the larger steady, the smaller joyful as a gull finding the right draft.

“Hello,” he said, and the hum did the work the word couldn’t reach.

Night Moon laughed, soft and absolutely alive. “He likes that,” she said.

“Or she,” he remembered, and the hum learned a smile.

He lifted his mouth to the diamond—one kiss, as always—then lowered and kissed the place where the smaller light kept time—welcome. The mobile turned once, twice, settled into a pace that seemed to agree with the hum.

Night Moon put her hand over his, making stove and lantern the same object. “We signed a paper,” she said. “But this is the accord that will keep.”

He nodded. “Paper teaches neighbors. This teaches a house.”

She leaned her brow to his. The hum went on doing its work, a long, patient sound that knew the difference between guarding and keeping.

“Write?” he asked after a while, because she always liked to leave a line behind for the air to read.

She reached for the new journal, the little iron lantern charm tapping the margin once. She wrote:

The chirurgeon named us sturdy, and told him to be boring. We signed a letter that prefers windows and kettles to shouting. Men tried a song; the house answered with Through. He hummed weather; the child laughed with a foot I felt in the center of my palm. This is the accord that holds: stove, window, two lights, one room that keeps.

She left it open to dry. He banked the fire. In the corridor, the line of lamps did their jurisdiction, each teaching the next to be steady.

“Together,” she said, the word now the quietest kind of furniture.

“For three,” he replied.

On the sill, bark and iron and feather kept their parliament: code, oath, direction. Down in the Brume, someone sang Through to a baby door-mouse and discovered even mice prefer good laws. At the edge of the Wood, Maelen read the accord to elders with a teapot on the table, and Aelene sharpened a quill to inscribe no theft attempted on the next page before anyone could argue. Silva took out clean paper and found, to her surprise, that it asked for gentler verbs.

And in a room that had learned to be the size of a future, a dragon hummed like weather that had decided to be kind, a mother breathed in time, and a new light turned like a yes that has discovered it likes saying itself.

Chapter Text

Chapter 19 — Salt & Lanterns

Morning brought rain like clean handwriting. The city smelled of slate and bakery; the east gallery lanterns wore beads of water and pretended they were jewels.

Honoroit arrived at the library carrying a tray that had ideas about becoming a treaty: tea that behaved, bread that would not disappoint, a small dish of salt. “From the kitchens,” he said, setting the salt beside the oranges as if it belonged. “For luck.”

A knock pressed the air into form. A Fortemps runner with wet lashes and a spine full of duty presented three letters bound by the same ribbon: one for Edmont, one for Aymeric, one for Night Moon. The wax bore the mooted leaf, pressed hard enough to think itself persuasive.

Edmont broke his first, frowned in polite Ishgardian, and passed it to Aymeric. Night Moon slit hers with a nail and let the Wood’s scent out.

To Night Moon of the Fortemps hearth,
The moot at first leaf-break requests a proof-of-peace: no recall, no naming, no claim. We ask leave to place a seed-marker at your threshold—a token the Wood reads as ‘no summons shall cross.’ Our zealots will be displeased; let them sulk into obedience.
—Maelen

Beneath, in a different hand, tighter and tireless:

As Leaf-Speaker pro tem: 1) one token only; 2) no cedar; 3) no songs in stone; 4) witnesses present; 5) bread first.
—Aelene

Aymeric skimmed, mouth easing. “Reasonable,” he judged, then looked to Edmont. “With supervision.”

Edmont nodded. “We’ll host the placing at the east gallery. Bread table, lanterns, witnesses. And salt,” he added, eyeing the dish as if it had proposed itself into the scene. “Mother swears by it.”

Night Moon touched the salt with two fingers and then the diamond as if introducing them. “My mother says salt keeps panic from curdling the soup,” she said.

“Wise,” Aymeric murmured. “And culinary.”

They were halfway through organizing the hour when Honoroit stiffened toward the window as if it had spoken untidily. He crossed to the sill, lifted the ash-leaf braid… and from beneath it drew out a thread-bound scrap of bark, varnished too thickly, that smelled—lightly, politely—of cedar.

The room changed. Not fear; attention.

“Not ours,” Saran said from the threshold, appearing as if summoned by a bad idea. He didn’t touch the thing. “A zealot’s pocket-ward, slipped by a hand that believes rules must be improved with disobedience.”

Aelene arrived before anyone had sent for her, rain tucked behind her hood. She took in the scrap, the salt, the room’s posture. Her mouth went thin in the way of craftswomen disappointed by apprentices who skip sanding. She extended a hand. “May I?”

Night Moon inclined her head. Aelene lifted the scrap with two fingers the way one removes a coal that has jumped the grate and thinks itself a comet. She brought it to the salt, pressed it in, held it there until the varnish surrendered its vanity and the cedar note was replaced by plainness.

“Witness,” she said, and glanced at Aymeric. “May I burn this in your hearth, with apple?”

“You must,” Edmont said, already reaching for the poker.

They set it to apple; it flared, hissed, consigned itself to sense; the room let breath go. Aelene turned to Saran without ceremony. “Name,” she said.

“Istan of the Hara,” Saran replied, grim, “cousin of a cousin, fond of shortcuts and self. He won’t have come himself. He will be nearby, pleased with the thought of his cleverness.”

Aelene’s jaw set. “I will please him more,” she said mildly. “By writing his name down in a book he cannot read his way out of.” She faced Night Moon then, and the mildness melted. “My apology.”

Night Moon touched the salt again—blessing, not chain—and nodded. “Accepted. Place the seed-marker under bread, with our witness.”

“Bread, then,” Aelene said, relief and resolve married in the word.

They made a little rite of the thing because the world behaves better when asked to: a basket of loaves on the table, the carved lantern steady in the window, a dish of salt in proper view, two Brume women humming Through under their breath as if to remind the day of its obligations. Aelene produced the seed-marker—a small disc of smooth wood wrapped with green thread and a single ash vein painted honest. No cedar. No varnish. It smelled like clean rain and a promise not to overstep.

“By the accord,” Aelene said, addressing the salt and the lantern and anyone else who wished to be jurisprudent, “we set a token at this threshold: no summons shall cross. Witness?”

Aymeric: “Witness.”
Edmont: “Witness.”
Saran, hand on the window latch: “Witness.”
Night Moon: “Witness.”

Aelene slid the disc under the bread basket, deliberately ungrand. “Done,” she said, then added low, “and Istan will eat a sermon later.”

Night Moon’s mouth tilted. “Give him a slice after.”

Aelene allowed herself a brief grin. “Very well.”

Rain held; Ishgard learned the trick of wet light. The house returned to its errands.

—flashback (trigger: salt pressed into palm; a mother’s kitchen)—

A narrow hut where winters learned to make do. Her mother teaching with her hands. “Salt first,” she’d say, pinching it into Night Moon’s palm. “So you remember you can fix what you’ve made too sweet with grief.” She’d add, softer, “And so you remember you don’t cook alone.”
—end—

By midday the Brume had arranged seats under awnings and named it weather rather than inconvenience. Night Moon liked these hours—commerce, noise, the practice of neighborliness. Estinien carried the tea tin like a reliquary and did not apologize. Saran walked near enough to be used and far enough to be forgiven.

They did not intend a “witness net.” The city makes them when it means to. An onion-seller, a woman with a quilt, a boy with a wooden blade and a serious face; two men from the forges with black under their nails; Honoroit bearing a basket that refilled itself by rumor—bread, oranges, a small heap of hard sweets in wrapper paper written on by children practicing letters.

A man came with a rolled broadside, dry under his cloak despite the rain. He held it as one holds a tool whose use he is not entirely sure of. “Message,” he declared to the air.

“You’ll want witness,” the onion-seller said, and offered a stool.

He hesitated, sat, unrolled the paper. First leaf-break approaches. A ward is called. The leaf seal was Silva’s; the hand was Maelen’s—crisp, bare of vanity. At the bottom, in Aelene’s precise strokes: We accept accord: one Leaf-Speaker; no song; no recall; letters under seal; bread first. The seed-marker stands at Fortemps. Witness may sign below.

“Looks proper,” Alisaie said, arriving like punctuation. “Where do we write behave.”

“Aelene already did,” Saran murmured.

The messenger’s eyes ticked—lanterns in windows, bread in baskets, salt in a little dish on the quilt. “I was told,” he confessed, “to expect knives.”

“We sharpen letters instead,” Aymeric said, taking the sheet to sign the line that asked the city to agree it had witnessed. He added beneath: No theft attempted; none possible. Bread eaten.

Night Moon signed with the diamond, then pressed her salt-dusted thumb beside it so the leaf would learn their dialect. Estinien added his name with the economy of men who expect to be held to their words and are glad of it.

The messenger handed over two wrapped sweets—wages in kindness—and left with his back straighter than when he arrived. Children drifted in his wake, humming Through out of tune and still correct.

They returned to the manor through streets that had learned to enjoy rain. The east gallery wore droplets like a rosary. Night Moon set a palm low as she took the last turn; the smaller light answered with a firm little press that made her stop and grin helplessly at nothing in particular.

“Good?” Estinien asked.

“Very,” she said.

Afternoon promised a storm and delivered. The sky took on the greenish argument that means thunder; the first bolt spoke respectfully to the High Vigil and was answered by bell-metal a split second behind. The house folded its windows to ajar; lanterns learned to glitter, not blaze.

In the nursery, the cradle waited as if it had ideas. The mobile—three lanterns and a leaf—turned like a conversation between weather and a patient craft. Mother’s scarf lay where it had been thrown and then arranged, which is how love looks when it isn’t trying for a portrait.

Night Moon stood at the window for the first flash, hand to the diamond by habit. The second flash came; she did not flinch. The two lights kept time.

“Storms?” Estinien asked, offering not comfort but company.

“Better with witnesses,” she said. “And song.”

He smiled because the word hadn’t frightened her.

—flashback (trigger: the storm’s first peel; shelter remembered)—

A courtyard in Foundation with rain deciding to be bold. Haurchefant had thrust a cloak at her, then thrown his without seeming accuracy over a pair of boys and a dog. “Shelter first,” he’d said, shepherding rug, boy, dog, girl with a lavishness that made comedy kneel. Under the arch he’d hummed something like Through but older, and the corridor had obeyed. “Let the sky argue with itself,” he’d told her. “We can take sides when we’re dry.”
—end—

Estinien set a palm where it belonged; the smaller light rolled once under his hand the way a seal practices the word yes.

He tried the wyrm’s hum low in his chest—a line the storm could lean on if it wanted to be polite. Night Moon added Through, the little braid of notes that makes rooms remember their duty. The mobile swung, settled, kept pace. Thunder forgot to menace and contented itself with being spectacular.

The door thought about admitting a knock and did. Mother stood there with damp hair arranged by rain and a look that claimed satisfaction. “Good,” she said, as if evaluating a batch of jars. “Sing louder than weather. It respects audacity.”

Estinien obliged, a fraction. The hum made the floorboards approve. Night Moon’s four notes sat on it like tea on a good saucer.

“Child?” Mother asked, to the air.

“Listening,” Night Moon said, and then—unable not to laugh—“answering.”

They kept the room easy until the storm revised itself into rain and bell-metal forgetfulness.

Evening followed obediently. Lanterns along the gallery lit—fifteen bright, confessing to their work. Honoroit brought supper to the nursery as if the room had demanded a table: soup that remembered stockpots, bread that remembered being flour, pear that forgave everyone for weather.

They ate in the way of people who have promised to be careful with what’s next. Night Moon left a perfect crescent of bread on a small plate and put it on the sill—habit, not superstition. Estinien didn’t tease it into symbolism. He was learning.

After, she took the new journal and let the iron lantern charm tap the margin once.

Maelen asked for a seed-marker; Aelene salted zeal into sense. We placed it under bread where even law must behave. The Brume turned inspection into company and wrote witness on rain. The storm learned manners from dragon-hum and Through. The child likes thunder when it arrives with bread and lamps.

She left the page open so the words could been seen by the air they’d organized.

“Stay?” she asked, though she knew.

“I will,” he said.

He banked the fire without asking anyone’s opinion. Mother tucked a second scarf over the hearth chair with a sigh that insisted she had invented warmth. Saran’s shadow crossed and recrossed the gallery once, as if checking that lantern seven had remembered its lesson. It had.

Night Moon lay down and set her palm low. The smaller light answered with the happy insistence of a story that has decided what shape it wants and is content to wait its turn to be told.

“Together,” she said.

“For three,” he returned.

Rain finished tidying the roofs. The seed-marker, salted and honest, slept under bread. In the Wood, Aelene wrote a name in a ledger that would shame a zealot into usefulness; Maelen poured tea over a letter that had too much pride and sent it back to be rewritten with gentler verbs. Silva listened to the storm and decided, inconveniently, to think.

The house kept on doing the small work that saves the large: lanterns trimmed, salt on the table, lullabies that fit in one hand. And the two lights—one steady, one delighted by weather—went on being the accord nobody could rescind.

Light. Bread. Through.

Chapter Text

Chapter 20 — Path & Promise

Morning arrived particular and gray, like paper that wants ink.

A Fortemps runner delivered a ribboned packet, rain freckles drying on the wax. Edmont opened it with a courtesy he did not feel; Aymeric stood close because letters had lately learned to pretend they were weather. Night Moon broke her seal last.

To Night Moon of the Fortemps hearth,
The moot at first leaf-break invites you to prove your steadiness by the Path: you will walk from the outer parapet to the east gate unhindered. No hand shall be laid on you; no song shall be sung openly. If you cross without falter, the elders will concede the Wood has no claim but witness. If you refuse, they will say stone softened you.
—Silva

Under it, two smaller hands:

Aelene: The Path is a theatre for zeal. Decline. Send witness instead: letters, bells, windows, lanterns. We will read them.
Maelen: I told her to ask for bread; she asked for stairs. Do what you will; we will keep her from bringing cedar to a city.

Aymeric skimmed, exhaled like a patient man who has decided not to be. “We answer that our accord already proved steadiness,” he said, reaching for pen. “We offer a Path of Letters instead: a route measured in signatures and windows. If the Wood needs theatre, it can attend vespers.”

Edmont added, eyes bright with domestic mischief, “And we will line the east gallery with lanterns and bread, which are harder to trip over than pride.”

Night Moon touched the ash-leaf braid at her throat, then the diamond. “And we will not walk a stage built to make falling look like truth,” she said. “We will walk our hall, where the house knows our step.”

Saran leaned in the doorway, the rain on his hood organizing itself into drops because it preferred him. “If Silva sends boys with pocket-wards again,” he warned, “they will aim not at you. They will aim at any blood that will carry a song.”

“Then the city must carry witness faster,” Edmont replied, already dispatching boys with bread and orders to the Brume.

Aymeric sealed the answer. “We decline the Path,” he said, “and publish the accord again at noon in the market. If theatre is required, it will be neighborly.”

Night Moon’s palm settled low of its own will. The smaller light answered with a decisive press, as if seconding the motion.

“Good,” she murmured.

The market never needed an invitation to become a witness net. A quilt unfurled under a fruit awning; a borrowed bench learned the art of being a lectern; Honoroit appeared with a basket of loaves that kept refilling somehow. Aymeric pinned the accord to a board and let a clerk read it aloud as if announcing tomorrow’s weather: one Leaf-Speaker; no songs over stone; letters under seal; bread first; windows unlatched; lanterns lighted; seed-marker at Fortemps threshold; no theft possible.

Alisaie stood like punctuation with elbows. Alphinaud kept a ledger because comfort likes ledgers. Edmont bought onions he didn’t need because a city eats better when a count practices. Night Moon walked the edges with Mother, who kept rearranging people’s scarves as if this were a sacrament; Estinien carried the kettle and poured as if tea were policy.

It began as Saran had predicted—a tug too fine for pride to notice until it had already leaned toward it. Not the Calling’s full insistence. A suggestion. A recall laid like a thread across a narrow place in the market where water pooled and children liked to jump over it.

A Brume boy, small and serious, stepped toward the puddle with the quiet solemnity of children testing daring. His head tipped a fraction, listening to something no one had taught him to name.

Night Moon felt it like a prickle at the diamond and a wrongness in the seed of her palm. “There,” she said, already moving.

Saran was quicker—shoulder into the space where the draft meant to carry the thread. The boy blinked, confused out of enchantment by the presence of bread and uncle.

But the thread tried again. Not at Night Moon. Through the boy, toward her—clever, ugly.

Aymeric lifted a hand.

A bell struck, just once. The sound threaded the market like a spine. People looked up, not panicked—ready.

“Hands,” Night Moon called, voice calm enough to be obeyed. She extended hers to a woman, who passed it on to a man, who passed it to another, until a line ran from the lanterned shop front to the seeded quilt, and then to the board with the accord. A human Path. Not stairs. Neighbors.

Estinien set his palm low, steadied the two lights, then lifted his head and let the wyrm’s hum settle into his chest—low, invitation, weather. Night Moon braided Through into it, four notes that taught rooms their obligations. Onion-hands found harmony. A boy with a wooden sword whistled off-key and still useful.

The thread hit the chain of hands and frayed. It sought a gap; Saran stepped into it with the unremarkable bravery of someone who means to be furniture in a doorway. The boy took Night Moon’s other hand without being told.

“Walk,” she said to him. “Across our path.”

He did, steps square, and the thread—finding itself expected—collapsed like bad theatre in a room full of seamstresses.

“Again,” Aymeric said evenly.

The bell gave a second, measured strike. The market remembered itself. Someone laughed—just once, as if the day had tried a trick and been forgiven for the attempt. The boy blinked up at Night Moon. She touched the ash above her diamond.

“Do you know a song?” she asked.

He nodded, solemn. “The one with four notes.”

“Sing it to me,” she said.

He did, breathy and proud. Through.

The thread gave up. The market finished becoming afternoon.

A pair of men in forest-cut cloaks lingered at the far awning long enough to be witnessed gathering their embarrassment. Saran did not follow. He let Maelen’s promised eyebrows do the work. Aelene arrived late enough to be angry and early enough to be useful. She looked at the boy, at the puddle, at where the thread had been, and wrote two names in a small book with quick strokes that did not forgive.

“To be scolded,” she said.

“Bread first,” Night Moon reminded, and the Brume obliged, because justice without crumbs is bad for the teeth.

The boy went home with his hand sticky from orange and his back straighter from having been chosen to sing. Night Moon stood very still for a breath she hadn’t known she’d been hoarding. Estinien’s fingers found hers; the smaller light turned under both palms as if helping.

“You did not draw,” Mother observed to Estinien, which is the sort of sentence that counts as a medal in some houses.

“I am learning to be a stove,” he said.

“Good,” she replied. “Swords make poor kettles.”

—flashback (trigger: a wet stone step; Haurchefant’s laugh under rain)—

Foundation after a downpour, the sky still undecided. Haurchefant had put his hands up like a man stopping traffic and told three boys and a dog to cross wherever they wished. “There is no test today,” he’d declared. “The street is not a priest.” He’d looked at Night Moon and grinned the way you carry a hearth into the weather. “We choose what counts,” he’d said. “And then we hang a lantern so the next soul gets the answer without having to ask.”
—end—

Rain eased by evening. The east gallery wore droplets like a rosary again; fifteen small lamps caught dusk and turned it honest. In the little nursery, the cradle waited with the mobile—three lanterns and a leaf—turning as if thrilled by the idea of being stared at in a few months by someone with a very serious brow.

Night Moon sat and set her feet on the stool. Estinien took the now-familiar place, palm low. The two lights answered—larger sure, smaller playful, a push and a settle, the rhythm of a child who has discovered weather.

“We ought to admit a nickname,” he ventured, voice careful the way men are careful around new furniture. “Something to use before the ledger grants its title.”

Night Moon pretended to consider; she had been hoarding two. “Lanternling,” she offered. “Or—Little Yes.”

He grinned, undone by both. “They will ruin me.”

“They already have,” she said, and leaned her brow to his.

He reached beneath the cradle and produced a small thing—an iron sliver worked thin and honest, shaped into a tiny lantern barely bigger than his thumb.

“For the underside,” he said, suddenly shy. “Where only small hands will find it when they learn to hide and be found.”

She turned it in her fingers; it made a sound like a promise saying please. “Carve it,” she told him.

He lay on his back, slid under the cradle with the seriousness of a knight under a siege ladder, and etched the little lantern into the wood where no adult eye would remember to search. He added three lines beside it—L, B, T—the initials not of names but of the oath that had arranged their days.

Mother watched from the door and made a noise that meant: I will not admit to crying about a man carving a secret into furniture, but you may all behave as if I did.

A soft draft moved ankle-high—quick, mischievous. The lantern on the sill trembled its paper and recovered. The diamond warmed without heat. It was not spectacle. It was permission, as if a man with a laugh like sunlight had opened a door and leaned there, pleased.

“Haurchefant,” Night Moon said, not looking at the ceiling. Not asking.

Estinien did not look anywhere but now. He set his mouth to the diamond, then lowered and kissed the place where the smaller light kept time, the old welcome learning a new layer: we’re ready for you to make this house louder.

He hummed the wyrm’s low line. She sang Through. The mobile learned the pace and turned once like a sailor approving of a harbor.

Night Moon opened the new journal and let the little iron charm tap once at the margin.

Silva asked a stage; we gave her windows. A thread tried a child; a human chain refused. Bells agreed. The market sang. The lantern under the cradle is carved where only small hands will find it. We are ready for Little Yes to tell us what we’ve forgotten.

She left the ink for the air to read. Estinien banked the fire. Mother draped a fresh scarf on the hearth chair with a flourish that made everyone behave. Saran’s shadow passed the gallery and paused beneath lantern seven, which, having learned its manners, pretended to have never misbehaved.

“Together,” Night Moon said.

“For three,” Estinien answered.

On the sill, bark, iron, and feather kept their quiet parliament. In the Brume, the onion-seller taught a child how to sing Through while counting the change correctly. At the Wood’s edge, Maelen revised a letter until it admitted it wanted kinder verbs; Aelene put a name in a ledger that would teach a cousin humility. Silva stared at the rain and discovered that performances grow less tempting when no audience applauds.

The house did its work: lanterns trimmed, bread cooling, a lullaby that fits in one hand. And the two lights—one steady, one delighted—kept time like a promise you can walk without being asked to prove it on someone else’s stage.

Light. Bread. Through.