18 · The Father of the City

carts of sheets. He was not yet chancellor. He had paid for the servants' first treatments before learning his daughter was ill. Teren wanted to remember that accurately, even now.

The priests closed a hall to preserve the sanctuary. Ordan asked whether the sanctuary had more right to remain clean than children had to a roof. The argument ended when he broke the padlock. Teren helped him carry beds.

For six nights they worked near each other. The man knew the sick by name, knew who needed another blanket and who only wanted to hear someone read. His resources were not enough. Medicines arrived late; some were adulterated. The well overseers traded accusations rather than admit they must cut the supply.

One night Adria asked to see the water. They carried her into the courtyard. Her lips were cracked. Teren brought a clean bowl, and she put in it the boat her father had made.

The boat listed to one side.

“You can't make anything straight,” she told Cael.

He

burst into tears, and the girl touched his cheek as though she were healing him.

Teren did not know what people did with a scene like that after nine years. He had thought it wore with use, like a coin. Seeing the chancellor again, he understood it could also harden enough to serve as a blade.

Adria died while he was in the laundry. They called him to bring fresh sheets. Cael sat at the foot of the bed and asked the question the cleric would hear again for years in other voices:

“Is that it?”

The novice did not know how to answer. The nurse said yes.

Later, Cael paid for the children's burial. He rebuilt wells, sent auditors, established kitchens. The city began calling him father before making him chancellor. It was possible to follow the path between those decisions and the network of seals. There was, however, no exact point at which grief ceased to be grief and became permission.

Teren returned to the present at the

sound of the jug brushing a glass.

He was no longer a novice. Nor was the person across the table only the man he had seen beside a bed.

Cael Ordan served the water himself. Seeing Beran's empty sleeve, he called a servant to bring a lower chair. The dwarf did not refuse it.

“Forty-three,” Teren said.

The chancellor stopped pouring.

“That was the number of the man hanging on the bridges. I want his name.”

Ordan drew a notebook towards him and opened it without asking where they had been.

“Esren Toll. An army deserter. He was sentenced to execution.”

“That wasn't an execution,” Serik said.

“It was an experiment meant to prevent others.”

Maera pushed her glass away.

The chancellor sought no less horrible word.

“Do you think I don't know what we're doing? Nine years ago I buried my daughter with thirty-seven children. She wasn't ten. The bells rang until the sacristan could no longer lift his arms. Then people returned. A washerwoman. A man who had

killed his wife. A boy who never wanted to speak to his parents again. Not my daughter.”

Teren had tended Adria during her final week. He remembered less of her than he wished: swollen eyes, a joke about bald priests, a little wooden boat that would not float straight. Memory seemed a miserable form of justice.

“There is no moral choice in that distribution,” Ordan continued. “No mercy we can recognise. If the gods administer a door, I want to take their key.”

Ivara listened with interlaced fingers.

“Then why your name in the seals?”

“Because a will is needed to bring the parts together.”

“Yours.”

“Mine until an institution exists that can do it better.”

Beran raised his bandaged stump.

“That institution is always about to arrive. Meanwhile someone loses a hand.”

Ordan held his gaze.

“I could give it back.”

The silence that followed was crueller than an insult. Teren saw Beran open his mouth and close it again.

Cael had a box brought containing a piece of

stone. It had been found among remains brought from the Smuggler's Grotto on the Castaways' Coast, west of the Grey Marshes. Dead smugglers disputing an object none could read. Part of an original boundary, its edge carved like a current.

“The fourth,” Ivara whispered.

“The only one in safe hands,” Ordan said. “You've dismantled two anchors. The weight has shifted to the others. The Eye Temple may open on its own if we keep destroying what we don't understand.”

Teren leaned forward.

“Give that piece back. Open the shelter. Allow witnesses at the works. We can study the rest together.”

The chancellor looked at him as at the boy he had known.

“You still believe being right gives you time.”

Ordan summoned an assistant and asked for the first admissions book.

Teren thought he would show them evidence of gratitude. There was plenty. People who recovered relationships, merchants who paid for their own rations on leaving, an old man who returned and died again in the same season, refusing to

leave his garden. There were errors too: two families disputing a man, a woman declared returned who had never died and used the confusion to escape a sentence.

“Sometimes we must decide without certainty,” the chancellor said.

Maera opened the book halfway through. She found someone who asked to leave for Blackember and received three extensions of observation. The last note had no departure date.

“Why was she still here?”

The assistant searched his papers. She was a weaver burned in a village fire. She refused to explain why she wanted to travel south. The overseers assumed she suffered a compulsion linked to the seal.

“My cousin wanted to go south too,” Maera replied. “He had family.”

Ordan insisted that real harm had occurred when people were released too soon. It was not false. Ivara asked how often the harm was caused by the return and how often by other people's reaction. No one had separated those figures.

The chancellor closed the book.

“You can take every decision apart until

you prove none was perfect.”

“They don't have to be perfect,” Teren said. “You have to be able to change them without feeling they're taking your daughter away.”

Cael went still.

The cleric knew he had been cruel. Part of the sentence was true, and it used another part as a weapon. He would not protect it by calling it frankness.

“That last part was wrong,” he added.

Neris looked at him in surprise.

Ordan opened the book again, though he searched for no page. He looked like a man just struck in front of his employees who must choose what to do with the power to strike back.

“Harm doesn't become smaller because you acknowledge it,” he said.

“I know.”

They were not reconciled. But for a moment neither could hide behind a pure intention, and the table ceased to be the simple scene Cael had prepared to show himself surrounded by ingrates.

He let them leave at nightfall. It was not mercy: he gave them a written offer

and arranged witnesses. If they refused his proposed repair and the world broke, he wanted everyone to know whom to hold responsible.