23 · The Hollow Oak

separation before removing it. Slow work, impossible if guards arrived.

The guards were already coming.

Elyen heard them on the stairs and lay behind a root with his bow ready. Maera stayed beside him. They did not argue about who should take the first blow. Serik closed the entrance with his shield, and Beran looked for somewhere to brace it.

Ivara separated the threads. Teren read the names one by one and held the presences that found a way out through his voice. He gave no orders. He told them where they were and that they did not have to stay.

A woman appeared beside Serik. The paladin could not look at her without moving away from the shield. He heard her speak his childhood name.

His mother had always used a shortened form he hated.

Serik closed his eyes.

“You can go,” he said.

The woman touched the air beside his face. Then she was no longer there.

A bolt struck Elyen's shoulder. Maera dragged him behind the root

and went out to take his place. Neris began reading with Teren. As the names came free, the stems turned brown.

Beran fitted a wooden wedge beneath the shield. His only hand was full of splinters.

When they reached the last box, the cleric could not say the name. It was Adria Ordan.

There was no presence inside. Only a repeated call, so old in its desperation that Teren felt the father's weariness without being able to forgive him anything.

Teren stopped before Adria's box. He knew the shape of the lettering: Cael had written the name with the same hand that signed the grain allocations. Far from being a clumsy inscription made in mourning, it had been retraced many times until every hesitation was erased.

Inside, the call turned back on itself.

He felt it against the scar on his thigh. It was not trying to kill him. It wanted attention, like a child tugging a sleeve. The difference was that it could not stop. There was no child.

There was a need repeated by a mechanism incapable of growing tired.

Teren remembered the listing boat, the hospice courtyard. He understood that bringing that memory close was enough to give the call a voice. It offered Cael the material to keep believing. It could offer it to him too.

“Is she there?” Neris asked.

It cost him to say he did not know. It cost more to add that the box could not prove it.

A bolt struck the root above his shoulder. Bark dust fell. Maera lost a knife covering Elyen. She saw it slide across the floor to the water. She did not retrieve it. Serik was taking too many blows and needed someone beside him.

The attackers did not all advance the same way. Some wanted to obey an order. Others were bound to a call twisting their steps towards the chamber. One stopped at a box bearing his surname and let his spear fall. The man behind pushed him. Maera slashed his belt open to

remove the bracelet caught there.

The soldier fell to his knees and began vomiting.

“The ones behind have it too!” she shouted.

Serik looked at their wrists. He had struck men who could not move aside. He could not correct the blows already given. He lowered his sword and began cutting straps instead of bodies.

The decision cost him a shoulder wound. An unbound attacker took advantage of the hesitation. Maera reached him before the second blow.

“They aren't all prisoners,” she told him.

“I saw.”

They went on without a rule that absolved them from looking at each one.

In the centre, Neris marked the names with her nail to keep her place. Teren's pain reached her like a harsh sound. She realised she had begun humming between phrases: the same wordless tune with which she had accompanied the saw in the mines.

The rhythm helped the cleric breathe without becoming trapped in the call.

Ivara heard it and fitted her cuts to those pauses. What seemed a solitary

act of magic became a task shared among hands, voice, steel and care. None could afterwards claim to have done it alone.

Beran looked at Adria's box.

“That one has to come out too,” he said.

“Not that one,” Maera said from behind the root, without lowering her aim. “That one we take whole.”

No one asked her why. They knew. It was the only thing in the world Cael Ordan would trade for the coastal stone. With the box intact they could sit down across from him without an army, and perhaps without another death.

Ivara stayed with the filament between her fingers. She looked at Teren. She was not asking permission: she was asking that someone who had known the girl decide.

The cleric thought of Luro and his mother, of the paper that said “possible guarantee of obedience,” of the man hanged with a reused number. He thought too of what the other stone might cost if they did not get it this way, and of who

would pay for it.

“We are not going to do to her what he does to ours,” he said.

Maera lowered her eyes for a moment. She did not argue. Nor did she tell him he was right.

Teren placed his fingers on either side of the name and held it without answering.

He did not tell it it was unloved. He did not tell it to leave so others could live. There was no person to persuade. There was a waiting they must allow to end.

Ivara released the last filament.

They removed the wedge of dominion. From among the roots fell the original boundary piece, discarded by workers who had not recognised it. Beran picked it up with his good hand.

On the stairs, the soldiers were retreating.

One stayed.

He would be the age of the apprentice in Lindvale. He had not dropped his spear because he needed it to lean on. The bracelet burned his skin when the bond broke and now hung like an open

scab.

Maera wanted to pass without stopping. Elyen weighed on her arm, and Teren was pale with effort. The boy raised his face. He did not ask forgiveness. He asked them not to leave him there with the voices.

Serik took his spear and offered his free shoulder.

The stairs had filled with new roots. They were not growing at impossible speed: those confined by the conduits had come loose when the pressure changed and now occupied the way. They had to cut them. Beran pointed out which supported the earth and which could be removed.

Neris carried the sheets beneath her shirt. Her skin burned where they grew wet with sweat. On a landing, a soldier from the fleeing group tried to snatch them. Not from abstract evil: he thought his superiors would let him return if he brought something useful.

The gnome struck his hand with the oath board's edge.

He fell against the wall. Serik caught him before he slipped down the stairs. The boy with the

bracelet watched both actions as though unable to understand how they belonged to the same people.

“Walk,” Maera ordered. “You can try to explain it afterwards.”

They came out through the Buried Roots and found the forest in afternoon light. They had spent far longer inside than Teren believed: he had stopped counting the days while his body asked for something else.

On the path, the High Bough clan awaited a signal. Sael saw Elyen's wound and called two men to help. The hunter tried to straighten.

The old woman told him to stop getting in the way.

The freed soldier sat on a stone. They called him Endo. Teren cleaned his wrist and recorded his name before asking where he would go. He could return to his company or stay with the forest wardens until he healed.

Endo chose to stay.

It was the first decision of his own he could recognise in several days, and he exercised it over something as small as where to sleep that night.

The pulse that had guided them was gone.