Epilogue · The Account Continues

to risk their fingers. Beneath, he wrote that the mines were not safe. They were watched. No one should confuse the two.

Serik did not write. He arrived a week later, limping, with an escort and an order to pursue looters hiding in the northern passes. One carried an old safe-conduct from Darven. Maera accompanied him with one of her own and a different opinion on how to reach them.

They argued over supper without the roof falling in.

Teren served wine and let them hear one another.

The woman who had arrived without a road a year earlier returned that afternoon.

Her name was Rula. Teren took time to recognise her because she no longer wore the travelling coat they lent her or the expression of someone expecting a mistake in everything she touched. She had a new bow and a scar beside her eyebrow. She came into the mill asking for Lina.

They had corresponded over a flour debt. Rula helped lead a convoy to a northern community;

they paid late, but they had paid. She brought the coins wrapped in blue cloth the miller recognised before counting.

Teren offered her a seat.

She asked whether everyone had returned for the gathering. He said some were only passing through. Rula watched Serik and Maera arguing over routes, Beran pointing out a fault in a wheel support and Ivara protecting her papers from flour dust.

“In songs, you always seem to agree.”

Neris raised her head.

“You heard the worst ones.”

Rula laughed. She wanted to tell them something she had seen in the north: a boy returned from death who could not remember why he hated the family next door. His brothers tried to give him back the hatred as though it were a misplaced tool. He kept crossing the yard to play with the children.

No one knew whether that forgetting was a gift.

“I didn't come to ask what to do,” she clarified. “I thought you should know.”

Teren was relieved that no one consulted him

as custodian of every answer. A shared history did not make them owners of the ones to come.

Rula had met two people with sparks different from hers. One had not returned from any death they could remember. The other did not want to speak of gods. The three travelled together a week and parted over an argument about paying a toll. The spark had given them no common judgement.

Maera asked about the route. Rula corrected part of the map the dark elf wore at her belt. The stream crossing had been unsafe since the last storm; carters had opened another beside the forest. Serik made a copy and asked permission to pass it to his patrols.

The woman nodded.

“If they put up a post, don't let them close the road to people without papers.”

The paladin did not promise it would never happen. He recorded the community's name and that of the area's commander. He would have to argue it, and then argue it again.

At nightfall,

they set tables before the mill. Neighbours who had never descended a mine told how the valley held together while the travellers were away. Children interrupted to ask for more bread. A man grew angry with another over an old debt, and Lina sent them to fight on the side without jugs.

It was no universal peace. It was a supper that could continue.

Ivara opened the testimony book at the world's page. The heading read “Tierras Antiguas.” Beneath, in the navigators' tongue, they had written “The Elder Lands.” Neither expression claimed to prove who arrived first or to whom the land belonged. They were a way to name the shared expanse without pretending they had finished knowing it.

Rula left a correction beside the northern map.

Someone would have to check it before changing the archive copy. No one rejected it for coming from an unknown woman who had not yet done anything worthy of a song.

Oren had died at the start of winter. He did not return.

Lina stood for the council and lost by four votes to a woman who knew much more about harvests. Afterwards she accepted responsibility for the mill and discovered she could make herself heard from there too.

In the cemetery, the great oak's roots had begun lifting a stone. Teren wanted to straighten it, but the gravedigger told him to wait until summer: moving it in soft earth would damage the neighbouring grave. He thought it an instruction worthy of carving beside the most solemn treaties.

That night, Neris sang Madruga's story again.

This time Hara was a dwarven woman. The bridge sank the right way. The girl was not asleep until the end. When she reached the desk knife, a traveller interrupted: in his grandfather's version it had been a metal pen.

Neris invited him to sit close.

“Tell me afterwards,” she said. “First I'll finish this one.”

Teren went into the courtyard for a moment. The frogs had returned to the channels. Each sang from its invisible portion of

water, and none seemed to wait for the others' permission.

Two figures were coming along the road. One carried a sword; the other a bundle that could have been an instrument or a child. He could not distinguish them. There was still snow on the peaks. Clouds gathered in the west. Beyond the fields, the forests hid animals, ruins and grievances that had not vanished because four cities signed a paper.

Teren left the door ajar. There were visitors, and there was still bread.