“She heard me,” I said. “That was enough.”
“Enough?” Joren laughed. “Atlas, if I whispered half a word to a girl and she bolted off thinking I was a thunderclap, I’d call that a failure not a victory.”
I let his laughter fall away. The hall answered with its own kind of sound, distant hammering from the eastern gallery, a low scrape of scaffolding shifting, the soft call of someone carrying ember pans across stone. Not ruin. Work. The kind that only happens when people believe the thing they’re mending will be needed again.
“They risk themselves to keep this place breathing,” I said.
“They risk themselves because you’re back,” Joren replied, circling a pillar and tapping a chipped capital with two knuckles. “Don’t get sentimental on me, it makes you slow.”
“It makes me careful,” I tipped my head to the north transept. “Report?”
“Two ward-anchors identified inside Verdants line. One under the old aqueduct arch, one hidden in the bell foundry.”He shrugged. “They’re getting creative. I’d be impressed if they weren’t busy choking, you with your own weather.”
“Tonight.”
Joren groaned. “Of course, tonight. I forgot we rest when we’re dead.”
“You first,” I said, and he barked out a laugh.
“They can wall me out,” I said. “They can tangle my reach. But they can’t hold her forever. Not if this hall stands.”
“That’s generous of you,” Joren muttered. “Giving all the credit to the hall. Personally, I think it’s me keeping you sane.”
He wasn’t wrong. Without him—without the quiet hands that had held the pieces together—the court would have died and passed quietly into memory. Instead it endured, breathing shallow but stubborn beneath the weight of time.
His eyes flicked to the vaulted ceiling where faint runes still clung to the stone, dull as ash. “Those need to burn again. Without them, you’ll keep breaking yourself against their wards.”
I followed his gaze. The old sigils sprawled across the arches like veins gone dry. Once, they thrummed with stormlight, a net that bound every word and vow spoken here.
“They’ll burn,” I said.
Joren’s grin returned, sharp as a blade. “Good. Because I’d rather not die in a hall that whispers instead of roars.”
We took the lower paths down from the cliff as dusk bled into the streets, Verdant loved the play of respectability – the copper lanterns, the ivy scripted laws painted on plaster, the neat patrol routes you could set a clock by. Joren tugged a rough spun cloak around his shoulders and adjusted the scar-smudge at his jaw.
“You look like a man who sells carrots and poor decisions,” I said.
“Perfect disguise,” he said “People confess to carrot sellers. It’s a known fact.”
The night market under the aqueduct ran as it always had, barrels of salted fish, wooden stands stacked with lamp oil, a man hawking cheap tin charms stamped with fake warding that would peel off in the rain. We drifted through the press and let the noise make us ordinary.
Our contact was a woman who kept her stall too tidy for a place like this. Bowls nestled in bowls; a row of clay teapots aligned like soldiers. Her scarf was dyed valley-blue, and her hands never shook when she poured.
Joren approached first, laid two coppers on the counter and said, “We’re looking for a quieter kind of heat.”
“Stoves in the back,” she replied, eyes not moving from the cups.
“The kind that burns on paper,” he added. “The kind that draws lines no one should cross.”
That caught her attention. She glanced up from her work.
“You bring the paper?”
I slid a folded scrap out of my sleeve, not a map, not a letter, an old recipe for toffee, written in a hand she would recognize. The name in the corner wasn’t mine. It belonged to a boy she once promised a home and lost to Verdant’s press. Her mouth tightened into a thin line. She tucked the recipe into her apron and gave us two teacups.
“Walk,” she said.
We strolled like men with nowhere to be while she described the guard’s new rotations in a voice meant for sugar prices.
