The square filled like a cup drawn under a steady rain: people pressed to the edges, voices braided into a dull roar, banners overhead like the ribs of some great, patient animal. Word had moved faster than any herald; the city had decided this morning was worth watching. Priests in white clustered on raised steps as if arranging themselves into a moral choir. Men with ledger books tried to look like judges and failed. Mothers clutched children and merchants folded their hands over purses they did not want counted.
Aras and Elara rode together, not because they needed to be seen, but because spectacle woodenly demands a pair to be placed in its center. The prince stood at the king's shoulder like a human buffer; King Alric's face was well trained in the performance of control.
The folio had been copied three ways: one clean parchment tucked under Elara's sleeve (for display), one burned and scattered so the city could gossip about ash (for myth), and one—thin, annotated, and deliberately sloppier—slipped beneath the seat of the plaza's magistrate for anyone with curiosity and a sense for crooked paper trails. Miren had done that job with the nimble diplomacy of a courier who'd learned how to pass secrets like flowers.
Soren's men kept the black-sun riders busy in the eastern approaches; their horns were a distant, angry echo. Serane held the rear with the quiet competence of someone who knows how to put people between crisis and children. Lina slipped among the crowd with fresh bread; she handed loaves to the people who looked most likely to speak when given heat and sugar. The twins prowled like mischief made human, smiling at priests with the wrong kind of eyes.
When the folio was called to be read aloud it was Elara who stepped forward, voice steady as linen. She presented the king's sealed list like an accusation folded in silk and grace.
"These are petitions," she said. "These were placed before the crown and set aside. They are not mistakes. They are the pages of people no one asked to be counted." Her fingers brushed each name as if touching the edge of a hymn.
A clerk muttered that perhaps a mistake had been made. A priest nodded in that slow way that tries to appear wise. The crowd shifted like a herd listening for the first predator sound.
Aras felt his palms go slick. He wanted to swagger, to make some line that would make the priests' wigs fall off and the crowd laugh. Instead he kept his teeth quiet and let the work be loud: Miren stepped up and read a single petition aloud — the petition of a midwife who had asked the palace thrice to rescue her village from a plague and been told the rosters were closed. She read the mountain of the woman's handwriting, the dates, the scrawled replies, each a small betrayal. Heads bowed as if the city could physically make apologies.
When the petitions were read, a slow, hot thing crept through the square: shame. For the first time, the ledger's thin arithmetic could not hide the faces behind its numbers.
King Alric shifted. "These are accusations," he intoned, trying to press the moment back into a stage he could control. "And we will investigate. Let order—"
"No," a voice called. It belonged to a woman who had once been a clerk and now held a child who had been given back his laughter. "We need remedies now." Her tone cracked a window. The crowd leaned in, hungry for this human answer.
The king found that rhetoric worked better for crowds than the slow machinery of counting. He promised commissions, letters, apologies. He promised the sort of compromise that looks like action and smells faintly of delay. It was enough for some: merchants grumbled and returned to their stalls. The priests offered statements about human error and divine mercy.
But not everyone would accept letters.
From the crowd's edge Miren produced the thin, annotated copy and let it be seen by a dozen scribes. It spread like a secret bread—handled, read aloud, held to lamps. The annotated copy had margins full of notes that were not clerical neatness but human outrage: ignored, swept, reassign. Someone—someone careful and cruel—had signed these notations with a few initials that matched the steward of the keeper's office. That initial landed like starlight on a tired night: it meant someone in the palace had willingly misfiled pleas.
King Alric's jaw worked. He flung the question outward—who authored these marginal notations?—and could not drown it in royal dignity. The square smelled of a revolution that had been patient and then chosen not to be.
Aras stepped forward then, not because he wanted to be the noise but because certain lines of silence require mouths. He did not accuse the king—spectacles breed fight, not policy—but asked for a pause that mattered more than any chant: an independent review, a public register where each petition would be read and a representative chosen. The crowd took to the idea like fish to a net.
It was not perfect. The king offered terms; Soren played cards offstage; priests suggested rituals. Behind the scenes, Aras had made a secondary bargain: he would give the palace a public victory of carefully curated confession in exchange for the king signing an act that would free a number of people from the "accounting" status. He did not trust kings with hearts; he trusted them with contracts.
When Alric put his seal on the parchment—hands trembling with more than ceremony—Elara's fingers found Aras's, and he squeezed. Nothing ended that day. But eleven thousand names were no longer only lines in an ivory book. They had ears listening to them now, scribes who would check again, and a chorus of people who would not let the ledger sleep.
After the public accounting the square didn't explode into immediate felicity. There were threats issued in curt missives, riders sent to find Soren's men, and dark rooms where men in good collars worked to write black in new ledgers. But the city had learned a small, dangerous lesson: names belong to people, not to pages.
That night, under a different moon, Aras and Elara slipped away from the palace not to run but to steal a breath of ordinary. They walked the market lane hand in hand, laughing like thieves who had not yet been unmasked. In the shadow of a stall that sold secondhand scarves and better gossip, they kissed—longer this time, slower, because each kiss was now a small, real vow. Inside it was all messy: their laughter, wet hair from a sudden shower, the smell of roasted chestnuts, and the understanding that whatever came next would be loud.
They had given the city a moment; they had kept their methods secret. The folio's copies continued to do their work—some burned in public by the priests to save face and some hidden by scribes who had remembered the faces behind the names. The caravan moved at dawn, as caravans do, taking the people who had been awakened to safer houses in the hills. Miren had planned routes so clean no pursuer could stitch them; Serane mapped escorts. Soren's men melted back toward northern hedgerows. The ledger still lived on a shelf, but now it was checked by more than one pair of hands.
Before the caravan left the square, Lina handed Aras a small loaf wrapped in oilcloth. On the cloth, in a child's shaky hand, someone had written: Thank you for taking our names back. Aras put it in his pocket, and the weight of paper and bread felt the same: small, human, and more valuable than any coin.
They rode out while the city still hummed, and in the cart behind them Verene sewed a new pocket into a cloak—one meant to hold letters that could not be counted away. Beside Aras, Elara slept with her head on his shoulder like an exhausted promise. He looked at her and, heart loud as a bell, thought: we did this together. We did it the way lovers and thieves and terrible optimists always do—messily, fiercely, and with too much faith in one another.
The story would grow teeth in taverns and books and angry sermons. Some people would call them criminals, some saints, and some only interesting gossip. It didn't matter. People had names again. That, for Aras and his strange, devoted family, was enough