The Flagon's morning wore work for a coat. Steam rose from pots like a well‑behaved argument; knives spoke softly against boards. Rothgar praised an onion and threatened a leek. Mira wrote two columns as if cutting cloth: waste is sin, but so is false economy. Elira moved with bowls, quick without hurrying, tapping the doorframe twice when no one watched and once when someone did.
Kaelthar took his breakfast at the window where the sign's shadow made a slow math on stone. He listened to the city arrange itself. Worry threaded the talk the way a thin reed strengthens a basket when placed where the craft knows it belongs.
The hooded patron sat under the rescued beam, ledger in the angle of his hand. He turned a page that did not need turning and wrote a single character with a pen that had been taught restraint. The mark looked like a number that hadn't chosen its value yet. The hand paused the breath of a heartbeat and then set the pen down parallel to the book's edge—as if alignment were a kind of courtesy.
Elira stopped by Kaelthar with a folded paper. Wax waited beside it like an opinion unspoken. "If you go by the south lanes today," she said, "give this to Hadrik the potter. He mended a bowl that was meant for Rothgar's oldest friend and forgot to send it. If he sells it, Da will owe debt to a man who counts favors longer than he counts years."
Kaelthar considered the paper. "A message delivered is a kindness that pays interest."
"It also avoids Da's storytelling becoming the law," Elira said. "Which Mira says happens more than is healthy for a city." She set the wax near the candle. The flame leaned, as if curious. Without thinking, Kaelthar tilted the paper toward it, and the wax softened at exactly the rate a sensible seal requires. Elira blinked at the timing and then pretended not to. "Thank you."
Selith appeared with reed under her arm and a grin she owed to nothing. "I'm taking baskets to the ferrymen. If you're heading south, I'll trade you three short alleys for one long sermon about keeping to the shade."
"Trade accepted," Kaelthar said.
They took streets that had learned to be reasonable about noon. At the south lane, Hadrik's stall showed bowls whose patience in the kiln had been rewarded. Hadrik himself—broad in forearm, thin in apology—held one vessel to the light and frowned. A hairline ran clean from lip to base.
"Bad clay?" Selith asked.
"Good clay," Hadrik said. "Bad line. As if someone marked it by string." He saw Kaelthar. Recognition worked across his face like a man remembering the name of a teacher he respected and avoided. "You spoke to me yesterday. 'Mind your lines.' I minded them. The lines minded me back." He huffed. "Who's this for?"
Kaelthar set Elira's folded paper on the table. "From the Flagon. A bowl owed."
"The one with the faint blue ring," Hadrik said, and reached under the counter for it. He looked at the seal, then at Kaelthar, then at the air between them, which had taken on the feeling of measured work. "Tell Rothgar a bowl is only honest if it keeps its promises. Like men."
A customer in a dyed vest poked at a stack. "This one's flawed," he announced, triumphant, as if the flaw had been put there so he could discover it. "Line right along the side. Won't hold stew."
"It will hold," Hadrik said. "It declares itself. That is different from failing."
"Declaring is failing loudly," the customer said. "I'll pay half."
Hadrik's mouth set. Selith made the small hand movement that means do not start a fight in front of bowls. Kaelthar set two fingers on the vessel the man had chosen and tilted it, gently, so the light showed the clean line without malice.
"Try water," Kaelthar said. "If it holds water, it will hold stew that has earned its rest."
The man glanced at the bucket, irritated to be offered a test when he had come for victory. He poured. The line held. The bowl sweated as bowls do when they meet their work. No leak.
"Half," he tried again, weaker.
"Full," Hadrik said, not loud.
"Three‑quarters," Selith suggested cheerfully to the air, because cheerfulness is a tool that keeps knives sheathed. "For the lesson."
Hadrik considered the courtesy of that. "Three‑quarters," he allowed. The man paid as if paying were philosophy and he disagreed with it, and left. Hadrik exhaled a laugh that had been waiting all morning. "If I had three more of you, I'd sell trouble at a profit."
"Please don't," Selith said. "The market is saturated."
They crossed near the river, where Bran the ferryman called times as if announcing small truths: "On the hour, and on the honest half if the wind remembers." He saw Kaelthar and lifted his chin. "You keep the thirteenth to yourself?"
"I keep what is given," Kaelthar said.
"Good." Bran tapped his oar with the end of a nail. Notches ran along the wood, some finer than others. "Rumors that proved true," he explained.
By noon, the bell counted thirteen again. Bran paused mid‑stroke, considered the oar, and cut a new fine notch without naming it an omen. "I like my lies to confess before I carry them."
By the time they returned to the Flagon, the room had settled into the workman's afternoon: talk that lives at elbow height, laughter that leaves no dents. Mira's book lay open. She added marks in sixes, checked a sum, and frowned, not at the number, but at the fact of having written it a breath too soon.
"Coin next," Rothgar declared, bustling through with a tray. "Argument later."
A sailor in a shirt that had once been blue set a coin on the bar. Mira had already marked the page. She did not scratch the ink out. She did not like to correct a ledger as if it could be made to forget. She met the sailor's eye the way one meets a dog that may bite and probably won't.
"You paid," she said evenly. "I wrote that truth before it arrived. Be careful with your luck; it is spending itself without you."
The sailor laughed because laughing cost less than thinking. He took his ale. When he turned, the hooded patron was there, hands folded, ledger closed. Up close, the cloth of his hood was the color of a shadow that had made a habit of itself.
"Sir," Rothgar said, courteous as to a customer and suspicious as to a profession. "You eat today?"
"I count," the man said, voice trained to carry without leaning. He tilted the ledger a fraction, enough for Kaelthar to see a page on which a date had been written in a square, precise hand. The date belonged to tomorrow.
"Careful," Mira told no one in particular, and everyone.
Elira slipped past with a tray and the particular balance of someone who has memorized the floor's mischief. A bump of elbows at a crowded table set the tray tilting toward disaster. Kaelthar's hand moved not quickly but correctly; fingers under the far edge, wrist turning, momentum tamed like a horse whose mood had been read before it remembered it had one. The bowls settled with a chime of relief.
"Thank you," Elira said, and then, because she could not help it, "Do you always see the angle before the angle sees you?"
"Sometimes the world shows courtesy," Kaelthar said.
"That would be new," Mira muttered, but her mouth attempted a truce with the idea.
Captain Ysren came at last, not hurrying, which is how men who are always late avoid saying so with their faces. He took the corner that had begun to think of itself as his. "Noon counted thirteen again?" he asked the room lightly, as if ordering a familiar meal.
"It did," said three voices and one ledger at once.
Ysren grunted acknowledgement. "I have priests quarrelling in sets of two and three, a bell‑warden who writes notices like sermons, and a boy who sold a drawing of a crowned crow for a half‑mark. Progress." He accepted a cup and didn't drink yet. "And you, Master Kaelthar—do we write this down as weather or as law?"
"Write it down," Kaelthar said. "The world is practicing. Practice becomes law when enough hands agree not to drop it."
"Practice implies a performance," Ysren said. "When?"
"When it decides it has learned the steps," Kaelthar said. He looked toward the hooded patron. The man had set his ledger parallel to the bar again. Polite angles, everywhere.
Evening folded along the rafters; the sign's shadow reached its last account. Selith tapped two doorframes as she left, just to keep the city's habit in order. Bran called his last ferry; the river approved with a sound like a coin returning to the bowl it had been meant for all day.
Mira closed her book for the night with a firmness usually reserved for good arguments. She paused, thumb on the edge, then reopened to the afternoon page. A faint extra stroke lay at the bottom margin—a thin, straight line she did not recall setting. She touched it and found it dry.
"Who wrote that?" Elira asked, curious.
"Courtesy," Mira said, and did not decide yet whether she meant thanks or warning.
In a room two streets away, Orren ran his palm along the frayed rope cut clean and wondered if there were instruments for measuring decisions. In the Silent Hall, Neris stood over a rubbing of the bell tower inscription and considered whether an eaten circle was a part of the world's grammar or its appetite.
Kaelthar waited at the window until the light remembered it was night. The city breathed and pretended it had not been holding itself a little too straight. When he slept, he dreamed of ledgers aligning themselves and of a sound that was not a sound, only a shape the world would soon remember how to speak.