Selith's stall faced the lane that liked to pretend it was a square. Reed bundles leaned in their own shadows; finished baskets nested in a logic older than coin. Morning moved the way a patient man counts—deliberate, unwilling to skip.
"Pattern for the fishmongers," Selith said, setting cross‑weaves and ties the way a scribe sets lines. "Tight here, loose there, so the water goes where it should and the fish do not." Her fingers made the knot that finished a rim and found that it did not wish to be finished.
The strand slid free with a calm that felt impolite.
She made it again, firmer. It shrugged again, as if the knot had an opinion about the day's geometry. Selith narrowed her eyes at it the way you look at a child who has learned a new mischief from the air.
"Interesting," Kaelthar said.
"Unhelpful," Selith corrected, and tried a third time in a style her mother had called sailor‑stubborn. The knot held, then un‑held, as if remembering a prior commitment. She looked at Kaelthar without looking at him. "Walk three paces away."
He did. She made the knot and it stayed as knots have stayed since rope was first convinced to work. She lifted the basket. Nothing unraveled. She set it down, waved Kaelthar back. He returned to the table and the knot loosened by the width of a thought.
Selith sighed, not entirely displeased. "There are days when the world listens with one ear and glances at you with the other." She tightened the rim, as if setting manners. "You take no offense?"
"I do work that benefits from honest warnings," Kaelthar said.
Pell arrived with bread that looked like it had won a competition. He set two halves on the table and would have run if Selith had not pinned him with an eyebrow. "A moment," she said. "Which way do knots hold today?"
"The way you tell them," Pell said promptly, because in this lane facts were taught before school.
"Good boy," Selith said. "Tell the Captain I approve of his notices; we like being told to keep our windows latched. It makes us feel we live in a city that expects windows."
Pell beamed as if responsible for the invention of windows. "He said also: 'Counting happens at noon whether or not noon cooperates.' He said to say it exactly like that." He hesitated, looked at Kaelthar, looked away. "Also, the Flagon's crooked handle is to have a paper with lines people can mark when the bell does anything silly."
"A witness ledger," Kaelthar said.
Pell nodded importantly. "I can carry it there and back if they don't keep it."
"They will keep it," Selith said. "They like paper that earns its seat."
The Flagon kept a long table for days when the city needed to be honest in public. Mira cleared the end nearest the door. "Not for dice," she warned a pair of men who had already thought of dice. She set a sheet on a board with ink and a tin stamped with the city's mark—a scale over an open hand. Across the top, neat even letters read: Noon Account: If The Hours Miscount, Mark What Your Eyes Saw.
Rothgar squinted. " 'Saw,' not 'heard'?"
" 'Saw,' " Mira said. "Noise is a politician."
Olin sat under the rescued beam with his ledger closed to its place of resting. He examined the witness paper as though it might declare bankruptcy. "Will you accept marks without names?"
"We will accept truth," Mira said. "Names can be purchased on market days."
Elira slid into the space between the table and the world and made it a different room. "We'll mark the order of marks," she said. "If the bell plays tricks, we will not let it play the same trick twice." She looked to Kaelthar. "Fair?"
"Fair," he said.
They broke to errands. Selith brought her obstinate basket for show‑and‑tell and left it by the table with a note: Knot Holds When The Master Is Not Looking. Someone added in smaller hand: Same For Some Men. Mira circled the note and did not erase it.
Before noon, a pair of Silent Hall clerks stepped in; Neris trailed them, uncertain whether she had permission to be curious or whether curiosity would have to forgive her after. The older clerk inspected the candle by the window. "Do yours lean?" he asked Mira, as if demanding an alibi.
"They behave according to their craft," Mira said. "As do we."
"An hour ago," the man said, "a guttering flame in the archive straightened itself and stayed straight. We prefer oddities that resolve before the ledger must consider them."
"Then find different hours," Rothgar suggested. "These have chosen to work overtime."
Neris touched the witness board, not writing. "May the Hall make a copy?"
Mira considered the question as if it were a coin that might pay for the wrong loaf. "You may read here," she said. "Your hands may leave with more than paper carries."
Neris smiled as if forgiven in advance for nothing in particular. "We will read here."
Noon approached and was recognized. Bran's call came through the window with the smell of river metal. In the market, fish scales flashed their arithmetic. At the shrine street, bells that were not responsible for counting argued with their cords.
The first toll was as expected. The second, third, and the dependable family of fourth through eighth behaved. Ninth checked its laces. Tenth did not apologize for being punctual. Eleventh minded itself. Twelfth completed the sentence.
The room at the Flagon held a breath.
The thirteenth arrived without air. Dust above the long table lifted in a thin, perfect ring. On the witness board, the ink beaded, parted, and left the smallest white circle dry in the center. Elira's hair rose where it escaped its tie, then lay down again as if embarrassed by its honesty. The candle by the window leaned toward Kaelthar, then toward the eaten middle of nothing, then resumed the manners of wax.
"Mark," Mira said, already writing. She drew a clean circle with a gap where the center would have been and noted the hour. Names followed without names: Crooked Handle—Ring In Dust; River—Ripples Out, Not In (Bran's apprentice, hurrying); Fishmonger—Scales Shivered But Did Not Fall; Shrine Street—Small Bell Listened, Did Not Speak.
Selith added: Basket—Knot Cooperated To A Degree. She underlined to a degree and did not hide her grin.
The older Hall clerk sniffed at the board as if paper might lie. "Letters," he muttered, contempt fighting curiosity.
"Practice," Kaelthar said. "The world practices the sentence it intends."
Ysren appeared in the doorway at exactly the pace of a man who had not run and expected no praise for it. He read the board, rubbed a thumb at his jaw, and nodded once to Mira as to an officer of a different uniform. "Good." He turned to Olin. "And your book?"
"It cooperates," Olin said. He opened the ledger on his knee and showed a page with a sum totaled in a column that included a figure labeled noon which no man had written. Ysren looked and did not say what he thought. He had not had time to decide what he thought.
"Jurisdiction," he said to the room, "remains pending. Harm remains mostly to dignity. The city may keep its windows latched; the watch will keep its hat on." He tipped the brim as if to prove it secured.
He left a copy of his notice and took with him the knowledge that paper can be braver than people when given a line to stand on.
In the calm after audience, the two Silent Hall clerks developed courage together. "There is a candle," the older began.
"At the Flagon," Neris said in the same breath, then flushed. "It—behaves. We have heard."
"Candles behave when rooms forget how," Mira answered, not unkind. "Eat stew. It resolves certain theological questions without speaking."
They ate. Theology accepted hospitality and remained hungry.
Selith took her basket back to the stall, where she found Hadrik the potter looking at a bowl as if it were a plan for a small bridge. The hairline that declared itself yesterday had not lengthened or shortened. "I make a mark for every vessel that refuses to lie," he told her, and showed where he had scratched an honest line on the underside. "People like to think truth means being pretty. Truth means being safe."
"Pretty is a kind of safety," Selith said. "For prices."
"Prices are sermons in numbers," Hadrik said, and seemed pleased with the phrase.
At the faceless oratory, Deya swept soot from a brass bowl. It would not collect at the center; she knew this now as the day's stance. Orren came to the door and did not correct her technique. "At noon," she said, keeping her voice a size that would not frighten the roof, "I thought I heard a note inside my chest."
"Where else should we keep them?" Orren said. "We must carry music until stone is ready."
She looked past him and saw Kaelthar going by with the gait of a man who had learned to be on time for things that happened without him. She did not say the wrong word again. Some words prefer to be earned twice.
Toward evening, the city behaved as if it had passed a test without being told the questions. The witness board gathered marks like a tree gathers birds before rain. Mira read each entry once, out loud, in the voice she used when reconciling the day's sums—so that the room could hear its own story and decide to continue it.
Olin stayed after the rush until the room quieted enough to be a thought. He shifted his ledger so its edge did not point at Kaelthar and allowed himself a confession the way a man allows himself a second slice of bread. "I was taught to suspect patterns that arrive without invoices," he said. "But I prefer honest books to polite gods."
"Polite gods make poor books," Kaelthar agreed.
"Tomorrow," Olin said, "I expect my ledger to write me into embarrassment."
"Then write it down first," Mira suggested from the bar. "Make it the ledger's idea."
Night eased its weight onto the rafters. The crooked handle outside caught a last coin of light and gave it back to the street. Elira tapped the doorframe twice, once for the world and once for whatever it was practicing. The candle's flame leaned just long enough to remember courtesy and then stood at attention.
Kaelthar sat by the window after closing, where the glass remembers heat longer than wood. He took from his satchel the clasp that sometimes showed a sun with its center swallowed and found that tonight it showed only a circle that might, with patience, choose to be eclipsed. He touched the metal and spoke to the air the way you speak to old work:
"Saved for later," he said. The room accepted the notice.
Somewhere up the tower, stone considered a lesson it had almost learned and postponed graduating for another day.