The treatise had the smell of old ink and something older still—dried citrus and the faint, impossible sweetness of a lullaby hummed into vellum. It lay on the workbench like a sleeping thing, its pages splayed under the tracer's pale lattice, and when Luna leaned over it the room seemed to inhale. Forensics had already teased the main hand into legibility: instructions, cautions, diagrams that braided words into knots. But the margins were the dangerous part—scribbles in a different hand, corrections that argued with the main text, a cramped scrawl that had been added later as if someone had been trying to talk back to the book.
Rell fed the tracer's filament along the treatise's edge and the lattice translated pressure and residue into a faint, ghostly image on the glass. The marginalia answered with a thin, resonant tone that made the lamplight tremble. Apprentices leaned in, faces lit by the tracer's glow, and Halv stood with her arms folded like a woman who preferred to break things rather than read them. Aria watched from the doorway, the shard's lead-lined case heavy at her feet, the manifest folded into the small of her back. The ledger's thread had led them here; the treatise might tell them why keepers had been asked to pay with names.
"Listen," Luna said, voice low. She did not read aloud at first; she let the tracer's hum settle into the room like a tide. Teachers read differently than forensics—they listened for cadences, for the way a line wanted to be sung. The marginalia's hand was cramped and urgent; it argued with the main text in short, clipped notes. Rell's fingers moved over the tracer's output and his face went tight.
"There's a lineage," he said. "Spiral keepers. They were custodians—families who tended seams. They recorded offerings and names. The marginalia—look—someone added a note: 'When keepers are taken, the Spiral frays. The Unnamed answers the fray with hunger.'"
The words landed like a stone. The Unnamed had been a myth told to frighten children into obedience, a weathered thing in the Loom's oral margins. But the treatise did not speak in myth; it spoke in instruction and ledger lines. If keepers had been real, and if their work had required names as counterweights, then the Spiral was not an abstract architecture but a living ledger that had been tended by people who paid with pieces of themselves.
Aria felt the room tilt. She had chased donor marks and broker routes and had expected to find patronage and procurement. She had not expected to find a lineage of people who had been asked to anchor memory with their names. The idea reframed everything: witnesses were not only people who remembered; they had been used as anchors, and the ledger's margins had been written with their cost.
"We need to know who wrote the marginalia," Aria said. "Who argued with the treatise? Who tried to change the instructions?"
Rell's tracer hummed. The marginalia's ink had been pressed with a different hand, a later pressure that left a heat signature the tracer could read. It yielded a faint imprint: a donor mark, not Virelle's spiral but a different sigil—an open spiral with a slash through it. The mark was older than the donor stamps they'd been tracing; it belonged to a custodial line, not a patron house.
"Keeper mark," Luna breathed. "A lineage sigil. This is a keeper's correction—someone who tried to warn future readers."
Halv's laugh was short and humorless. "Warned them about what? That the Unnamed eats names?"
"It's not a fairy tale," Rell said. "The marginalia lists offerings: fruit, a lullaby, a winter's name. It says the keeper remembers the name; the ledger forgets the keeper. The keeper becomes the counterweight."
The apprentices exchanged looks. One of them, a young woman with ink-stained fingers, swallowed and touched the tracer's glass as if she could feel the heat of the hand that had written the marginalia. The idea of giving a name as an offering was intimate and terrible; it made the ledger's arithmetic personal in a way that procurement lists never had.
"We should read the marginalia properly," Aria said. "Not just the tracer's ghost. We need the voice. Forensics can give us the ink's chemistry, but the treatise's voice—its cadence—might tell us how the keepers thought."
Luna's eyes were steady. "We can do a small ritual," she said. "A forensic reading that uses a teacher's summoning to coax the marginalia's voice. It's a delicate thing—an anchor, not a summoning of a being. We'll ask the treatise to speak and hold it with a small Thornkin offering. It will cost me a taste or a phrase. I'll pay it."
Aria felt the ledger's thread tighten. They had been paying costs in small increments—Echo Shields, nolistens, Tidebind aftershocks—but this was different. Luna's summoning would be a forensic ritual: a teacher's hum braided with a Thornkin's appetite to coax the treatise into revealing its marginalia's fuller voice. The cost would be immediate and personal: a small sensory dulling, a taste or a phrase that would thin for a day. Luna had already paid for the market's nolisten and the Thornkin's brief appearance; she had the ledger's arithmetic written into her bones.
"Do it," Aria said. The word was small and fierce. They had come this far.
They prepared the bench like a ritual: lead-lined case, tracer's lattice, a small brazier for the Thornkin's offering. Halv set a wedge of Night Orchard fruit on a silver plate—black as midnight and smelling of rain—and Luna braided a short cadence into the air. The apprentices formed a ring, their faces lit by the tracer's glow. Rell set the tracer's filament over the marginalia and let the lattice hum.
Luna's voice rose, low and precise. She did not sing so much as shape the air; her cadence braided the tracer's light into a thin net that would hold the treatise's voice steady. The Thornkin's offering was placed in the brazier and the fruit's scent rose like a tide. The brazier's flame licked the plate and the Thornkin's appetite answered with a small, living rustle that made the room's hairs stand up.
The marginalia's ink shivered under the tracer's lattice and then, as if a mouth had opened in the paper, a voice threaded through the room. It was not a human voice so much as a cadence—short, urgent, the sound of someone whispering into a ledger. The tracer translated it into a pattern Rell read aloud, and Luna's hum braided with the pattern until the words became clear.
"—we bound names to the seam," Rell read, voice thin. "We offered winter names and lullabies. The keeper remembers; the ledger forgets. It keeps the city whole. But when keepers were taken—by plague, by war, by houses that wanted names—the Spiral frayed. The Unnamed answered the fray. It eats the margins. It hungers for the missing names."
The room was very quiet. The apprentices' breaths were small and measured. Halv's jaw worked. Aria felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the vault's stone.
"Who took them?" Aria asked, though the question felt like a blade.
The marginalia's voice—if it could be called that—answered with a list of names and a tone that was more ledger than lament. "Donor trusts," Rell read. "Patron houses took keepers' names as collateral. They stamped donor marks into codex fragments. They hid names in vaults. The keepers were promised safety; they were given ledgers. The Spiral's keepers became donors' property."
The implication was a map of culpability. Patronage had not only funded archives; it had bought anchors. House Virelle's spiral, the donor marks stamped into shards and plates, might be part of a larger system that had turned custodial practice into private profit. The ledger's margins had been rewritten by those with coin.
Luna's hum thinned. The Thornkin's offering had been consumed; the brazier's flame settled into a steady glow. The cost landed like a bell. Luna's fingers flexed and she blinked, a small, private loss settling into her face.
"What did you lose?" Aria asked, voice small.
Luna's mouth went thin. "A taste," she said. "A small thing. The taste of citrus—lemon peel. It will come back, but it will be thin for a day." She smiled, small and fierce. "Worth it."
The ledger's arithmetic had been paid again. The marginalia had given them a lineage and a charge: keepers had been real, and patron houses had been implicated in turning names into assets. The Unnamed was not a myth but a consequence: when keepers were erased, the Spiral frayed and something answered the gap with hunger.
Rell's tracer hummed and spat out a faint image: a list of donor marks, dates, and a notation that matched the registry imprint they had pulled from the vault. One line stood out—a transfer to a private vault on the Salted Bastion dated two winters ago, stamped with Virelle's spiral and a donor notation that matched the shard's marginalia.
"We follow that line," Aria said. The decision felt like a blade sliding into place. "We find who signed for those names. We find the keepers' descendants. We find the Unnamed's seams."
Halv's laugh was short. "And we make sure the ledger doesn't eat anyone else."
They cataloged the marginalia, sealed the treatise in a lead-lined case, and set the tracer to record every nuance. Forensics would want the raw lattice; the apprentices would copy the marginalia into the Loom's ledger. They would need witnesses—keepers' descendants, people who might remember songs and lullabies—and they would need to protect them from brokers who trafficked in names.
Outside, the Bonebridge hummed with the city's indifferent life. Inside the safehouse, the treatise's marginalia lay like a wound that had been opened and stitched. The Thornkin's offering had been paid and Luna's taste dulled; the ledger's arithmetic had been balanced with a teacher's small sacrifice. The map had a new line: keepers, donor trusts, Virelle, the Salted Bastion.
Aria closed her eyes for a moment and tried to call back the name that had slipped in the vault breach. It hovered at the edge of her mind like a coin she could not find. The marginalia had given them a history and a direction, but it had also made the ledger's cost personal in a way that procurement lists never had. Names had been offered and taken; someone had paid with themselves so the city could remember. Now the Loom would have to decide what to do with that knowledge.
Luna's hand found Aria's and squeezed, fingers warm and steady. "We follow the line," she said. "We find the keepers. We learn what was given. We decide—together—what to do with the names."
Aria nodded. The treatise's marginalia had been coaxed into speech; the Spiral's keepers had been named in the margins. The ledger's thread ran on, bright and dangerous. They would follow it to the Salted Bastion and beyond, and they would count the cost of every step.