The square before the Council Hall had become a theater of consequence: banners snapped in the wind, the Bastion's spiral a dark punctuation above the gate, and the Bonebridge's crowd pressed in like a tide that would not be turned. Lanterns hung from ropes and the market's stalls had been pushed back to make room for witnesses and forensics. The Loom's table sat at the center, a simple plank under a tarpaulin, the lead-lined cases stacked like small, stubborn hearts. Rell's tracer hummed under a lamp; apprentices moved like a tide of practiced hands, arranging chairs, handing out water, checking knots.
Aria stood at the table's edge with the manifest unwrapped and the donor spiral exposed to the morning light. Around her the Loom gathered—Luna at her shoulder, Halv and Rell flanking, apprentices forming a ring of witnesses and exits. The Mass Cadence had been rehearsed until the teachers' throats knew its shape; the Thornkin's briar had been bargained for and paid; the forger's demonstration had taught the market how to read a plate. Now the packet would be read where the Council could not pretend not to see.
Council envoys arrived with the slow, bureaucratic certainty of men who had learned to make spectacle into procedure. They moved through the crowd with clipped steps and clipped faces, their dull coats a deliberate neutrality. Behind them, patrons' aides and brokers' handlers clustered like shadows, watching for a seam to exploit. The envoys took their place at the edge of the square, papers folded, expressions practiced. They had been summoned by the packet's gravity; they had not expected the scale of the crowd.
Aria set the manifest on the table and let the tracer's lattice crawl across the wax. Rell's fingers moved with the quiet certainty of someone who read machines the way others read faces. "Registry imprint matches the manifest," he said, voice low but steady. "Virelle trust line. Transfers dated across three seasons. Donor list attached."
A murmur moved through the crowd like wind through reeds. Someone laughed, sharp and unbelieving; someone else spat. The market's attention tightened into a single, hungry thing. The packet had become a public fact; the ledger's margins had been pried open.
Luna stepped forward and arranged the teachers into a tight semicircle behind the table. Their faces were set, the way people's faces go when they are about to give something away. The Mass Cadence they would sing here was not a private ward but a public anchor: layered voices braided into a living net that would hold witnesses steady and make the packet legible to forensics and to the city. It would demand voices—and with each voice the ledger's arithmetic would take its toll.
"You know what this will cost," Luna said, not to Aria but to the square. Her voice carried like a bell. "We will hold witnesses steady. We will make the ledger speak. We will pay what is required."
The Thornkin's demonstration was the other hinge. Halv had arranged for a living briar to be brought to the square, not as a spectacle of violence but as proof that bargains could be kept and that living things answered offerings. The Night Orchard's limb lay coiled in a crate, its sap wrapped in oilcloth, a small, blunt thing that smelled of rain. The Thornkin would not be used to harm; it would be used to show that the Loom's claims were not only words but trades with consequences.
The packet reading began with witnesses. Couriers, fence-keepers, a forger who had shown the market how to read a plate—each stepped forward under Luna's Echo Shield and spoke into the tracer's lattice. Forensics recorded pressure and cadence; apprentices copied testimony into the Loom's ledger. The Echo Shield held each voice steady for a minute, a fragile net that would blur a small, private thing in the witness's mind for a day or three. Each witness left the table pale and grateful, a small hollow where a domestic detail had been thinned.
When the manifest's registry line was read aloud—Virelle; trust transfers; dates and account numbers—the crowd's murmur sharpened into a roar. People who had traded in rumors felt the ledger's teeth close around them. Vendors shouted for justice; apprentices chanted for the Loom to take the Bastion; a militia captain barked orders and men in leather belts moved toward the docks. The packet had done its work: what had been a rumor in the margins was now a public wound.
The Council envoys moved forward with the slow efficiency of those who had been trained to turn outrage into procedure. They took the manifest from Aria's hands with a bureaucrat's touch and promised an inquiry that would be swift and public. Their words were measured, but their eyes flicked to the Bastion's parapet and to the patrons' aides who had gathered like a second, darker crowd. The envoys' presence meant the packet had entered the city's official ledger; it would be recorded, debated, and—if the Council chose—acted upon.
That was when the brokers struck.
Handlers in broker black moved through the crowd like smoke, small, practiced motions that let Shade Hares slip from sleeves and into palms. The Hares brushed a vendor's hand and a face blurred; they slipped between witnesses and thinned a memory here, a laugh there. The brokers had learned to weaponize small thefts: a taste dulled, a lullaby thinned, a witness's certainty made unreliable. The market's edges frayed as the Hares worked.
Luna's voice tightened. The Mass Cadence shifted, a minor key that braided the ward into a tighter net. Teachers' faces went pale; the strain of holding a district-scale ward was visible in the way their hands trembled. The cadence held, but the cost landed like a tally: a small memory here, a phrase there, a day's clarity thinned. The teachers' throats worked with the strain; their eyes glassed with the pressure of holding a public truth.
Halv's Thornkin demonstration answered the brokers' cruelty with blunt honesty. She set the Night Orchard's limb in the square and placed a small offering on a silver plate: a slice of fruit, a child's ribbon, a recorded lullaby played into a small horn. The Thornkin's limb uncoiled and took the offering with a sound like a lock. It did not fight; it did not bargain. It took what was given and did what it had been asked: it braided itself into a broker's launch and tangled a propeller, holding a vessel in place until the Council's envoys could see the manifest's chain of custody.
The Thornkin's presence was a demonstration of consequence that the brokers could not easily deny. Men cursed and hacked at living rope; handlers found their launches stalled and their routes exposed. The crowd watched a living bargain being kept and the ledger's arithmetic became visible: names paid, trades honored, costs exacted.
But the Mass Cadence's toll deepened. Teachers' memories thinned in cumulative ways that were no longer small. A lullaby that had once been a teacher's private anchor came back as a fragment; a taste that had been bright returned dull and flat. The chorus's edges frayed; voices that had been steady grew thin and breathy. Luna's fingers trembled as she braided the cadence; she pressed them to her temple and tasted the thinness of lemon peel where once there had been a bright edge.
The crowd saw it. Some faces softened with pity; others hardened with anger. The public reckoning had a human cost that could not be hidden behind tracer readouts and lead-lined cases. The teachers' sacrifices were visible now: the ledger's arithmetic had been paid in pieces of the people who held it.
The Council envoys conferred in clipped tones and then stepped forward with a statement that sounded like a verdict and like a postponement. They promised an inquiry, a public hearing, and a chain of custody that would be respected. They would send envoys to the Bastion; they would summon House Virelle's representatives. They would not, they said, allow vigilante justice. The crowd's roar split into factions—those who wanted immediate action and those who trusted the Council's slow machinery.
Patron houses did not wait for the Council's slow hand. A messenger from the Bastion arrived with a retinue and a demand: the packet's witnesses must be turned over for questioning; the Loom's methods must be scrutinized. The Bastion's muscle pressed like a shadow at the square's edge. Brokers' aides whispered of lawsuits and of private counsel. The public reckoning had become a political hinge: the ledger's margins were now a battlefield.
Aria felt the pressure like a rope around her chest. The packet had done what it needed to do—the manifest was public, the donor list recorded, witnesses anchored—but the consequences were immediate and dangerous. The Bastion would marshal counsel and muscle; patron houses would seek to bury the ledger under legal and financial weight. The Council's inquiry might be sincere or it might be a way to smooth the wound. The city would decide whether to stitch the ledger's margins or let them fester.
They moved then with the practiced speed of people who had rehearsed this choreography until muscle remembered what the mind could not risk forgetting. Witnesses were shepherded to safehouses; forensics copied the tracer's readouts into lead-lined cases; the Thornkin's limb was led back to the Night Orchard with a small, blunt ceremony that acknowledged the bargain and the cost. The teachers collapsed into chairs and let the exhaustion take them; their voices were thin and their eyes glassy.
In the Loom's stairwell, as the square's noise rose and fell like a tide, Luna wrapped a warm cloth around Aria's wrist and pressed a cup of bitter tea into her hands. "We made them see," she said, voice soft and fierce. "We forced the ledger into the open."
Aria let the words land like a small, fierce thing. She had wanted the ledger's truth to be public; she had wanted witnesses to be heard. She had not wanted the cost to be this cumulative, this visible. She had not wanted to feel the teachers' memories thin like pages left in the sun.
Halv's laugh was short and humorless as she checked the lead-lined cases. "We did what we had to," she said. "Now we watch."
Rell's tracer hummed as he fed the readouts into the Loom's ledger and prepared the chain of custody for the Council. The donor list was a map now: names, dates, patron houses, and the agents who had signed. The Spiral's keepers had been named in the margins; the donor trusts had been exposed. The Reckoning Packet had forced the city to look.
Outside, the square's crowd thinned into groups and arguments. Some marched toward the Bastion with torches and righteous anger; others gathered in small knots to trade rumors and plans. The Council's envoys moved through the press with the practiced indifference of those who had seen too many spectacles. The packet's echo would not fade quickly.
When Aria tried to call back the small memories that had been taken—names, tastes, lullabies—they hovered at the edge of her mind like coins she could not find. The Mass Cadence had thinned teachers' private lives in a way that would not be repaired by a single night's sleep. The ledger's arithmetic had been paid in pieces of themselves.
Luna's hand found Aria's and squeezed, fingers warm and steady. "We'll count it," she said. "We'll make sure no one pays alone."
Aria wanted to believe it with the fierce, childish faith that had kept her alive. She wanted to believe it because the alternative—counting the cost and finding it too high—was a thing she could not bear. She tightened her grip on the lead-lined case and let the Loom's dim light hold her like a small, private promise.
The Reckoning Packet had been read. The city had seen the ledger's margins. The Council would convene; patrons would marshal counsel; the Bastion would not sit quietly. The Thornkin's bargain had been kept and the teachers had paid. The ledger's thread ran on—bright, dangerous, and paid for in memory—and the Loom would follow it, together, one costly step at a time.