Greywick's river smelled like iron and old fish, like a mouth that never finished swallowing. Along the quay, men shouted over ropes and crates, and the gulls answered with their thin, greedy laughter. The town pretended that noise meant life. It was only a curtain—something to hide behind when the Ledger came to read the truth aloud.
Lark Hayes kept her head down and her hands moving.
She knelt at the edge of the square where the cobbles dipped toward the water, scrubbing salt stains from the stones with a brush worn to wire. It was the kind of work given to an Unmarked girl with a debt—public enough to be seen, small enough to be ignored. Every pass of the brush said the same thing to anyone watching: useful, not valued.
Her fingers stung. The cold crawled through her sleeves and settled in her bones like a promise.
A market woman stepped around her as if Lark were a puddle. A boy tossed an apple core that landed near her knee; he didn't even look back. Lark had learned not to flinch. Flinching was a kind of confession, and confessions drew attention. Attention made you visible. Visibility was how the Ledger found you even when you tried to fold yourself into the cracks of a town.
She told herself she could finish the stones, collect her scrip, disappear into the dock lanes before noon.
Then the bell rang.
Not the harbor bell—this was the square bell, the one used for proclamations and punishments. Its sound ran through Greywick like a spine straightening. Conversations thinned. Faces turned. Even the gulls paused, tilting their heads as if listening for blood.
Lark's brush slowed.
A line of riders entered the square in coats the color of wet ash. They moved with the calm of people who had never been told no. Two walked on foot beside the lead horse, gloved hands resting on the hilts of short blades. Marked, Lark guessed—by the way the crowd unconsciously gave them room, by the stillness in their shoulders, by the way they didn't need to raise their voices to own the space.
Behind them came the clerk.
He carried the Iron Book in a sling across his chest, as if it were a holy burden. The ledger's iron corners caught the daylight and threw it back in hard, indifferent flashes. A scribe followed with ink and papers, eyes down, mouth set—someone trained to record without pity.
Greywick's people shifted into place the way they always did. A half-circle formed around the steps of the public dais. Mothers drew children closer. Men with strong hands stared at their boots. Those who owed nothing watched with hunger anyway, because relief could look like cruelty when you were frightened enough.
Lark's heartbeat found her throat. She lowered her gaze and scrubbed faster, trying to make herself smaller than the stone.
The clerk unhooked the Iron Book and laid it on the dais with both hands, careful and reverent. The sound it made—metal kissing wood—was louder than it should have been. It felt like a door shutting.
"By Ledger Law," he said, and the words carried without strain, "debts will be read and balanced."
He opened the book.
Names spilled out like grain from a torn sack. Amounts, dates, penalties. Each sentence landed with the same dull weight: you owe, you owe, you owe. The clerk's voice did not change for the weeping woman. It did not soften for the old man whose hands shook as if he might crumble into the river. It did not harden for the boy whose jaw clenched like a trapped animal. The Ledger didn't care about faces. The Ledger cared about record.
Lark listened anyway. She couldn't help it. Listening was how she survived: knowing who was being taken, what kind of taking it would be, how the town shifted afterward.
Then she heard a name that pulled the air from her lungs.
"Lark Hayes," the clerk read, and the world narrowed to the sound of it.
She stood before she meant to, water dripping from her sleeves, brush still clenched in her fist. Heads turned. Eyes pinned her to the square. The shame rose hot in her chest, swift as flame.
She forced her voice to work.
"Under which clause," she said, carefully, because careful was all she owned, "does a dock-fee debt become indenture without—without a household hearing?"
A ripple went through the crowd—surprise, irritation, fear. Unmarked girls didn't ask questions in public. Questions were dangerous. Questions implied you believed the law could be spoken back to.
One of the ash-coated agents took a step, and the crowd tightened like a fist.
The clerk didn't look at her. He simply turned one page, as if her words were a fly that had landed on the margin.
"The hearing is the reading," he said, flat and final. "The witness is the square."
Lark swallowed. Her mouth tasted of river and soap and something older: the knowledge that she was standing in the wrong kind of spotlight.
She tried again, softer, threading her words the way she threaded stories—finding the seam.
"If the debt-holder is absent," she said, "the transfer can't be signed. That's in the—"
The agent's gloved hand closed around her upper arm.
Not hard enough to bruise yet. Just firm. A reminder. A claim in its first, polite shape.
Lark went very still, because she knew this feeling. Stillness was the only way not to give them more of you than they were already taking.
Then the clerk lifted his eyes, and said her name like a nail being driven.
"Lark Hayes," he repeated, not louder—cleaner, as if he were polishing the sound for the crowd to see. "Dock-fee arrears. Lodging arrears. Interest compounded under Ledger Law. Asset eligible for transfer."
Asset.
The word hit harder than the agent's grip. It turned her skin into inventory, her breath into an item that could be counted.
Lark's mouth opened, but the square had already shifted around her like a net. So many witnesses. So many eyes. In Valewyn, being seen wasn't safety; it was the blade that made the cut legal.
"I contest the—" she began, and the agent tightened his hold just enough to make the syllables tremble.
The clerk didn't flinch. He turned another page with the same calm he'd used on widows and old men.
"Debt-holder present to sign," he said.
A figure stepped from the line of ash coats—shorter than the agents, softer in the shoulders, but carrying authority like perfume. Not a dockman. Not a neighbor. A stranger with gloves too clean for river work, and a seal-ring that caught the pale light and swallowed it.
The crest was a thorned crown.
Whispers skittered through Greywick.
"Thorn—" someone breathed, and swallowed the rest like it might bite.
Lark's stomach went hollow. Thornwyck Manor wasn't a place you traveled to; it was a story told to keep girls indoors after dusk. A cliff keep. A mouth of stone. A High King who didn't sleep like other men. A household where servants learned to look away or lose parts of themselves.
The clerk addressed the stranger as if addressing the weather.
"Purchaser of record?"
The gloved hand placed a folded document on the dais. The paper looked wrong against the iron-bound book—too delicate, too alive. The scribe leaned in, dipped his pen, and began to write as if writing could be a kind of chain.
"Thornwyck household," the stranger said.
No flourish. No apology. Just the phrase, laid down like a stone on a grave.
Lark tasted copper. "You—" she tried, searching the stranger's face for anything human. "My debt wasn't—this wasn't—"
The agent hauled her forward, and the crowd parted as if she carried plague.
"Witnesses," the clerk said, eyes sweeping the square. The bell above them sat silent, but the people themselves were a bell—present, watching, binding the moment by simply staying.
"By record and witness," he continued, "the asset transfers. Indenture begins upon mark."
The stranger lifted the seal-ring and pressed it into the ink pad the scribe held out. Black ink slicked the crest. Then the ring came down onto the paper with a soft, final thunk.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
Lark flinched anyway, because some sounds were made for the body, not the ear.
The clerk slid the Iron Book closer and tapped a blank line with one pale finger. "Mark."
Lark's hand jerked back on instinct.
The agent caught her wrist.
Not cruelly—efficiently. As if her refusal were a brief inconvenience, like a knot in rope. He guided her thumb toward the ink.
Lark twisted, breath hitching. "Please—there's a mistake—"
"Unmarked," someone muttered in the crowd, half-spite, half-fear. "Always thinking they're people."
The words didn't come from the ash coats. They came from home.
Lark's throat tightened so hard it ached. She looked at the faces she'd known since she was small: the market woman, the boy with the apple core, the men who'd laughed near the quay. Some stared at her with relief—not me. Some stared with hunger—punishment, entertainment. Some stared with pity, and pity was its own kind of distance.
She had nowhere to put her eyes that didn't hurt.
Ink kissed her skin.
Her thumbprint bloomed on the page—dark, whorled, undeniable.
In the instant the print set, something in the air seemed to snap into place, like a latch catching. The scribe blotted it carefully, reverent as a priest. The clerk nodded once, satisfied.
The stranger took the paper back without looking at her.
"Collection complete," the clerk announced. "Deliver to Thornwyck."
Deliver.
The agent turned her toward the edge of the square, where a wagon waited with its canvas drawn tight. Two more ash-coated men stood beside it, faces blank, hands ready.
Lark dug her heels into the cobbles, desperate for one last lie—I can hide. I can slip between people. I can survive by being small.
But the agent's grip didn't loosen. He was stronger than her hope, steadier than her fear.
As they dragged her past the riverward slope, the wind off the water slapped her cheeks—cold, sharp, familiar. Greywick's smell rushed at her one final time: fish, tar, soap, smoke. A life she hadn't loved, but a life that had still been hers.
Then the wagon door opened, and the square's noise dimmed, as if the world itself were stepping back.
Thornwyck—spoken once—became the chain that pulled her off the stones and into the wagon's shadow.
The wagon's canvas turned daylight into a bruised, breathing dimness.
Lark sat on a plank that smelled of old straw and other people's fear, wrists bound with cord not tight enough to bleed—tight enough to remember. The river's noise faded behind them, replaced by the wooden groan of wheels and the steady clop of hooves, like a heartbeat that wasn't hers.
Her thumb still wore the ink. Black in the whorls. Proof that her body had spoken on paper even while her mouth had been begging.
Across from her, one of the ash-coated men rode with his knees braced, calm as a butcher on a familiar road. He watched her the way a clerk watches numbers: for change, for error, for theft.
"You marked," he said, as if commenting on weather. "So you're taken. That's the only part you needed to understand back there."
"I understood," Lark whispered. The words scraped out of her throat. "I'm asking what I signed. Exactly."
The man reached into his coat and pulled a folded strip of parchment—thin, stiff, edged with the same thorned crest she'd seen in the square. He didn't offer it to her. He held it up, just out of reach, like a lantern you weren't allowed to touch.
"Indenture," he said. "Work owed in body and time. No wage. Food and bed at the household's discretion. Discipline at the household's discretion. Movement at the household's discretion."
Each phrase landed like a stone dropped into a well—no splash, just a deep, final sound.
Lark's nails dug into the plank. "Discretion," she repeated. "Meaning what?"
"Meaning if you breathe wrong," he said, and there was no cruelty in it—only certainty, "the law is still on their side."
The wagon jolted over a rut. Lark's shoulder knocked the canvas. Cold air seeped through seams, tasting of damp earth and winter. Somewhere beyond the cloth, Greywick still existed. She could almost imagine the square, the stones, the bell. But imagination didn't un-ink her thumb.
"What if I refuse," she asked, careful, because careful was the last shape of power she owned. "If I don't—work. If I don't go inside. If I run."
The man's gaze slid to her ink-stained thumb as if it were the answer.
"You can refuse to cooperate," he said. "You can refuse to eat. You can refuse to speak. None of that changes the record."
He tapped his gloved finger against the parchment. Here. Written. Witnessed. The gesture carried the same weight as the bell.
"And if I run?" Lark pressed.
His mouth moved in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Then you become theft," he said. "And theft is punished. Not by Greywick. Not by Thornwyck. By Ledger Law. It will hunt you the way a net hunts a fish—quiet, patient, inevitable."
Lark's pulse climbed. "I'm not—property."
The man's eyes didn't change. He didn't argue. He didn't need to.
"You were an Unmarked debt," he replied. "Now you're Unmarked stock. The only difference is the name of the hand holding your rope."
Stock. Like barrels. Like sheep. Like something counted before winter.
Lark swallowed hard enough to hurt. "There has to be a clause," she said, half to him, half to the dark, "something about repayment, buyout—work the docks until—"
A second ash-coated guard leaned in from the wagon's opening, his breath a pale ghost in the cold. He looked at her as if she were already a rumor.
"Listen," he said, voice rough with boredom, "you can talk as much as you want. Words don't weigh anything until someone writes them down."
The first man folded the parchment again, crisp and final. "At Thornwyck," he said, "you'll learn what words are worth."
Lark stared at her own thumb in the dimness, at the ink that had turned her into a line in an iron book.
Her voice was still inside her—but the law had already decided it didn't matter.
The wagon lurched into a slower rhythm, wheels grinding as if the road itself had grown teeth.
Outside, a shout—brief, official. Hooves halted. Leather creaked. The canvas flap lifted, and a blade of daylight cut across Lark's knees.
She blinked hard, eyes watering. For a heartbeat she saw a roadside post crowned with a small bell and a nailed plank of notices—Ledger stamps, travel permissions, the kind of authority that didn't need walls. A scribe stood there with a portable desk, ink pot wedged in a wooden cradle so it wouldn't spill. Two guards watched him write, not because they feared him, but because they feared what he represented.
The ash-coated man across from her nodded toward the opening. "Routine," he said. "Transfer trail."
Lark's throat tightened. "You already have the record."
"Record has steps," he answered. "Steps make it harder to undo."
The second guard—rough-voiced, bored—caught her elbow and tugged her forward. The cord at her wrists scraped her skin as she stumbled to the edge of the wagon. Cold air slapped her face clean.
The scribe didn't look up. He slid a small strip of parchment onto the desk, already bearing the thorned crown crest at its top. A line beneath it waited—blank, hungry.
Lark's gaze snagged on the ink tool in his hand.
Not a feather quill. Not a simple pen.
A short, black nib, metal-tipped, wrapped at the base with a tight coil of dark thread—so neatly wound it looked deliberate, like a signal disguised as a repair.
"Thumb," the scribe said.
Lark held her bound hands close to her chest. "I can read," she said, breath shaky but stubborn. "Let me see the terms."
The scribe's pen paused for the first time. His eyes lifted—flat, grey, practiced.
"This isn't a contract you negotiate," he replied. "It's a trail you leave."
The ash-coated man leaned closer, voice low enough to feel private even with all of them watching. "Mark it, and we move. Make this difficult, and we make you quiet."
Lark stared at the blank line. Her mind raced through clauses the way it always did when she was afraid—searching for a hinge, a loophole, a single word that could be turned.
But the parchment wasn't written in the dock notices' plain script. It was court-hand—tight, old, built to keep meaning behind closed doors.
A lock made of letters.
"I don't consent," she said, and the words came out thin, like thread pulled too hard.
The rough-voiced guard snorted. "Consent isn't in it, Unmarked."
He reached for her bound wrists.
Lark jerked back on instinct, and the movement was small—pathetic, really—but it lit something in the air. Not magic, not yet. Something worse: procedure. The ash-coated man's patience cooled.
"You want to keep your voice?" he asked softly. "Then learn what voice is worth. Here, it's worth exactly what it can change."
He guided her hands forward anyway, firm as law.
The scribe dipped the metal nib into the ink.
The ink looked thicker than river-black, glossy as oil. When the nib rose, a bead clung to it like a drop that didn't want to fall.
"Thumb," the scribe repeated.
Lark's thumb hovered above the line. She could smell the ink—sharp, bitter, threaded with something metallic. Her stomach rolled.
"Wait," she whispered. "If I mark it, what am I agreeing to?"
The scribe finally met her gaze, and for a moment she saw it: not cruelty, not kindness—fear. The kind that comes from serving a system that eats the people inside it.
"Oathcraft doesn't care what you meant," he said. "Only what was witnessed."
Lark's breath hitched. "Oath—"
"Thumb," the ash-coated man said, and his voice turned into a door that had decided to close.
Her thumb came down.
The ink bit.
Not metaphor. Not imagination. A sharp, stinging pinch at the pad of her thumb, like a small mouth closing—brief, precise, punishing. Lark gasped, shoulders jolting, and the guard's grip tightened to keep her from yanking away.
A thin burn flared under her skin as the print set on the parchment. The scribe blotted it quickly, careful, reverent—like he was sealing a wound.
Lark stared at her thumb, heart hammering. No blood, but the skin felt tender, newly claimed.
"What—what was that?" she managed.
The scribe's eyes dropped back to his work. "Teeth," he said, as if naming a feature of the world. "So you remember the line is alive."
The rough-voiced guard gave a humorless laugh. "Welcome to Thornwyck's way of doing things."
Lark swallowed against the nausea rising in her throat. "I didn't say anything," she whispered. "I didn't swear—"
"You marked," the ash-coated man cut in. "That's enough."
He took the parchment from the scribe and tucked it into his coat like a receipt.
Lark's hands fell back toward her chest, cord pulling, thumb throbbing softly with each pulse. She wanted to scream that this wasn't law, it was hunger dressed in ink. She wanted to call out to the road, to the sky, to anyone.
But the roadside post stood silent. The bell didn't ring for her. Witnesses were present, and that was all the world required.
As they shoved her back into the wagon, the rough-voiced guard muttered, almost fondly, "Unmarked stock that can read—dangerous little thing."
The canvas dropped, swallowing daylight again, and the darkness inside smelled suddenly of ink.
The road dragged Greywick away in small, cruel increments.
Through a seam in the canvas, Lark caught flashes of the world she'd belonged to—river-glint, slate roofs, chimney-smoke curling like pale fingers. The wagon's rhythm was steady now, as if the wheels had found a groove carved by other people's leaving. Her bound wrists rested in her lap, cord rough against skin, and her thumb throbbed with that sharp little memory of ink-teeth.
She tried to breathe without making sound.
Every time the canvas lifted with the wind, she leaned toward the light like a plant that still believed in sun. Not because she expected rescue—no, that hope had been skinned in the square—but because there was a difference between being taken and being erased, and she wasn't ready to be erased.
The wagon slowed near the last cluster of cottages before the road opened into fields. There was a bend here where the river road split—one branch hugging the water, the other climbing toward the inland ridge. Lark knew it by the crooked alder tree, by the stone trough where horses drank, by the way the air smelled less like fish and more like damp hay.
A voice outside called for a pause—brief, official.
The canvas flap shifted. Daylight spilled in, thin and winter-bright. Lark blinked, and her eyes found the roadside like a starving thing finds crumbs.
People had gathered to watch. Not many—just enough to make the taking feel ordinary. A man with a cart of turnips. A woman with a bundled child on her hip. Two boys pretending they weren't staring, their shoulders angled like broken arrows.
And there—near the trough, hands tucked into a worn shawl—stood Nell.
Nell from the dock lanes. Nell who had once pushed a heel of bread into Lark's palm and murmured, Eat, love, before the river freezes you from the inside. Nell who had clucked her tongue at the Ledger's cruelty in the safety of a doorway, then crossed herself like that could be protection.
Lark's chest seized so hard her next breath came out wrong.
For one bright, stupid heartbeat, she believed Nell would look up, see her, and do something—anything. Shout. Lie. Throw herself into the road. Put her body between the wagon and its path the way mothers did for children.
Lark leaned forward, cords biting her wrists. "Nell—" she tried, but the name came out half-strangled, swallowed by the cold air and the wagon's creak.
A guard at the opening shifted, blocking part of the view. His shadow cut across her knees like a bar.
Lark forced her voice anyway, pushing it through the tightness in her throat. "Nell, please—"
Nell's head lifted.
Their eyes found each other, clean and direct, the way mirrors do when you can't avoid yourself.
Nell's face changed. Not into anger. Not into pity. Into calculation—the fast, frightened arithmetic of survival.
Her gaze flicked to the ash-coated men. To the thorn-crest on a seal-ring. To the iron certainty of authority standing casually beside the wagon like it belonged to the road.
Then Nell looked away.
Not slowly. Not with apology.
Quickly, like a person stepping aside from a knife.
She adjusted the shawl at her shoulders with hands that didn't tremble—hands practiced at pretending. The child she'd been holding earlier was not hers, Lark realized with a dizzy little shock. She was borrowing motherhood as camouflage, the way people borrowed silence.
Lark's throat burned.
The world didn't stop. The wagon didn't stop. The road didn't open and swallow the guards. Nothing dramatic arrived to prove that kindness still had teeth.
Inside the wagon, the rough-voiced guard muttered, bored and amused, "Thought you had someone?"
Lark didn't answer. If she spoke, she would beg again, and begging was a kind of surrender that never ended—it only changed hands.
She watched Nell's profile in the sliver of daylight, watched the way Nell's chin lifted, the way her mouth set into a line that said not me, not today, I have to live. The posture was familiar. Greywick was full of it. The whole town was built of people who had learned that cowardice could be fed like a pet until it felt like wisdom.
Lark's fingers curled against the cord, nails pressing crescents into her own skin.
It isn't that I'm unloved, a bitter thought rose, sharp as the ink's bite. It's that love costs too much here.
Ledger Law didn't just collect coin; it collected courage. It took pieces of people and called it order.
The guard's hand nudged her shoulder, a warning to sit back. Lark obeyed, not because she accepted it, but because she refused to waste what little she still had on a fight she couldn't win yet.
Yet.
Her eyes stayed on the seam of light as Greywick slid farther away—roofs shrinking, river brightening into a thin line, smoke thinning into nothing. Nell became a smudge of shawl and then a dot and then a memory that hurt less than it should have, because pain had started to harden into something else.
Resolve, maybe.
Or rage wearing a calm face.
Lark lowered her gaze to her thumb. The pad was tender where the ink had bitten, the print sealed on paper somewhere in a coat pocket, carried like a receipt of ownership. She pressed her thumb to her palm and felt her pulse answer, steady and stubborn.
If the world only listens to what's written, she thought, then I will learn how to write back.
No witnesses. No bell. No clerk to make it official.
Just a girl in a wagon, making a vow the way you make a fire in wet weather—patiently, fiercely, with whatever you can find.
The wagon rocked onward, and her vow rocked with it—no witness but her ribs, no ink but her pulse.
A mile past the last cottages, the road narrowed between low hedgerows, winter-bare and bristling. The guards spoke to someone outside—short words, official tones—and the wheels slowed again, complaining as they rolled into a lay-by carved from mud and stone.
A post stood there, taller than a man. Iron-capped. Ledger-stamped notices nailed to its face like dried leaves. Beneath the papers sat a wooden frame with wrist-holes—an old punishment stand, weathered smooth by years of bodies.
And someone was in it.
A boy, maybe fifteen, cheeks chapped raw, hair the color of straw. His shoulders shook—not from crying, Lark realized, but from holding himself still. A woman stood a few paces away with a basket at her feet, knuckles white around the handle. She did not step closer. She did not reach for him. Her eyes stared fixedly at the road, as if looking at him would make the law notice her next.
Beside the boy, a local constable held a thin cane like a tool, not a weapon.
"Bread," the constable said, voice bored as rain. "Third offense."
The boy's lips moved—silent words Lark couldn't hear. Maybe pleading. Maybe promising. Maybe praying to a world that didn't keep promises.
A handful of onlookers lingered at a distance, pretending they were only waiting for the road to clear. Their faces had the same expression Lark had seen in the square: the tight relief of thank the Ledger it isn't me.
The cane lifted.
Lark's stomach turned. Her fingers clenched against the cord until it bit her skin. She wanted to look away—she did—but the sound followed her anyway: a sharp crack that made the air jump.
The boy jerked, then forced himself still again, because stillness was how you survived punishment without giving it the satisfaction of your collapse.
The ash-coated guard beside Lark glanced at her, as if measuring her reaction the way a tailor measures cloth.
"See?" he murmured. "This is how towns stay obedient. Pain, performed. Witnessed. Remembered."
Lark's throat tightened, but she kept her face calm. She understood the lesson too well: the law didn't only hurt you—it taught everyone else how to stand aside.
The wagon jolted forward again, dragging the scene away behind canvas and distance. Through the seam, Lark saw the woman finally take one step toward the boy—only to stop, as if a rope had snapped tight around her ankles.
Cowardice, or calculation. Love crushed flat under the weight of consequence.
Lark's bitten thumb throbbed, small and steady, like a second heartbeat.
I am alone, she thought—not as a lament now, but as a fact she could build on. Alone meant no one would save her. Alone also meant no one could bargain away her courage for the price of their comfort.
The road climbed. The river air thinned. Greywick's familiar stink—fish and tar and smoke—fell off behind them like a shed skin. The world ahead smelled of stone and pine and something colder, sharper, waiting.
Lark leaned back against the wagon wall and let the darkness cover her face like a hood.
Inside it, her vow stayed bright. Not loud. Not pretty.
Just alive.
The wagon kept swallowing miles like a hungry thing, the wheels chewing the road into a steady, endless grind.
At the next stop, they opened the canvas and let more darkness in—more bodies, more breath, more fear. Two women climbed up first, skirts muddied at the hem, eyes fixed on the floorboards as if the wood might forgive them. A thin man followed, coughing into his sleeve. Last came a girl not much younger than Lark, with cracked lips and a bruise blooming at her temple like spilled ink.
They were packed in close, knees touching, shoulders pressed—human warmth turned into another kind of trap. The guards didn't speak to them. Speaking required recognition, and recognition was a mercy the Ledger rarely granted.
When the canvas dropped again, the wagon became a small night, lit only by the faint seam of day at the edge and the pale glimmer of Lark's bitten thumb when it shifted.
No one cried. Crying was loud, and loud drew attention. Attention drew rules.
But whispers found their way through the dark anyway—low, careful, traded like contraband.
"Where are you bound?" the bruised girl breathed, barely moving her mouth.
Lark hesitated. Even her name had weight now; even a sentence felt like a gamble. Still, the question wasn't idle. It was the first step in measuring danger.
"Thornwyck," Lark whispered back.
The wagon seemed to tighten around the word.
The thin man's cough caught, as if the syllables had grabbed him by the throat. One of the older women made a small sound—half prayer, half warning.
"Cliff keep," the bruised girl said, voice flat with dread she'd rehearsed. "High King's mouth of stone."
"Don't say king," one of the women muttered, eyes darting toward the guards. "Say household. Say manor. Names carry."
Lark's thumb pulsed, tender. Names carry. As if the air itself listened for the right ones.
The bruised girl leaned closer, daring the darkness to hear her. "They say there's a wing that stays locked," she murmured. "Not a servant key in all the manor fits it. Only the king. Only his ring."
Lark's skin prickled. "Locked for what?"
The girl swallowed, and Lark heard it—dry, painful. "For what he becomes," she said. "For what they keep behind it."
The thin man exhaled, shaky. "Stories," he whispered. "That's what keeps people alive on the road. Stories and rumors. But this one—this one has teeth."
One of the women shook her head once, sharp. "I heard it from a groom who hauled barrels to the gatehouse," she said. "Oak door. Thick as a church. Claw marks carved into it like someone tried to write their way out."
Oak door.
The words rang with a strange familiarity, like a shape her mind had already brushed in the dark. Lark didn't know why they snagged so deep, only that they did.
The bruised girl's voice dropped further. "They call it the Night Gallery," she said. "And they say if you're sent down there, you don't come back the same. If you come back at all."
The wagon jolted. Someone's shoulder slammed into Lark's. The thin man hissed in pain and doubled over, coughing harder, each cough scraping like gravel.
Lark reacted before caution could stop her. She twisted, searching the cramped shadows, and found a small water flask tucked near her hip—what the guards had thrown to her earlier as if hydration were a privilege that could be rationed like speech.
She loosened the stopper with her thumb and guided the flask toward the thin man's shaking hands.
"Here," she whispered. "Slowly—just a sip."
His fingers hovered, uncertain, like touching kindness might burn. Then he reached.
The motion was small. Almost invisible.
Not invisible enough.
A gloved hand punched through the darkness and snatched the flask mid-offer. The cord at Lark's wrists jerked as the guard yanked her forward, and the wagon's air chilled, suddenly sharp with the promise of consequence.
"Charity isn't yours to give," the rough-voiced guard said.
In the dimness, he held the flask like evidence. A thin ribbon of water sloshed against its mouth, catching the faint seam-light, bright as something stolen.
Lark's stomach knotted. She kept her voice level—kept it small, because small voices survived longer. "He's choking," she said. "I was preventing trouble."
"Trouble," the guard echoed, amused. "You think you prevent trouble?"
The ash-coated man across from her leaned in, his presence a wall. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The wagon itself seemed to listen.
"You don't decide what's useful," he said. "We do. Thornwyck does."
The thin man coughed again, harsher, and folded into himself. One of the older women shifted as if to help, then froze—fear snapping her back into stillness.
Lark's bitten thumb throbbed, as if the ink under her skin remembered being owned.
"I didn't—" she began.
The rough-voiced guard unscrewed the stopper, lifted the flask, and poured a slow, deliberate stream onto the floorboards. Water darkened the wood, soaking into cracks like a secret that couldn't be retrieved.
It was such a small cruelty, almost elegant.
"See?" he said softly. "Now no one drinks."
The bruised girl made a sound—tiny, involuntary—and swallowed it fast.
Lark's chest burned, not only with anger but with the sick clarity of the lesson: in a system like this, kindness wasn't punished because it was wrong. It was punished because it made people remember they were human.
The guard capped the empty flask and tossed it back into the corner. It rolled, knocking gently against the plank, stopping near Lark's knee like a taunt.
Then he grabbed her bound wrists and hauled them up, forcing her to sit straighter, shoulders pulled back.
"Listen, Unmarked," he said. "You keep your hands to yourself. You keep your words to yourself. You keep your heart wherever you hid it before we found you."
His face came closer—shadowed under the hood of his ash coat. His breath smelled of bitter tea and cold road.
"And if I don't?" Lark asked, before she could stop herself.
The question wasn't brave. It was raw. It slipped out because something in her had started to refuse the shape of obedience.
The guard's mouth twitched. "Then we report you," he said. "And Thornwyck will decide what to do with disobedient stock."
The ash-coated man's gaze flicked to her thumb.
"Remember your bite?" he asked quietly. "That was a courtesy. Thornwyck doesn't always use teeth that small."
Lark held his stare as long as she could. Then she looked away, not in surrender, but in strategy. A wolf didn't bare its throat while counting the exits.
The wagon rolled on, heavier with silence now. No more whispers. The rumor-trading stopped, swallowed by the knowledge that even breath could be rationed.
Hours passed. The road rose, winding into hills where the trees grew darker and the air sharpened into pine and stone. Twilight bled into early night. The wagon's seam of light turned the color of dull pewter, then faded as the sky dimmed.
At last, the wheels slowed again—not for a post, not for a checkpoint, but for something vast. The hooves changed sound, striking stone instead of dirt.
The canvas flap snapped open.
Cold night poured in, clean as a blade.
Lark blinked, and saw it.
A cliff face, black and sheer, rising like the side of a world. A gatehouse crouched at its base, built from the same stone, its windows narrow as slits. Above, higher than the trees, higher than sense, Thornwyck Manor clawed into the sky—towers and roofs stacked like layered teeth, every edge sharp, every silhouette wrong.
Lanterns burned along the wall, their light a sickly gold, as if even fire was cautious here.
The ash-coated guard jumped down and barked instructions. The captives began to move, stiff and trembling, climbing out of the wagon one by one.
Lark's boots hit the ground and sank slightly into frozen mud. She smelled iron again—not river iron, but old, deep stone iron, the scent of chains that had been worn smooth by generations of use.
The bruised girl beside her whispered, "Don't look up."
Lark looked up anyway.
Because some horrors demanded witness, even if witnessing did nothing to save you.
High above the gatehouse, carved into the cliff stone, was the thorned crown crest—massive, ancient, scarred by weather. Beneath it, an inscription in court-hand cut into rock:
DEBT IS ORDER.
Lark's breath fogged in the cold. Her thumb pulsed, tender and alive, as if answering the stone's words with a quieter truth.
The gatehouse doors opened.
Warmth spilled out—lantern heat, smoke, the smell of stew—and behind it, something else: a faint, metallic sweetness, like ink left too long on a tongue.
The guards herded them forward.
Thornwyck didn't welcome.
It received.