CHAPTER 560: THIS GROUND IS COUNTED (2)

"They took two sheep and a dog." Surena’s eyes cut toward the field. "And they did not spill."

She didn’t need to explain. Farmers spill when they butcher. Wolves spill because they are messy by design. Only two kinds of things do not spill when they feed: the ones with dishes and the ones with rituals. Neither sounded like a neighbor coming over to ask for a cup of flour.

Lyan glanced toward the line of willow that traced the ditch. "Where?"

"By the broken birch." Surena shifted the weight on her feet. "I went as close as I dared. I brought a bit." She pulled a small twist of cloth from her belt, undone it with two fingers, and held the bundle out. Inside was a smear of gray where meat should have been red. It had dried almost at once into a color that made the eye skitter.

Arielle felt the house move closer behind her, not with fear, but with the mind’s quick measuring of what children might do if frightened, and who had the keys to the seed shed, and whether the gate on the well had the pin in. She met Lyan’s eyes. He didn’t say Stay; he knew she would ignore it if he made it a command. He said instead, "I will look with Surena. Sigrid takes the watch list and makes it real within the hour. Lara and Tara: no one alone to the river for the next two days."

"Three," Surena said. "Give me three."

"Three," he agreed, quick.

Sigrid had moved without needing orders. You could feel her arranging the village in the invisible lines she loved best—paths for bodies and thoughts to move along. Lara already had the rope back across the ditch. Tara had gone to speak with the old women—the ones who could make a herd of frightened children turn their hands to counting pebbles and forget whatever had scared them until someone put a real description to it.

Arielle stood with the little twist of cloth in her fingers after Lyan and Surena were gone, breathing slow so her thoughts would not break into a run. She had no magic for monsters. What she had was chalk. She looked at the gray smear, at the way it tried to be colorless and failed. "All right," she said to it gently, as if soothing a child who would not name its fear. "We will find the numbers in you."

The day did not pause because something ugly had brushed it with a tail. It went on teaching and eating and arguing and counting. That was how people survived, Arielle thought as she re-hung the hand-washing placard above the barrel where Sigrid had insisted the kids scrub before touching seed. Not by pretending the world was safe, but by refusing to let danger have the whole page.

They broke in the late afternoon for a celebration improvised from leftover triumph. Someone had brought a fiddle. Someone else had found a pan big enough to call a drum. Little wreaths of thyme hung from the doorframe and made the air taste green. Arielle stood very straight while three aunts pushed a carved stick into her hands—hazel, with an abacus burned into the head of it.

"For when you must point at the truth from far away," one said.

"And for braining the occasional idiot," another added cheerfully.

"For balance," said the third, and Arielle knew it was the real reason. She looked down at the stick and felt the weight of what it meant: a stewardship made visible. The room cheered because they were kind. Lyan’s eyes warmed because he was proud.

Josephine arrived in time to catch the last of the applause and to add some of her own, palms clapped with wicked delight. "My bookwife," she announced, half to the room, half to Arielle, "who turns ledgers into lances and still blushes like a teenager when praised." She kissed the air beside Arielle’s cheek, saw the blush happen in real time, and laughed herself breathless. "I will never tire of this."

"Go away," Arielle muttered, grinning and mortified in equal measure. "Or I’ll make you tally manure weights for a week."

"Promises, promises," Josephine sang, and hooked her arm in Arielle’s so she couldn’t flee the next round of congratulations.

For an hour the house and yard shone like the inside of a lantern—music, clatter, the kind of chatter that makes even the shy forget to flinch. Arielle let her shoulders drop, let the noise wash over the numbers still ticking in her head. The trio hauled her into a circle dance that had more stomping than grace; she did not disgrace herself entirely. Lyan danced poorly and without apology, which somehow made the children adore him more.

Then pigeons came. You could feel the message on their wings before you saw the roll of paper. The birds spun over the square and dropped clean onto the new perch at the corner of the gateboard where Tara had smeared a bit of honey the day before. Pigeons like contracts. Lyan went to the perch. Arielle followed because she had become the kind of person who did not let ink dry without seeing its face first.

Two letters. One with Grafen’s formal seal. One with a lesser mark that still carried teeth: Dunbridge’s office of trade affairs.

They read Wilhelmina’s letter together, shoulder to shoulder, because that was how they did hard things now. The crown had received complaints—Dunbridge accusing them of unfair practices, of "pitting poor villages against honest merchants" and (Arielle almost laughed) of "enchantments and sorcery present in the Grafen method of grain assessment." Wilhelmina’s hand grew sharper in the second paragraph: We have steel behind us, but I would rather not waste it on paper men. Send me your numbers. Send me your witnesses. We will drown them in arithmetic.

Arielle exhaled through her nose, slow. "She’s right. We win this in the open."

Lyan turned the second letter over in his hands. He did not open it yet. "And when we have won it there," he said, "Dunbridge will come another way."

"How many ways do you think they have?"

He looked at her then with a face that did not frighten her only because she had seen the gentler ones in the same bones. "As many as there are corners to cut and pockets to fill."

She nodded. "Good. Then we count the corners, and we sew the pockets shut."

He smiled, brief and real. "I knew you would say that." He opened Dunbridge’s letter.

It was polite. It was careful. It was a snake trying on a ribbon. We note with interest the developments in Grafen’s agricultural practices. We invite representatives from Grafen to present their methods at a conclave in two weeks’ time. We would be honored to host them and to discuss the proper levies and certifications that must accompany any large-scale reform to protect consumers.

"’Protect consumers,’" Arielle repeated flatly. "From what? Clean scales?"

"From losing their cut," Lyan said. He folded the letter back along its crease. "We will go."

Arielle didn’t pretend to be brave about it. "Yes," she said, and felt the hollow open under the word where fear nests. "With guards. With copies of everything. With witnesses."

"And with a simpler board a man can carry under his arm," he added, practical. "So even if they shut us out, we can stand in an alley and show a line of dockworkers the trick of a ditch. Let them try to outlaw a chalk mark when a hundred men have already copied it on scrap wood."

It helped. It helped more than she let him see, because if she said how often she reached for his steadiness she might never stop saying it.

"Before we go," he said, "we seed the near villages."

"Reedbank, Stonewash, Hollowford," Arielle said, writing their names on the inside of her palm because all paper felt suddenly too official. "And the small hamlet behind the willow fen. They come to market here. They will bring the story home."

They set a time. They set a list. They set a jar for coins and a jar for favors and a jar for IOUs that would never be collected if the family using them kept the boards clean for a season. They called the watchers into a circle and showed them how watching is not prying when the thing you watch is a public promise written in chalk. And then, as if the world were determined to prove it had a sense of timing, Lyan and Surena returned from the north bank.

They had the look of people who had stood too close to a cold fire.

"What did you find?" Arielle asked, throat already tight around the word we.

Surena laid a piece of bark on the table outside. On it lay three things: a crescent of hoof like no animal in the field; a tuft of hair so pale it would have passed for straw if the light had not caught the uncolor in it; and a strip of ribbon torn in a way that said teeth had not done it but ritual.

"Not wolves," Surena said.

"Not men," Lyan added. "Not anything that grows its own hunger."

"What, then?" Sigrid demanded from the doorway, as if the creature in the woods could be brought to heel simply by giving it a grimmer name.

Lyan touched the tuft with the back of one knuckle. He did not let the skin of his finger meet it. "Something made."

Arielle’s mind did what it did: it ran not to terror but to lists. Made by whom. For what. From what. For how long. "How close did it come?" she asked.

"Close." Surena pointed to the broken birch—five hundred paces beyond the ditch—then farther, to the line of scrub two fields away. "It stood and watched before it took the sheep. It knew where the dogs slept. It took the bell from the blue ewe’s collar and set it on a stump. On purpose."

Arielle did not look away from the things on the bark. "We will post watches by the herds," she said. "We will double the path along the ditch. We will hang bells on the inside of the hedge, not the outside."

"And we tell the children a story that makes sense of the rules," Tara added, quiet. "Never tell a little one Don’t, without telling them Because."

Arielle nodded. "We tell them: bells belong on the inside because thieves like trophies for their pockets."

Lyan’s jaw tightened, the smallest movement. "And we tell the adults we will not be danced into panic by a creature that wants us to scatter."

Arielle reached for his sleeve without thinking and then let her hand fall because you cannot take that steadiness for yourself when a village needs it with both hands. "We go to Reedbank at dusk," she said. "We go to Stonewash at dawn."

He agreed and did not add the words he was thinking: If it lets us go.