CHAPTER 89: 89: A NEW BEGINNING PART XIV

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"Or was taught," Fizz answered, voice going level in the way it did when jokes put on boots and became plans. "Someone shepherds you from the real gate."

"Then let us be sheep awhile," John said. "Dogs sleep somewhere."

A few more days later...

The dyehouses lived in a twilight of their own making. Cloth hung like flags between buildings, dripping blues, reds, madder browns into gutters that forgot how to be water. People worked with mouths closed; dye makes men careful because it loves to bleed. Three Vale households lived close to the vats; none had a cousin named Rettan, all had cousins who claimed not to remember cousins.

"Rellan once," said a woman with purple wrists and eyes that liked to measure men. "Face like a question. Laugh like an apology. Not a captain, not a nose. Married out to a tanner on Pave Street when the river froze strong that winter."

"Rellan," Fizz murmured, wrinkling his muzzle. "Relatives of Rettan for poets, not for evidence."

Pave Street smelled like hides that believed in redemption and men who did not. The tanner’s arms looked like stumps and his patience looked like a puddle. Coin made him civil; questions made him suspicious; a second coin made him remember that Rellan had moved west to a market where men argue professionally about the color brown. He did not recall the market’s name. His wife did, after she decided the cute little glowing creature was funny enough to deserve an answer. The name led to a weaver with good thread, poor jokes, and no knowledge of any birch, any pin, any captain, any Rettan.

By the fifth conversation that returned a different name with the right shape and the wrong face, Fizz began to develop a taste for ink and vengeance. "People keep offering poems when we ask for groceries," he growled, fur bristling.

"It is not a poem," John said. "It is a broom sweeping tracks. The hand holding the broom is sloppy."

"Then let us find the hand," Fizz said.

"We will," John answered, and believed it long enough to keep walking.

They found him in a town where the bell believed it should ring for interesting chickens. He drank without company and watched doors the way old soldiers count exits. Fizz slipped the right word into the air near his ear — not rude enough to earn a fist, not soft enough to be ignored.

"White estate," the man said, voice flat as an anvil. "I left before the Duke learned to pretend he had a heart. Captains come, captains go. Bent noses heal; straight ones break. Names are coats."

"Rettan Vale," John said. "Or a name that decided it wanted to be that."

The man frowned into his mug as if beer sometimes told stories. "Rettan is not a man. Rettan is a man for now. It used to be called the Hollow, back when men allowed themselves poetry. Someone with less music wanted consonants. Rettan is the quiet taker-away. Ten winters here, then the hat finds another skull."

Fizz’s ears went back, then forward with grim delight. "A habit with a name," he said. "We have been chasing a hat."

"You will find heads under it," the guard said. "Not the one you want. The birch gate leads to water. Water leads to the world. If the world returns her, she is home and does not need you. If the world kept her, she built a door you are not allowed to break. My advice is free and probably worth the price."

He stood, his aches ticking like little clocks. At the door he added without turning, "Rettan is a habit. Kill habits — men are more complicated."

They slept thinly on that thought and woke to a sky trying to rain and deciding to make trouble later instead.

A few more days later...

A market by the river offered them a bent nose at last — attached to a man who had once worn a white pin and now wore a scar where an ear had tried to resign. He had the easy posture of someone who had stopped taking orders and started taking payments.

"I never walked any woman through any birch," he said, buying a fruit that smelled like burned sugar with their coin and biting it as if the day had been his plan all along. "I walked drunk footmen out of kitchens and thieves out of tack rooms. Then I walked myself out of my boots. If you find your Rettan, tell him I invented him."

Fizz produced three stanzas of mutiny on the way back to the road, all of which would have gotten him blessed and scolded by the same priest.

They collected almost the way travelers collect harmless scars. Almost the right name at a river-gate registry — same letters, clerk’s hand. Almost the right pin on a pawnbroker’s velvet — wrong backing, another house’s story. Almost the right woman in a laundry yard — river hair, yes, orange ribbon, not red; allergic to birch, sneezed at the thought of it; knew a friend who had rowed away from a fisherman and into a better life, and would happily tell that story twice.

They ate what they could afford and what they should not, and traded labor for beds when pride would have been too expensive. John sharpened knives and straightened pot hooks, explaining to two boys how to oil a hinge so a door forgot how to gossip. Fizz sold the idea of buying two when a customer needed one and somehow made the customer feel grateful for being talked into the future. They stamped the small die into leather straps, into the end grain of crate boards, into wax, even into the heel of a foolish boy’s boot because the boy insisted that luck begins at the feet.

At night, when there was chalk and a patch of ground that did not mind, John drew small discipline circles and practiced breath and tiny pulses until the air inside the ring thickened and held like a secret.