Morning found the square pretending it hadn't kept vigil.
Tables were stacked like sleeping geese. Rope hung in lazy arcs, knots slack with relief. The chalk drawing at Xion's grave—six-legged table, eight plates—had ghosted under dew and then reasserted itself the moment sun touched it, as if the city had decided to redraw it each dawn until someone scolded it for hope.
Luminous arrived with a new way to carry her shoulders. Yesterday had put a seam of weight in her; she wore it like a second scabbard. Her hair had done what hair does when you've fought a myth and won: ignored the concept of obedience and then, at the last second, remembered it wanted to be taken seriously. Will Breaker drifted above her like a lantern that had learned the trick of floating.
"You slept," Xion said.
"I forgot to," she admitted. "Then remembered I could."
He accepted that as victory. Small, petty. Exactly the right size for breakfast.
"Ordo?" he asked.
"They want a report written in a font called Donor." She rolled her eyes. "The Intercalary Clerk wants a policy. The Court wants... to be seen pretending not to want."
"And Fen?"
"In a bed he prefers to a grave," she said. "Hurt. Not humbled."
Will Breaker twirled, skirt whispering. "The strongest 9th didn't enjoy being told he is not the protagonist. Who could have predicted."
"Everyone," Luminous and Xion said together, which made them both unwillingly smile.
They went to work. Eline set a walking circle with ribbon—"Not fences," she told a young guard. "Suggestions." Tilda sorted benches by which legs trusted themselves and which required gossip to hold. Sareen untied a ledger from her apron and tied it to her heart and pretended she'd done neither. Oren paced. He was writing a short blessing and resented the discipline; brevity insulted his sense of humor.
At second hour, the Intercalary Clerk arrived with their chain neat and their mouth prepared for a small war.
"Audit of chairs," they declared.
Xion saluted with a rag. "We're adding a place. Your kind of intercalary."
The Clerk's eyes flicked to a table still bearing crumbs. "Your kind is messier."
"Because it's for people."
They captured their frown and folded it precisely. "Yesterday's... invitation... to the Null Host was against practice," they said, as if reading a line stamped on their own palm. "However. The absence-guest sat. The city did not hemorrhage time. Recommendation: provisional allowance for seats designated to named absences, with conditions."
"Conditions?" Luminous asked.
"Three," the Clerk said, tallying them on the air. "One: children do not sit next to absences. Two: no eulogies longer than the bread stays warm. Three: the chair remains tied by a mercy-knot."
Tilda, overhearing, gave a pleased grunt. "Finally, a policy that understands rope."
Xion nodded at the Clerk. "We'll call it Chairs for Absences. The table tax."
"Call it Intercalary Seating," the Clerk countered, visibly hating how warm their chain felt when they said it.
"Done," Xion said. "Now help me lift this plank. Witnessing is exhausting; lifting refreshes the soul."
They did not help. But they did not leave.
—
By third hour the square had a pulse again. It was smaller today, deliberately. Luminous called it "a breath between arguments." People practiced free things like scales: a heel of bread, a ribbon of pitch, a story only one sentence long. Kett, who had sat despite himself yesterday, arrived early and rearranged three chairs with the offended competence of a man who had been told for too long that helping was making himself important.
"Don't make this a hobby," Luminous warned him lightly as he aligned chair-legs with battlement attention.
He grunted. "Trying to make it a job."
"Then sit at least once," she said. "Or you'll forget who it's for."
He sat, grudgingly. The chair held. He scowled at its loyalty.
The first price came to Xion sly and small: the particular cool that stroked the nape when a narrow street finally exhaled shade—gone. He noted it and let it go and saved a smile for Ivo when the boy correctly dropped precisely one plum, then considered the morality of a second with the seriousness usually reserved for treaties.
"Perfect," Xion said, and meant it wrong on purpose so the boy could mean it right.
Will Breaker hummed above his shoulder. "Petty coins again?"
"Always," he said. "Today I will pay with my talent for waiting in line without composing sermons."
"Tragic," she deadpanned.
—
At fourth hour the shadow of the tower remembered its job and leaned across the square. Under it, a smear of cloud arranged itself into neat intentions and then unraveled. Luminous felt it before she saw it; her fingers flexed like a pianist rehearsing a grief.
"Moon tax," she said.
"Fen?" Xion asked.
"Fen's patrons," she corrected. "Or patrons' cousins."
The pressure rolled in quiet. You don't feel the moon as weight—you feel it as expectation. Folks went quiet one by one, the way men do when a uniform they don't owe respect to looms.
Three figures came without dramatic entrances. One wore a coat of grey fur lined with chalk marks, one wore a neat suit that had learned to launder blood and carry receipts, and one wore neither coat nor suit nor much of anything; its outline changed like tide. They looked like a law, an accountant, and hunger.
"Representatives," the Intercalary Clerk murmured, chain suddenly heavy. "Not Court. Not Ordo. The Moon God's calendar office."
The furred one spoke first. Their mouth was wolf and woman and something that had eaten both. "A claim," they said. "You stole a hound-pack's hunt and threaded it back through a hinge. You misaligned a Cub's night. You owe tithe."
"Who's you?" Xion asked.
"You set tables," the suit replied, voice polite. "Tables settle hunger. Settled hunger offends those who bill for it."
Luminous did not reach for the Key. She exhaled slowly, through a count that had never cared for men's numbers. "We pay delay already," she said. "We will not pay hunger."
"You will pay in chairs," the tide-thing said, pleased with the cruelty of the idea. "One chair each night for us. We will seat ourselves and ask all stories be told to us first."
"No," Xion said, gently.
The furred one bared teeth. "Says who."
"The hinge," he said. "And the rope. And the ledger. And the bread. And the boy who drops exactly one plum." He took a breath and decided to be exact. "The Gate may take our panic. The Court may take our policy. The Ordo may take our minutes. The Moon will not take our chairs."
The suit's smile had no temperature. "Your authority?"
"None," Luminous said, honesty like a blade. "And more than you like."
The tide reached, just a little, testing. The tables creaked as if seasickness were a contagious opinion.
"Eline," Xion said.
She'd been waiting in the corner of the square like patience with a spear. Now she walked her ribbon-circle slow and obvious, and the ribbon remembered being river and decided to behave like a boundary. The tide lifted—could have stepped over—and did not. Even hunger knows when it would be publicly humiliated.
"Three minutes," the Intercalary Clerk said suddenly, voice precise. "We will pay three minutes to listening. But the chair will not be yours. It will be ours, tied with mercy-knot, under our policy, on our time. Intercalary. Extra place. Not tithe. Table law."
The fur shrugged something that had once shrugged rain. The suit checked a book that was also a stomach. The tide tried to look bored. "When?" the suit asked.
"Second bell," Luminous said, because compromise is best offered where a city is used to swallowing.
"Done," the suit said. "We audit kindnesses at second bell."
"Call it a visit," Oren muttered. "Or everyone will arrive with hats in their hands."
The tide's outline smiled on the way out.
"Bold," Will Breaker whispered.
"Economical," the Clerk corrected, then seemed embarrassed to have agreed with a sword.
—
They set the extra place at second bell as if they'd been practicing. A chair that didn't match, bound by the boy's new chair-knot. A plate that had a chip you could like. A plum slice, because absent guests should be offered summer even when they are winter.
The bell rang at twelve-oh-three; the note went through Xion without anchoring. He didn't wrap it. He let it go and listened to how it made the plates ring, a choir of cheap porcelain learning hymns.
The Moon office arrived exactly three minutes later, because when you start making rules for a city it will teach them back at you. The suit sat. The fur leaned. The tide observed the knots like a tourist with a rude opinion of boats.
"Stories," the suit said briskly. "Three minutes apiece."
"No sermons," Luminous added. "Abbreviated truth only."
A woman with flour wrists told the chair the exact sound her mother had made the morning she coughed and never stopped. A boy told it the name of a dog that had died before he could learn not to love it too well. Kett, ambushed by his own mouth, told it that he had once left a town because staying would have required apologizing for liking things.
The suit wrote nothing. The fur breathed in with a dog's pace—once, twice—and out with something older. The tide leaned and unleaned. When three minutes ended, Xion lifted two fingers; the Chair felt the knot do that clever mercy trick—tighten under weight, loosen when asked. The place didn't belong to the Moon when it let go. It belonged to the table again.
"Audit complete," the suit said. "Kindness paid. Anomaly recorded."
"Define anomaly," the Clerk said sharply.
"The pleasure the teller took in being brief," the suit said. They did not like that anomaly at all.
"Come back tomorrow," Luminous said. "Bring a story that doesn't end with hunger."
"We are not invited," the fur said.
"You are," Xion said. "As absences." He pointed to the chair. "As long as you sit there."
The tide hitched, as if considering a tantrum. Then it flowed off, affronted with the dignity of a cat.
—
At dusk, a wind wrote a line across the clouds that only a few people in the square could read.
ZENPHIR WILL WRITE A NEW MOON, it said. YOU'LL EAT UNDER IT OR NOT AT ALL.
Luminous read it and did not look away. "He's healing," she said.
"Good," Xion said mildly.
"Good?"
"Men who heal are less likely to mistake murder for medicine."
Will Breaker's eyes went bright gold. "You optimistic hinge."
"Petty hinge," he corrected. "Optimism is just pettiness that refuses to scale."
He paid two coins without complaining—the little crisp of first laugh, the comfort of a certain stretch—and kept one he hadn't expected: the particular satisfaction of watching Eline praise a guard properly. He stored it. He would need it later when the Gate inevitably sent something that resented compliments.
They smudged the Ledger before night. Luminous slid her thumb across three lines with that careful insolence she had learned yesterday:
Kett—owed a debt became Kett—carried a chair.
Moon Office—owed a tithe became Moon Office—accepted a visit.
Maryville—owes time stayed. It always would.
The Ledger purred in wood.
On their way out of the tower, a new sentence had been added to Xion's stone, in neat, unfancy letters that had no interest in poetry:
set two extra places next time
"Greedy," Luminous said, amused.
"An aunt who never says thank you," Xion sighed, fond.
At the cemetery gate the boy with soot-hair dangled his legs and practiced a knot of his own invention.
"Name it," Xion said.
"Guest-knot," the boy answered solemnly. "It keeps a chair from sliding away when someone who thinks they shouldn't stay tries to stand too soon."
"Show me."
He did. Loop. Bite. A small trick at the end that made the wood whisper yes.
"You learning all this for fun?" Luminous asked.
"I'm learning it because the tower keeps being late," the boy said, as if that explained everything. In Maryville, it did.
—
Night rose. The city closed its eyes in shifts. The Moon's office left through a seam men couldn't draw a map to. The Intercalary Clerk wrote a first draft they would later pretend had always been policy. Eline forced herself not to polish a buckle and went to bed before the day turned into her excuse for cruelty. Tilda whispered hold to four benches and three hearts. Oren cut a blessing in half and it was twice as good for having edges.
Luminous stood at a window and let the Key cool in her palm. It had no shape you could describe without sounding like an evangelist for a geometry you hadn't invented. It had marked her wrist—small, pale—like the memory of a burn you were glad you'd earned.
"You will pay," Will Breaker said from the sill, tone almost kind.
"Not with chairs," Luminous said. "Not with children."
"What then?"
"My pride," she said eventually. "And my timing."
Will Breaker smiled a knife's smile. "We know a city that trains for exactly that."
Across town, Xion inventoried coins. He'd lost the cool dusk on his neck, the first-laugh crisp, the stretch-euphoria. He had kept the sound of plates learning hymns and the sight of a suit pretending not to be moved by a boy's dog and the feel of a knot loosening under a willing hand.
He left his window open the width of a string. He slept. The storm woke him. He counted seconds between thunder and forgave the number that came late.
In the seam behind maps, the Calendar Court argued fonts. The Sundial insisted every policy include seating. The Scribe, weary and approving, footnoted: Extra places decrease panic. The Sexton, in a rebellious mood, arrived three minutes early to an empty room and sat in a chair no one had invited him to and was startled to find it comfortable.
Far away and very near, under a sky that planned to be written on, a man named Fen stood in a room crowded with wolves' breath and held a sword that wanted to be a calendar. He remembered a child with red-and-black hair and an old, unanswerable humiliation. He thought of a woman who told him not to compare himself to someone he could not reach. He lifted Zenphir and the blade drew a thin line across the night: not a threat; a receipt.
"Tomorrow," he said to no one.
"Tomorrow," the city said back, in the sound of cutlery being stacked and chairs being untied and a hinge that had decided not to squeak just to be polite.