The square smelled of wet paper and boiled coffee and the faint metallic tang of sigils. Dawn had bled into the city and the Silver Vault steps were a river of faces: merchants with ink-stained fingers, teachers with tired throats, apprentices whose eyes still held the bright, raw edges of shock. The manifests lay on a low table beneath a lamp, pages bound with a teacher's knot and stamped with the tracer's lattice. Forensics had printed every donor mark, every transfer code; the shard's marginalia had been transcribed and set beside them like a small, stubborn heart. House Virelle's spiral was no longer a rumor in the margins. It was a ledger entry, a public stain.
Aria stood at the edge of the crowd with Luna at her side, the teacher's knot at Luna's throat catching the morning light. The Gate Duel's fatigue still sat in Aria's limbs—muscles that remembered exertion and a motor slowness that came and went like a tide—but the ache had a purpose now. The public packet would be read aloud, witnesses would be called, and the city would be asked to choose what to do with the truth.
Rell and Halv moved through the crowd like two steady tides, corralling witnesses and keeping the brokers' men at the edges. Forensics set up a ring of lamps and sigil-tracers; apprentices ferried water and extra oilcloth. The Thornkin's briars had been cut back where they had tangled launches, but their work had left the harbor with a new memory: launches wrapped in living rope, patrons made impotent by a hedge. That image had not been bought away by coin. It had been burned into the market's mind.
When the first witness spoke, Luna's Echo Shield held him steady for a minute while the tracer anchored his testimony. The man's hands trembled as he recited transfer codes and launch numbers; his voice was small but precise. Each line was a stitch in a public ledger. The manifests were read aloud and the crowd's murmur rose and fell like a tide. Virelle's donor mark appeared on page after page; the shard's marginalia matched the registry imprint from the Bastion vault. The evidence was bureaucratic and ugly and therefore hard to deny.
The Council's envoys listened with the practiced patience of those who measure risk. They could not ignore the paper and the witnesses and the Thornkin's living proof. Their first response was the language of delay: committees, provisional panels, audits. They promised investigations and a public hearing scheduled for the week ahead. It was not immediate justice, but it was a start—an official hinge the Loom could lever.
Outside the square, the market's mood shifted. Brokers' ledgers were opened and audited on the spot; a handful of smaller houses found their donor trusts frozen pending inquiry. Merchants who had been on the fence shifted their weight toward the Loom's side; the Thornkin's spectacle had made the ledger's harm undeniable. The Silver Vault's clerks, who had once kept patron records opaque, now found themselves under the lamp's glare. Paper that had been meant to hide names now served as proof.
But exposure did not heal the people who had paid for that visibility. Teachers who had held mass cadences sat in small circles and traded phrases they could not quite remember, helping one another find the missing syllables. Luna moved among them with the slow, patient hands of someone who had learned to stitch memory back together. She hummed a tune—thin, steady—and the teachers repeated it until words returned like fish to a net. Some things came back altered; some names remained stubbornly absent. The ledger's arithmetic had been paid in pieces of people.
Aria felt the cost in the small, private places: a name that hovered at the edge of her mind like a coin she could not find; the taste of a morning that had thinned to a shape. She had held the ritual focus on the rocks and had paid for it. She had not expected the ledger's truth to be clean. She had expected it to be costly, and she had accepted that cost because the alternative was silence.
House Virelle did not yield quietly. Their agents moved through the city with a different kind of currency: favors, threats, and the slow pressure of influence. A few witnesses received late-night visits that were thinly veiled warnings. A courier who had been slated to testify found his manifest "misplaced." The Loom's work had forced a wound into the city's skin; the patron house's response was to try to stitch it closed with other hands.
That was why the Loom's next steps were not only legal but practical. Forensics continued to trace manifests and to secure copies; the Thornkin were asked to patrol the harbor's approaches until the Council's oversight could be enforced; the Loom set up a public registry where witnesses could record testimony under teacher's knots and Echo Shields. They would not trust the Bastion's vaults to hold the truth alone.
There were smaller, quieter victories that day. A forger who had been selling false donor marks was arrested when an apprentice recognized a telltale sigil cut into a bead. A broker's launch was impounded when its manifest could not be produced. A small house that had trafficked in Shade Hares found its customers turning away. These were not the end of the ledger's rot, but they were stitches in a larger repair.
The human work was harder. Funerals were held for those who had died in the Tidebleed and the Gate Duel; teachers hummed cadences that were more remembering than warding. Children who had been used as test nodes were placed in sanctuaries; the Loom arranged for long-term care and for ritual anchors that would help recover what had been taken. Aria visited the small clinic where a witness slept and left a strip of cloth at the bedside—a token, a promise that the Loom would not forget.
By evening the square had thinned and the manifests were bound and copied and sent to the Council's provisional panel. The public packet had done its work: it had forced a choice into the open. The city would either hold House Virelle to account or let influence smooth the ledger's margins. The choice would be made in committees and courts and, if necessary, in the streets.
Aria and Luna walked the Bonebridge as the lamps came up, the harbor breathing a slow, watchful rhythm. They did not speak at first; the day had been long and the ledger's costs had been tallied in small, private ways. When they did speak, it was in the low, careful way of people who had learned to keep certain things between them.
"We made them see," Luna said finally. Her voice was tired but steady. "Now we make sure they remember."
Aria tightened the cloth at her wrist—the knot Luna had given her—and felt the small, fierce steadiness of it. "We follow the manifests," she said. "We keep witnesses safe. We make the public packet a living thing, not a one-day spectacle."
Their plan was practical and relentless: forensic audits, a public registry for witness testimony, Thornkin patrols of the harbor, and a provisional oversight panel that could not be bought overnight. They would press the Council, protect witnesses, and keep the ledger's margins from being smoothed by coin. The work would be slow and costly and sometimes ugly. It would require teachers to pay more and witnesses to stand again. It would require the city to choose.
When the market's last vendors closed their stalls, Aria let herself breathe. The manifests were bound; the witnesses had been heard; the city had been given a choice. Dawn would bring hearings and envoys and the slow machinery of law. For now, in the quiet between the tides, they had done what they could: they had made the ledger's margins visible, and they had begun the work of repair.
The ledger's thread ran on, bright and dangerous, but now it ran through a city that had seen the seam. They would follow it to the Bastion's vaults and beyond. They would count the costs and anchor what they could. They would teach the teachers to stitch memory back together and the public to hold power to account. The path forward was long and costly, but it was theirs to walk—one costly step at a time.