Emberfall's market was a low, colorful riot by noon—stalls jammed shoulder to shoulder, cloth awnings flapping, voices rubbing against one another like rough-skinned fish. It smelled of frying fat, hedgerow honey, hot leather, and the metallic tang that always gathered where folk traded things meant to change hands and fortunes. For Kael the market felt too bright; he kept his eyes shaded by habit, watching edges and elbows the way a cat watches a sunlit window.
Arin had promised him the market would be "good for sharpening wits." He had also promised a pastry and a bet that Kael couldn't walk the whole row without making a stranger laugh. Now Arin wove through the crowd with a practiced shoulder and a grin that tagged a hundred small trades—two for a coin, three laughs for a loaf—and Kael followed, the shadow along his wrist slack and patient as a sleeping thing.
Liora moved with a different rhythm. She threaded between stalls like someone reading a sentence, stopping to lift a curious trinket, testing the balance of a spring, sniffing the smoke of an oil seller as if it might tell her the alloy within. Merchants who knew her nodded; others watched with suspicion, as if she might trade more than coin for goods—knowledge, favors, stealthy sockets of wiring no one else could mend.
They had come to the market for a reason that felt practical and also terribly small: Liora wanted a delicate amplifier bead she had only half-made and thought a traveling tinkerer might have the right glass. Arin wanted something to practice flame tricks with that wouldn't singe his eyebrows off. Kael wanted nothing in particular—only the chance to see how the city measured these small lives that were not led under hedgerows.
They found the Heart Row, where oddities tended to gather. A blind woman sold jars of "sleep for weeping" that smelled like chamomile; a man with a crooked smile and a wooden leg hawked "charms that catch your luck" that were mostly polished glass. And in a crooked stall curtained with moth-eaten velvet, an old trader named Kess kept a slow watch over a collection of plates, shards, and small, engraved things.
Kess's hands were brown and knuckled, his hair a gray that caught the sun like dust. When Liora lifted the coin-plate from her apron and laid it on his table, his fingers trembled—not from age but from recognition.
"You brought the wrong kind of coin to a market, child," he said softly, eyes narrowing. He did not try to sell them a story. He offered a glance that felt like inventory.
Liora's mouth tightened. "It was found in the scrub, embedded in a beast," she said. "It's a marker, not a coin. I want to know what it points to."
Kess lifted it and set it to his cheek as if listening. The stall fell quiet around them as if the market's noise respected caution. "Marks like this travel," he murmured. "They are crumbs of doors. I'll give you two truths if you want them cheap: one, there are more plates. Two, the plates are old enough that the words they wear have changed skin three times. When you touch them, you sometimes hear doors you were not meant to open."
Kael felt the old familiar squeeze of caution—the memory of the ruin's trap and the thin pulse the plate had thrown at him. "Is there a way to follow them safely?" he asked. His voice came smaller than usual. He did not want to be the sort of man who opened doors without looking for the other side.
Kess's laugh was a dry rustle. "Safe is a ledger for timid men. Useful is something else." He tapped the rim of the plate with a nail. "There are readers—few here, fewer in the north. They trade knowledge for coin, for favors, for work. You can find a man in the city who calls himself a cartographer of the old ways. He marks gates, writes maps, and knows a trick or two about sealing." He studied Kael, his look like a scale. "If you're asking me, I say: find the map-maker and bring caution as company."
Before Kael could reply, a shriek cut across the stall-row—a thin, ugly sound that curled like a rattlesnake. A man burst into the market from the lane by the cooper, panting, his face red with haste. "Thief! Thief!" he shouted. Heads turned. The market tightened like a fist.
A small knot had formed near a linen stall: a wiry youth had been caught with a pouch stuffed into his coat. He looked scared and small, and for a breath Kael wondered if it would end with a handful of curses and an embarrassed apology. But the market's ingredients were fickle; fortunes had tempers. The linen seller—broad, fat, face like a ledger burned in sunlight—pointed and spat a single word: "Guard!"
Three men in the market's loose flank—low-level enforcers who made reputations by enforcing small hurt—stepped forward. One of them carried a short blade that flashed like bad teeth. The wiry youth had a friend—a squat, mean-faced thing who lunged to shove the linen seller back and free his mate. A scuffle began that could have been over in seconds.
Except the squat thing was not only mean—it was picked up on a current that smelled wrong. Kael watched as a strip of darkness slicked over the man's knuckles for a blink, like a ribbon caught in a draft. It was a small, crude shadow trick—one of those talents that men with hunger used to make a coin by scaring a stall into giving them bread. The ribbon lashed and smarted, and one of the enforcers stumbled back with a cut that sizzled as if touched by cold.
Arin's hand tightened on Kael's sleeve. "Trouble," he said softly, grinning in a way that meant both excitement and teeth.
Liora's face went still. She crouched and moved toward the scuffle, fingers already finding a wire she could throw like a snare. Kael felt the shadow along his wrist prick with recognition and a small, sharp envy: other hands reached for the same small powers, but without the tether of purpose he had felt when he had first bound the beast.
The squat man—named Brell, the linen seller later said with a sniff—squared his shoulders and spat. "Keep your coin and your cloth. The lane's for us tonight." He flicked his fingers and a dark sliver knifed toward the linen seller's arm. The sliver did not try to cut flesh so much as to find the hesitation in muscle and pry it open like a seam. The linen seller dropped his hand, clutching his arm and howling.
Kael's temper, which had been careful since the river, flared like a struck stone. He could have let the market's rules take their course—men would talk, a coin would pass, and the wronged would be balanced by license. Instead he stepped forward.
At first he tried restraint. He reached for the shadow with the same thought he used to bind—calm, form, tether. This time he shaped the darkness into a flat, crosswise shield that slid between the sliver and the linen seller's arm. The sliver struck the shield and sputtered like a knife hitting glass. For the stall-bystanders the movement was instant and the protection looked like something living and quick.
Brell grinned at the deflection like a dog who had been slapped. He flicked another sliver, smaller and sharper, as if trying to test the shield's thickness. Kael answered by thickening the darkness, drawing the weave tighter. He felt the shadow obey a clearer command now: not just hold, but shape and stand. The braid along his arm tightened into a strip of dusk that felt like leather against steel.
Arin moved at the same second, stepping to the linen seller, palms flaring into a ring of ember that surrounded the stall. The flame did not scorch the cloth but made the air hiss with heat that shied the smaller thieves away. Liora, nimble as a cat, tossed a wire that looped Brell's ankle; the man staggered and fell, cursing.
Brell looked up at Kael, eyes narrowing. He spat and made a desperate move to jerk free, his hand sliding beneath the fallen cloth to fetch a small blade. Kael's shadow flicked—this time not to bind but to probe, a thin finger that found Brell's wrist and curled about it. The probe did not crush but sent a sharp, private warning through the man's nerves: stop.
Brell froze, flinch spreading slow over his face. For a breath his bravado wavered. Around them the market breathed like a held thing. The enforcers moved in to take the captives. The linen seller, pale and shaking, gathered his cloth and nodded at Kael with a gratitude that was all honesty: "You could have let them take a thing and leave a worse thing. You kept the market." His voice was small and surprised.
Kess the trader, who had watched from the velvet-curtained stall, gave Kael a slow, appraising nod. "You hold power with a hand that thinks before it strikes," he said. "That matters."
The market's law took its course: the enforcers took the thieves, Brell's curses still bitter, the linen seller's purse loosened to repay some small fee, and the market's rhythm resumed. People traded and bartered as if nothing larger had shifted. But Kael felt the market's attention like a new weight on him—a ledger entry that would be added to the rumor lists. Dalen's warning echoed: avoid unnecessary displays.
On Kess's counter, while they collected their small payment of thanks and a pie that Arin already had an eye on, Kess picked at the coin-plate again. "If you are to follow crumbs, you will draw men like Brell now—small ones who learned shadow to steal a coin, and big ones who will learn to use it more cruelly," he said. "Keep friends who can read light, who can twist wires, who can guard a plate. Doors are not what you want without a map."
Liora, who had been watching market faces with a scholar's appetite, tapped Kael's shoulder. "You did better than you think," she said quietly. "You shaped rather than struck. That's the thing I taught you without meaning to: tools protect when they're used to hold things together."
Kael took the pie Arin offered and ate it with a small, private smile. The market's bustle folded around them again like fabric. They left Heart Row with the coin-plate heavier now with purpose and Kess's directions sketched in Kael's mind like a small map: find the map-maker, keep your circle tight, practice shielding as much as striking.
As they threaded back toward the village and the hedgerows, Kael felt the shadow along his wrist settle into a new kind of readiness. It had learned a new phrase: guard. The thought fit him like a glove. He had not wanted songs, but he had earned a new line in the ledger—one that might buy him safety and might, if he was careless, call men like Brell who dressed hunger up as cunning.
He walked on, the market noise shrinking behind them, and thought of gates and crumbs and the name Kess had given: readers and map-makers. The road ahead had new markers. The shadow in his hand hummed like a promise, and Kael closed his fingers around the staff as if to countenance the path it drew.