The marsh east of Rivermarch began where the river ran out of patience with itself. Fields gave way to reed and rush, soil to sponge, paths to guesses. The guild’s posting had been simple: wagons taking the east causeway kept returning with torn tarps and bite-marked mules; a boy had gone in after a lost duck and come back sounding like he’d swallowed a drum. “Bog-beasts,” the parchment said in the clerk’s narrow hand. “Cull to safe numbers.”

  “Safe numbers,” Marin muttered, stepping from plank to plank along the causeway. “As if they count themselves.”

  Corin followed in the middle of their loose line, trying to keep his satchel above mud-height and his shoes below panic. He had rolled his sleeves and stuck a strip of waxed cloth around his wrists to keep the water out “because mildew is a conspiracy,” which Marin had declared was the most scholar sentence ever spoken on a road.

  Aanya took the lead. The causeway was an old road raised on logs, a thin straight line through a wet nowhere. Dragonflies stitched light between reeds. Somewhere close, something with polite lungs breathed under water.

  “Eyes up,” she said. “Listen for… anything wrong.”

  “What’s wrong sound like?” Corin asked.

  “Not birds,” Marin said. “Not breeze. The kind of silence that’s working.”

  Corin, to his credit, didn’t argue with the definition. He scanned the ruts and the black water and the pale blossoms that floated like lies. “Bog-beasts,” he said, more settled when speaking to the world rather than about it. “They’re not true frogs. More jaw than sense. They herd when they get numbers and aim for soft parts. The Codex says they panic at fire and hate sharp sounds.”

  Marin grinned without looking back. “Good. Scream and set yourself alight.”

  “I… will pass on both,” Corin said, and Aanya heard the smile he couldn’t keep out of his voice.

  ...

  They stepped back into the late afternoon with pockets heavier and legs shaking in that good way that means you did not die for your bread. Corin’s eyes kept going soft with the understanding that coin had weight because he had work in it. He opened his mouth to say thank you for the hundredth time and thought better of it.

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  “Eat?” Marin said.

  “Eat,” Aanya agreed.

  They ate where working people eat when they are wise: at a street cart that sells something honest and hot. Dumplings steamed on a tray above a brazier; the woman behind it ladled vinegar and green onions on top with the ceremony of a priest of practical gods. Umbra got his dumpling without proof of sin and sat with it between his paws like a treasure he intended to love very quickly.

  “Tomorrow,” Aanya said, when the first edge of hunger had smoothed. “The quarry. Corin, if your books have a footnote on stone-lizards—”

  “They like warm cracks,” he said, mouth full, mortified by it, swallowing. “Small eyes. Bad at sudden brightness. If there’s a rift anywhere near, they’ll be near it. If we can… make them step wrong, like the guildmaster said—”

  “—we make them step wrong,” Marin finished, pointing at him with her chopsticks. “And I bring a spare haft this time.”

  They took the whistle to the baker’s boy. He was stoic in the way of children who have older siblings and therefore know about grief in installments. His mother cried in the doorway without apologizing for it and pressed a hot roll into each of their hands and into Umbra’s mouth while pretending not to. Corin closed his eyes while the boy blew one long, off-key note that was the best thing the street had heard all day.

  Evening put its shoulder to the city and moved it toward night. They counted their coin at the loft table, each clink a line in a ledger Marin kept like a prayer. The sum came close to something that might someday be called a down payment if you were generous and lied a little to yourself.

  “Steel,” Marin said, tapping the ledger with the back of her fingernail. “I can get good stock from Harun if I don’t pretend to be clever about it. I need coal. And time.”

  “Books,” Corin said, hesitant, as if it were a luxury. “There are two commentaries I didn’t copy because the monk likes to haggle with morals, but they have diagrams I haven’t seen.”

  “Get them,” Aanya said instantly. “We’re not buying a roof if we don’t know what to do under it.”

  He stared at her and then nodded vigorously enough to endanger his dumpling.

  Aanya leaned back. The bracelet lay cool against her skin, humming that new low note as if pleased to be included in a conversation without being the subject of it. The day had been work and mud and fire and counting, and she felt something like the edge of joy: the small, inconvenient kind that sits on your shoulder and suggests that you might live through your plans.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “Quarry,” Marin said.

  “Patterns,” Corin said, and immediately looked like he wanted to apologize to the word until Aanya laughed and then he didn’t.

  Umbra, full of dumpling and righteousness, flopped on his side with a sigh that sounded like a promise to kill the next marsh that tried to be clever.

  Night carried the city downriver on its back. In a room above a cooper’s workshop, three people slept as if invited. The hill outside the north gate waited with the patience of hills. Far away beneath stone and time, something that walked like a man and thought like weather marked a point on a map only he could see and did not change his mind.