9 #3

The lamp lit the water. Isolde submerged her face and gripped a stone. Cold entered through the scar. The current carried away her scarf and freed some of her dyed hair.

A guard came down to the edge.

Kaoran threw a piece of metal from the other side. It struck near the kilns. The dog pulled that way. Soren sent the men, though he kept watching the watercourse.

Isolde counted the time three breaths would have taken. Her throat began to tighten. She pressed her good fingers against the stone; her left leg was losing strength.

Soren raised the lamp. The cart was moving away.

A bell rang in the square. Someone had started a fight beside the tavern. The officer turned his head. Kaoran used the moment to reach down and pull Isolde behind the pier.

She breathed without coughing.

“The stone,” she whispered. “The false bottom holds living stone or part of Ydrael.”

“Can you follow it?”

“Not today. If we come out, he’ll see us.”

The column took the western road. The workers’ cart turned north. The loads and people separated after leaving the village.

Isolde marked both directions when they could leave the streambed.

They returned to the post through the woods. The wet cork pressed into her heel. Isolde removed it as soon as they left the watched roads. Black dye ran down her neck. She carried the damp records and Aelyn’s thread inside a waxed bag.

Kaoran lit a lamp.

“Draw Nydel,” he said.

Isolde spread a clean sheet. She marked the mill, fountain, mine, and roads.

Kaoran brought the lamp closer so she could copy the damp notes. Isolde placed the bread line, Mella’s plot, and the hours Rina could work. She added Oren’s channel and the four nightly routes. Aelyn’s thread lay beside it, off the sheet they could take into the village.

“Joren named nine survivors,” Kaoran said.

“His is the only full name I know.”

She left eight spaces and wrote beside them: ask about the families. Then she checked the plot’s hours. If Enna was still in the mine, someone would have to take Rina’s son to her.

In the lower margin, she wrote: the living first.

Kaoran read the words.

“Tomorrow we’ll see whether the map works.”

“The patrol already knows you’re here.”

“Tomorrow we enter through Mella’s field. Sela Renn has found work.”

They returned before dawn in farming clothes, carrying the tool basket. The market was still closed. The first miners walked toward the gallery. Isolde followed a path between gardens and reached the riverside plot without crossing a post.

Mella was dismantling the irrigation wheel. Two shovels rested beside the wall. Rina watched three children while cleaning seeds. Odo had brought a cart axle. Sel had yet to appear.

“I counted four hands,” Isolde said.

Mella looked up.

“Rina has six. The children know how to carry stones too.”

Isolde remembered the correction and put away her hasty count.

“What does each person need to be here this morning?”

Mella pointed to Rina.

“Her son has a fever. She can work while he sleeps. Odo has to return the axle before noon. I have to collect bread at the third bell. Sel will leave the mine when they let him.”

“Who knows how to fit the wheel?”

“My husband did.”

“Who helped him?”

Mella looked at Odo.

The man shrugged.

“I held the pieces and listened to his insults.”

“Start with what you remember,” Isolde said.

They dismantled the old axle. The wood was swollen, and the metal ring had split. Kaoran took the piece to Doven by a back route. Isolde cleaned the channel with Mella and the children. Rina cut leather gaskets without leaving the blanket where her son slept.

The initial plan changed four times in the first hour.

Odo found a crack in the support. Mella discovered the sluice gate leaked. The sick child woke crying. A messenger warned that the bread line had been moved earlier because an inspection was coming.

Mella went for bread. Rina picked up the child and kept cutting leather. Odo sought wood while the little ones cleared stones. Isolde stopped trying to gather them beside the wheel to explain every change. She asked what they could finish before Mella returned and began cleaning the sluice gate.

Mella returned with bread in midmorning, shortly before the first patrol appeared.

Three guards walked behind an office employee. He carried a list of tools subject to requisition. He saw the axle beside the channel and pointed.

“The mine needs that part.”

“It belongs to my cart,” Odo said.

“The cart is registered as a support asset.”

“Without an axle, it stops being a cart.”

“Then you’ll have less to declare.”

The employee marked his sheet. Isolde felt the urge to approach. Sela Renn had no authority, and an argument could draw Officer Soren. She looked at the map folded beneath her shirt.

Rina had a route to the laundry.

The children knew the channel.

Doven was working on the ring at the smithy.

“The wheel needs four sections,” Isolde whispered to Mella. “If the office finds one, it will still be incomplete.”

Mella understood.

Odo let the employee take the cart axle. While the guards loaded it, the children rolled the new supports to the channel and hid them beneath the bridge. Rina tucked the gaskets inside the blanket. Kaoran returned with the ring in two pieces, hidden beneath coal.

The patrol left with the axle and the satisfaction of having requisitioned something.

“That cost an axle,” Odo said.

“Can you make another?” Isolde asked.

“With a piece of ash already cut, I can finish before dark.”

“Who has ash?”

Rina named a cousin. Mella knew when her yard was hidden from the post’s view. One of the children offered to carry the message through the channel.

The map changed again.

By late afternoon, the wheel was mounted on its new axle. Kaoran fitted the ring. Isolde and Odo lifted the structure; she braced her left leg beneath the weight. Sel had arrived from the mine and helped Mella fit the pin.

The sluice gate opened.

Water entered the paddles, pushed the wheel, and filled the ditch. The children ran beside the channel. A first dark line crossed the dry plot.

Mella plunged a hand into the mud.

“It’ll be ready for sowing,” she said.

Rina left with the sleeping child. Odo stayed sitting beside the support, too tired to celebrate. The wheel supplied water; they still needed to replace Odo’s cart axle and get Enna to see the fever.

“How much do we owe you?” Mella asked.

“Nothing.”

“I’ll note that you came. Someday you may need us to let you in.”

Isolde folded the map slowly. The offer reached her even under Sela’s name.

“When you harvest, keep seed for a home that needs it. You choose which one.”

Mella narrowed her eyes.

“This time you asked for the names first.”

“I’m trying to learn.”

“Then learn something else. Joren saw you yesterday. If his suspicion grows, the Guard will find it on his face.”

“I’ll leave before that.”

“You could also give him an explanation that protects his daughter.”

Isolde found the veteran behind the bakery. She told him Sela worked for a network of displaced families and that the heir’s story could open dangerous routes. Joren half accepted the explanation. In exchange, he asked for his companions from Cendral to be added to the aid map.

“There are nine in the district,” he said. “Three can’t work. Two drink too much. They all know part of the retreat.”

Isolde wrote down the names. The witness list she had thought lost began on a street in Nydel.

Before leaving, Isolde updated the shifts beside the irrigation ditch. Sel’s hours had changed. Rina’s son needed Enna, and Joren could contact eight more survivors. She marked the four routes they had used to move through Nydel.

The wheel still turned when she put the sheet away. She would have to check it again before entrusting that route to anyone.