The city smelled of salt and smoke and the thin, metallic tang of things that had been forced open. Dawn had not yet burned the last of the night's cold from the Bonebridge when the first of the triage tents went up—canvas patched with sigil-cloth, lanterns hung on poles, teachers and apprentices moving with the quiet, efficient hands of people who had learned to make care into a craft. The bridge's stones were slick with spray and the residue of wards; the nets sagged like tired mouths. Where the Tidebleed had been held, the air still thrummed with a low, tired note that made the teeth ache.
Aria walked among the tents with a cloak pulled tight around her shoulders. Her wrist was bandaged where the Tidebind Lunge had nicked her; the cloth Luna had tied there had already frayed at the edges with sweat and salt. Her legs felt like a ledger of small injuries—muscles that remembered exertion and a motor slowness that came and went like a tide. She moved anyway, because there were names to be taken down and faces to be steadied and witnesses who needed to be anchored before the brokers could buy their silence.
The triage was a choreography of small mercies. Teachers set up wards to hold the witnesses' memories steady while forensics recorded their testimony; apprentices boiled water and wrapped wounds; Halv and Rell ferried the wounded from the quay to the tents with a blunt, practical tenderness. Luna moved through the rows like a tide, hands steady, humming a low cadence that smelled faintly of jasmine and ash. Her voice was thin at the edges; the Moonborn Echo had taken from her a lullaby and a dozen small phrases, and the loss sat in her like a private ache. She did not speak of it; she only hummed and steadied.
They had more than physical wounds to tend. Memory was a fragile thing, and the Tidebleed had taken pieces from people in ways that did not show on bandages. A woman who had come to testify about a stolen photograph could not remember the photograph's subject; she could only hum the tune she had once sung to herself. A teacher who had anchored the east flank could not recall the name of her first apprentice. Forensics had recorded the witnesses' statements, but the statements themselves were sometimes ragged, missing edges where the ledger's costs had been paid.
Aria sat with one of those witnesses beneath a low tent, a lamp throwing a small circle of light over the man's face. He was middle-aged, hands callused from rope work, and his eyes kept sliding away as if the memory he tried to hold was a fish that would not stay in his hands.
"Tell me again," Aria said, voice low. "Start at the beginning. Who paid you? What did they give you?"
He swallowed. The cadence Luna had set around him held his breath steady. "A launch," he said. "A crate. Oilcloth. A man with a donor token—silver spiral. He said the plate was for a patron. He said the name Virelle. I—" His fingers trembled. "I remember the coin. I remember the smell of the oilcloth. The rest—" He closed his eyes. "It's like a page with a corner torn out."
Aria nodded and wrote. The ledger of the Loom was not only about public packets and market spectacles; it was about the slow, patient work of stitching fragments into a story. She recorded the man's halting words and the forensics team took a sample of his breath for resonance reading. Each small piece was a stitch.
Outside the tents, the market was a different kind of triage. Stalls were being repaired, awnings rehung, glass beads reset on strings that had been knocked loose in the panic. Brokers counted losses in ledgers that did not show the cost of memory; traders argued about routes and insurance and whether the Council would step in to stabilize trade. The Bonebridge's packet had been read aloud in the market square, and the city had seen House Virelle's name. That sight had not ended the brokers' power, but it had made them vulnerable in a way coin could not immediately fix.
The public reaction was a raw, complicated thing. Some people cheered the Loom's audacity; others muttered about law and order and the danger of teachers playing politics. A group of dockworkers gathered near the quay and argued loudly about whether the Thornkin had been right to tangle the launches; a woman with a ledger-slate shouted that the Council would have to answer for letting patron houses hoard donor trusts. Rumors moved faster than the forensics team: that the Moonforge had been sabotaged; that the Moving Archive had been bribed; that a broker cell leader had escaped in the night.
That last rumor had teeth. The broker cell leader—known in the market as Black Keel—had been a shadow in the margins for months, a man who coordinated launches and kept a ledger of favors that made him untouchable. For a while the Loom had thought they had him: a courier's manifest, a handler's testimony, a launch number traced to the Salted Bastion. But the city's chaos had been a cover. While the Bonebridge burned with spectacle, Black Keel had slipped through a broker's back channel and vanished into the Bastion's warrens.
Halv cursed when she heard it, a short, practical sound. "He's gone," she said. "He took a small boat and a false manifest. He's not in Saltport anymore."
Rell's face was a map of anger and calculation. "He won't be safe for long," he said. "Not with the Thornkin on the water and the public watching. But he's fast and he knows the Bastion's tunnels. We'll have to be faster."
The escape tightened the Loom's shoulders. Black Keel's flight meant the brokers would regroup, that patron houses would move to bury the ledger's margins, that the Council's envoys would be courted with coin and legalese. The public packet had been a victory, but it was a fragile one. The Loom had forced a wound into the city's skin; now they had to keep it from being stitched closed by the wrong hands.
Funerals were the other kind of immediate work. Not all the dead had been teachers or witnesses; some were brokers' men, some were apprentices who had been in the wrong place when a Thornkin limb lashed out, some were bystanders caught in the launches' panic. The city did what cities do: it made space for grief and then tried to move on. A small procession wound through the market—candles, a borrowed shroud, a teacher's knot tied at the corner of the cloth. Aria walked at the back, shoulders hunched, feeling the ledger's weight like a stone in her chest.
They buried the dead in a narrow strip of ground by the Bonebridge where the tide could wash over the stones and the names could be spoken into the air. Luna stood at the head of the graves and hummed a cadence that was not a ward so much as a remembering. Her voice was thin and steady; the lullaby she had lost in the Tideborn Echo was gone, but she could still shape a tune that held the names. People came forward to lay small offerings—fruit, a scrap of cloth, a bead—and the teachers recorded each name in the Loom's ledger. The act of naming was a kind of repair.
After the funerals, the market's panic condensed into a single, public setpiece: a broker's meeting at the Silver Vault steps where the Council's envoys would be forced to listen. The Loom had arranged it with the blunt, practical diplomacy of people who knew how to make a spectacle unavoidable. Forensics had printed the shard's marginalia and the treatise's notes; witnesses had been anchored and their testimony recorded; the Thornkin's work had made the brokers' muscle impotent. The city would see the ledger's margins and the Council would have to answer.
When the envoys arrived, they were careful and cool, the practiced faces of those who had seen too many spectacles to be surprised. They moved through the market with clipped questions and the kind of politeness that hides calculation. House Virelle's agent—an elegant man with a donor token at his throat—spoke in measured tones about patronage and the need for stability. He offered coin and promises and the kind of legalese that smooths over inconvenient truths.
The crowd did not accept smoothness. People who had been on the fence now shouted for action. Witnesses spoke of stolen names and erased photographs and children who had lost pieces of themselves. The public's anger was a force the envoys could not easily ignore. For a moment the Council's machinery creaked under the weight of a city that had been made to remember.
But politics is a patient thing. The envoys promised investigations and committees and the slow, bureaucratic language that buys time. House Virelle's agent smiled and promised cooperation while his hands moved in ways that suggested other plans. The market's packet had been read; the public had seen; the Council had been forced to respond. Yet the Loom knew the difference between a promise and a binding. They had to keep pressure on the city's conscience while the legal machinery turned.
That night the market's mood was a brittle, exhausted thing. Traders closed their stalls early; lanterns were dimmed; people moved with the careful economy of those who had been through a storm and were not yet sure if the shore would hold. The Loom's safehouse filled with maps and manifests and the low hum of forensics machines. Aria sat at the table and watched Rell and Halv argue over routes and contingencies. Luna cataloged the teachers' losses and made lists of what could be repaired with anchors and what would need time.
"We can't let Black Keel vanish," Rell said, voice low. "If he gets to the Bastion's vaults, he'll bury the manifests. He'll make the ledger's margins disappear."
Halv's jaw was a hard line. "Then we go to the Bastion," she said. "We take a small team. We move fast. We don't give them time to bury anything."
Aria looked at the shard's lead-lined case on the table. It hummed faintly, a small, insistent heartbeat that made the air taste metallic. The shard had been the key that opened the ledger's margins; it had cost them names and lullabies and the teachers' phrases. It had also given them a map. They would follow it.
"We go at first light," Aria said. "We take the shard and the witnesses who can speak. We don't let them bury the truth."
Luna's hand found Aria's and squeezed. "We'll go together," she said. "And we'll bring anchors. We'll make sure the witnesses are held."
They slept in fits and starts. The city's night was a thin, watchful thing. Outside, the Bonebridge hummed with the residue of the mass cadence; inside, the Loom counted costs and made plans. The immediate aftermath was a ledger of small tasks: tend the wounded, bury the dead, keep the public's attention, trace the broker's routes. It was also a ledger of private reckonings: the names that would not come back for a while, the lullabies that had been thinned, the teachers who would wake with holes and learn to stitch them with other people's voices.
In the morning, as the first pale light bled into the harbor, Aria walked the quay one last time before they left for the Bastion. The nets were repaired; the Thornkin's briars had been cut back where they had tangled launches; the market's stalls were being reset. A child ran past her, chasing a dog, and for a moment Aria felt the ledger's weight lift like a tide. The child's laugh was bright and ordinary and it made something in her unclench.
Then she saw the broker's men on the far pier—figures moving with the practiced economy of those who had been paid to watch and to wait. One of them looked up and their eyes met. For a heartbeat the world narrowed to a ledger of glances: a man who had been paid to make trouble and a woman who had been paid to stop it. The man turned away and vanished into the market's shadow.
Aria breathed and let the moment pass. There would be more fights, more costs, more names to be counted. The immediate aftermath had been triage and funerals and a public packet that had forced the city to see. It had also been a reminder that victory is not a single thing but a series of small, costly acts stitched together.
They loaded the shard into the Loom's cart and set out for the Salted Bastion with a small team: Halv and Rell, two apprentices who could hold anchors, a forensics pair, and Luna with her teacher's kit. The Bonebridge receded behind them like a wound that had been stitched but not healed. The city's market hummed with rumor and repair. Brokers counted losses and plotted responses. The Council's envoys wrote notes and promised committees.
Black Keel had escaped, but the ledger's margins were no longer invisible. The public had seen House Virelle's name. The Thornkin had made the brokers' muscle impotent. The teachers had paid with phrases and lullabies and names. The Loom had forced a choice into the city's hands.
As the cart rolled toward the Bastion, Aria felt the ledger's thread hum under her palm like a living thing. She tightened her grip and thought of the child who had laughed on the quay, of the teachers who had given pieces of themselves, of the witnesses who had come to be seen. The immediate aftermath had been messy and costly and necessary. The path forward would be dangerous and expensive in ways coin could not measure.
They would follow the thread to the Salted Bastion. They would force the patron house to answer. They would count the costs and try to anchor what had been taken. And they would do it together, one costly step at a time.