~ KAEL ~
It took most of the morning.
Kael had never actually told the whole story in order before — pieces of it, yes, to various people, in various rooms, usually while something was actively on fire in a metaphorical sense. But start to finish, from the alley to now, with someone sitting across from him who had no prior knowledge and a notebook open on her knee: that was new.
Awen was a good listener. Not the polite kind, who nodded at intervals and waited for their turn to speak, but the real kind — the kind who went still at the important parts and asked questions at the exact moments a question would land hardest.
She asked, when he got to the poem: "And you actually wrote it down? On paper?"
"On a scrap of harbour commission memo, yes."
She looked at the empty air. "And that was enough?"
"It was the truest thing anyone had said to me in a very long time," Nyxara said. "I'd been… not listening, for several thousand years. It turns out sincerity carries further than volume."
Awen wrote something in her notebook. Kael caught a glimpse: *sincerity over volume.* Underlined twice.
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Awen's reactions, Nyxara found, were a kind of mirror — seeing the story through someone who'd only heard fragments of it, filtered through dock gossip and temple rumour, was like hearing it for the first time herself. The parts that landed hardest on Awen weren't always the ones Nyxara would have predicted.
The Conclave: Awen went very still, and asked three clarifying questions, and wrote for almost a minute without looking up.
Mira's letter: Awen set down her pen entirely, and didn't pick it back up for a while.
The communal humming in the undercroft: Awen looked up with an expression Nyxara recognized — the particular expression of someone hearing about something that had happened in someone else's tradition and feeling, with some discomfort, that it should have happened in their own.
"The Harvest Mother's rites," Awen said slowly, "are… communal. Have always been communal — harvests, plantings, festivals, things done together. But they're… scripted. Every word of every rite has been the same for three hundred years. Nobody has ever… hummed. Nobody has ever done something imperfect and unplanned and…" she trailed off.
"Had it reach anyway?" Nyxara said gently.
Awen looked at her notebook. "I'm beginning to wonder," she said, "whether 'scripted' and 'understood' are the same thing. For us. In our rites."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
He got to Vren, and Awen's careful patience acquired a different quality — attentive in the way of someone hearing about a storm they'd been watching from a distance and were now being told had already reached land.
"The arrangements," she said, when he'd finished the Tomlin arc. "Between our temple and the Covenant Exchange. I don't know all of them — some are older than the current High Keeper's memory. But I know we use their credit facilities. For grain storage, between harvests. We've always assumed…" she paused. "We've always assumed the terms were what we were told they were."
"Have you read them?" Kael asked. "All the way through?"
Awen was quiet for a moment that answered the question before she did. "The High Keeper sent me with copies," she said finally. "Of everything we have on file. She said —" a small pause, "'find the accountant and ask him to look.'"
She reached into her satchel and produced a bundle of documents, tied with red cord, considerably thicker than Kael had expected. She set them on the desk with the careful precision of someone setting down something they'd carried for five weeks and were only now allowing themselves to put down.
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Nyxara felt Kael look at the bundle — at the cord, the seal, the sheer volume of paper — with the particular expression he wore when something large had just arrived and he was already, instinctively, reaching for a pen.
"Kael," she said softly.
"I know," he said. "I'm not going to read them all right now."
"You were absolutely going to read them all right now."
"I was going to read the interest clauses," he said, with the dignity of a man making an important distinction. "That's not all of them. That's just… the relevant ones."
Awen, watching this exchange with the expression of someone recalibrating what 'the accountant' meant in practice, looked between Kael and the empty air with something that might, after five weeks of careful professional distance, have been the beginning of a smile.
"The High Keeper said you'd do that," she said. "She said — and I'm quoting directly — 'he'll want to read the contracts immediately. Let him. It's what he does.'"
"I've never met the High Keeper," Kael said, slightly unnerved.
"No," Awen agreed. "But she's heard about you. Quite a lot, apparently. From…" she checked her notes, "'several reliable sources, and one elderly woman on a bench who was extremely forthcoming.'"
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
Kael untied the red cord.
The first contract was sixty years old. The interest clause was on page two. He read it once, and then again, and felt — in the particular cold, familiar way — the shape of a number that was never meant to reach zero.
He looked up at Awen, who was watching him with the careful attention of someone who had carried these documents for five weeks precisely to see this expression on someone's face.
"How many of these does the Harvest Mother's temple have?" he asked quietly.
"That bundle," Awen said, "is the ones we know about. The High Keeper thinks there may be more. In the older records. Before anyone thought to keep track."
"Kael," Nyxara said — carefully, the particular careful of someone who had felt, in the last thirty seconds, the shape of something considerably larger than one temple's grain storage arrangements. "I think… I think Vren's arrangements with other gods are older than his arrangements with mortals. And I think… if the same script was used…"
"Then it's not just families," Kael said slowly. "It's temples. It's gods. It's…" he looked at the bundle, at sixty years of red cord, at Awen's patient, five-weeks-tired face.
"Alright," he said, reaching for his pen. "Let's find out how deep this goes."