They cleared the bridge and climbed into a saddle where pines stooped like aunties gossiping under shawls. Ketu ran the ridge with thread, Sagar placed men like stones in a wall, Mira tested every plank of every footbridge with the skepticism of a carpenter who refuses to be surprised twice.
The road took a left where habit said right. Not visibly. In bones. A farmer trundling barley frowned, then shook his head as if forgetting mid-thought. The sleeping baby sighed and refused to learn about loops.
"Feel it?" Lhakpa asked.
"Feel what?" Mira said, then blinked. "Oh."
Arya set a breath-ring at his own feet. It steadied his mind like a full spoon steadies a hand. He took five steps. The pine on his left was still on his left. He took five more. The pine was on his left again, as if it had moved with him out of kindness.
Ketu spat. "Harish didn't eat the mile. He bruised it. Someone else will drink the bruise."
"Ash-walkers?" Mira asked.
"No," Yeshe said. "Worse. Men with hungry pockets."
They found them at the bend where the road decided to lose its memory: six figures dressed like nobody worth writing a poem about. Rope, sticks, a knife each. Their faces held the look of men who have convinced themselves they are owed and have finally found someone to collect from. Behind them, the air thickened—not seam, not fog. Debt.
The leader—scar across chin, eyes like a ledger—pointed his stick at the barley cart. "Road toll," he said. "Four coins a wheel. Two for the child."
The child's mother smiled the sort of smile that is a blade politely sheathed. "No."
He hit the cart with the stick. The sound it made was not wood. It was a stamp—as if a number had been pressed onto the day. The wheel did not break. The cart did not move. The road buckled into a memory that made feet repeat their mistake.
Sagar took one step forward and stopped cold when the ground said "again." He looked at Arya. Not for permission. For math.
Arya placed his palm to the dust and drew a line instead of a ring, straight across the wheel rut, thin as a vein. "No storm that turns a mile into a price," he whispered. "No debt written on breath." The line held. The bruise leaned and could not cross.
The leader laughed and hit the line with the stick. The sound the stick made was boring. He scowled. "Fine. Another way." He lifted his chin. Two of his men began to sing.
Not a hymn. A work song, the kind you use to inherit somebody else's rhythm, to turn the swing of their arms into your profit. The road liked the beat out of habit. The cart shifted toward due, the baby scowled, and the mother's smile turned into winter.
Mira stepped into the song and clapped wrong. Two, three, two again, then four, with a stubborn little heel click. A child at the festival picked it up and giggled. The beat broke. The road forgot to obey strangers.
Ketu blew his horn, but not full. Half-notes, rude as goats. Pemba and Dolma—who had ghosted onto the trail without asking permission from anyone's story—threw thread low, making ankle-height snares the eye refused to report.
The leader saw none of it. He raised his stick toward Arya now—seeing properly for the first time the boy no one had hired standing where numbers failed. "What's your toll, then?" he sneered. "What do storms charge?"
Arya felt his palm itch. He set a second line—not at the men's feet, not across the cart. Across his own ribs. "No storm for pride," he reminded himself.
"Yes," Yeshe said under her breath, hearing the line set. "Keep yourself cheaper than the problem."
He lifted his hand. "My toll is this," he said quietly. "You stop singing to the road. You apologize to the wheel. You carry the barley four paces yourself and say thank you to the woman who did your work."
The men laughed like men do when they are sure laughter is a weapon.
Sagar did not laugh. "Do it," he said to the leader without raising his voice. "Or I will make you leave the half-mile in a sack."
The leader looked at Sagar's trident like a carpenter looks at rain—tiresome, wet, inevitable. "Captain," he said, almost polite. "We are collecting for the King."
"No," Sagar said. "You are collecting for a hole in your pocket."
"Same thing," the man said.
Ketu's horn trilled a note like a child imitating a bird and being accidentally perfect. The ankle threads tightened. The leader moved to step back and found that his ankle had made a friendship with Diyalo thread that it did not particularly enjoy. He windmilled and did not fall by sheer stubbornness.
Mira smiled with all her teeth. "Pay up," she said.
Something in the road relented—not because of threat, but because the work song had been replaced with petty embarrassment, and embarrassment is honest labor. The cart rolled. The wheel hummed a satisfied little note and forgave absolutely nobody.
The leader yanked at the thread; it didn't break. He looked at Arya again, genuinely angry now. "Unfair," he said.
"Yes," Arya said. "Fair is for scales. Roads prefer mercies."
The man spat, cursed the road, the cart, the baby, the horn, the mountain, and his own ankle. Then he lifted the barley sack because Sagar's eyes suggested he should, carried it four paces, and set it down like a man finishing a penance he didn't agree to. He did not say thank you.
The child's mother did not need it. She nodded to Arya once—the small, exact nod of a woman adjusting a pot lid—and clicked to her pony. The caravan moved. The loop unwound. The bruise in the mile faded like breath on a cold day.
The men slid off the road with as much dignity as thread around ankles allows. "We'll remember," the leader said, trying on menace and finding it didn't fit.
"Yes," Ketu said pleasantly. "That's the point of roads."
They walked until village roofs made reasonable arguments about soup and sleep. At the wayhouse door, Gita stood with a lamp and the relieved fury of an auntie who has counted heads too many times. "Eat," she snapped. "Then be praised, then be scolded. Not in that order."
Sagar leaned his trident against a post. "Report," he told the lamp. "Unfiled."
Lhakpa cleared his throat. "For the record—"
"Later," Mira and Ketu said together, and high-fived without planning to.
Arya put his palm to the lintel and listened. The storm under his ribs was steady. The day had not turned anyone's name into a price. He let himself believe that for one breath longer than he usually allowed. It hurt less than he'd expected.
Outside the circle of lamplight, the watcher with the red eye stood on the bridge stone and watched the river not move. He did not smile. He did not blink. He simply waited like a question that preferred echo to answer.