Three years had passed since Rowan, Brenner, Ari, Nyx, Lyra, Ashwyn, and the rest had first staggered into the ruins by the sea. Back then, Wraithborn was only broken walls and a cold wind. Now it was a city cut into the cliffs and wrapped around the river mouth, loud with hammers, market voices, and kids chasing each other along sunny lanes.
From a few hundred frightened people it had grown to ten thousand. The new walls were stone stitched to living vine, thick and green, anchoring themselves into the cliff with roots that bit like fingers. Watchtowers rose where shattered roofs once sagged. Inside the walls, the river split the town into two banks and tied them together with three rebuilt bridges. Mills turned on its current. Ropewalks ran along its edge. On warm days, fishermen stood calf-deep in the shallows and cast their nets in a quick, practiced rhythm.
The raider prisoners—the same men and women who once dragged cages and swung whips—no longer wore chains. That had not come easily. In the first months there had been spitting and shouting, scuffles in alleys, and long nights where anger seemed like the only language anyone remembered. But work has a way of teaching what words cannot. People who swung picks together to clear terraces and lifted stones together to brace beams began to nod at one another. People who bled side by side on hunts and patrols started to share food without thinking about it. Now some of the former raiders ran workshops and barracks. A few had gifts and had risen further still. When their names were called on the wall, no one looked twice.
On the east bank, fields lay in neat stripes where wild grass had once grown tall. Water ran to them by channels Rowan had helped mark with a stick, his bare feet in the mud, and Ashwyn had taught the soil to hold. The terraces climbed toward the cliff like steps. Wheat nodded in the breeze. Beans climbed poles. Fruit trees threw pale shade where old stones warmed the roots.
On the west bank, markets stretched from the river to the main gate. Stalls leaned shoulder-to-shoulder under patched canvas. A potter's wheel spun. A thread-seller teased a knot free with her teeth. A baker slid brown loaves onto a board with a laugh so big it bounced off the walls. Voices rose and fell. A boy ran past with a basket of fish and almost crashed into a girl carrying a bundle of arrows; they dodged, grinned, and kept going.
Brenner's laugh rolled over all of it. You could find him by following the sound. He moved through the square like a friendly storm, big and loud and grinning, with Artan padding at his heel. Children swarmed him the way starlings swarm a scarecrow in spring. They climbed his forearms and sat on his shoulders as if he were a tree. When he growled, they shrieked and laughed. When he sat, there was always one small person with both hands in his hair and another curled against Artan's side, face buried in warm fur, eyes shut in pure joy.
"Again!" a boy cried, thumping Brenner's shoulder.
"Again?" Brenner said, pretending to think. "Again means tax. The tax is… one apple. No—two. No—three, because Artan is very hungry."
Artan rumbled, which made it true.
A woman passed and shook her head with a smile. Adults watched Brenner the way children did, only softer. Everyone knew what those hands could do to a shield or a gate. Everyone also knew he would stop anything with those same hands that tried to hurt a child.
Right or left of Brenner, depending on the sun, you could look up and see Ari on the wall. She wore a plain tunic, her hair tied back. No cloak. No decoration. She did not need any of that. Five hundred archers stood in lines across the wall and the roofs below it. Some had the pale shimmer of power clinging to their skin; most did not. All hit what they aimed at. Ari walked the line with a bow across one shoulder and a quiver at her hip, stopping to shift an elbow here, tilt a chin there.
"Breathe," she said, calm as wind. "Don't fight your own lungs."
On her left and right stood the two siblings from the hill village—older now, taller, both with the look of people who had learned where to put their feet and how to stand still when stillness mattered. The brother wore a captain's cord around his sleeve and kept a level tone that made people listen. The sister, whose hands had once shaken on the bowstring, had awakened in the last year; her arrows curved as if the air itself wanted to help. When she loosed at a moving mark and it fell without drama, Ari's mouth softened. She did not praise often, but everyone could see it in her eyes.
In the alleys and high places where shadows held, Nyx walked. She had the habit of appearing without sound, like a thought. She did not pretend her work was gentle. She did not need to. The network she had built in three years stretched across valleys and through towns, a web of shadow-walkers and seers who passed messages in whispers and in minds. A look was enough to send a runner. A hand on a low wall was enough to call Pan out of a dark doorway. If there were raiders near, Nyx knew before their boots touched the road. If there were rumors of corruption gathering men into something like an army, she knew that too. She did not speak those rumors loudly. She measured them, set them on a shelf inside her, and watched.
Near the river road, Lyra kept count. She had merged in the second year, and the change showed in quiet ways. She did not grow faster or louder. She grew steadier. Her pack mule—the same stubborn, clever beast that had once eaten half a sack of plums when no one was looking—seemed to carry twice what it should and never tire. Lyra's ledgers were neat and clean. Her storehouses were clean too, and full: grain, dried meat, cloth, leather, spare cart wheels, rope. When a hunter came in limping, Lyra had a sling ready before he asked. When a patrol left hungry, she handed out bread from a basket without putting her writing stick down. If anyone wondered how she always had what they needed, they learned to shrug and say, "Lyra knows."
Across from Lyra's sheds the hospital stood with its doors wide and its windows open to the light. Tamsin ran it with three other healers who had come forward during darker days and proved themselves by choosing to help when they could have hidden. A steady stream of people came and went—sprains, cuts, fevers from the marsh, a broken finger from a clumsy hammer, a cough that would not leave an old chest alone. Tamsin's hands were quick and kind. Her headscarf fringed her face like a small cloud. If Brenner passed the doorway, he slowed, and if she looked up and met his eyes, he forgot his next step for a moment. He had never said anything. He did not know if he would. For now it seemed enough to carry a basket through her door once a week and put it on the table without a word. Apples. A jar of honey. A loaf from the laughing baker. She always knew who had brought it. She always let him think he had slipped away unseen.
Ashwyn moved more slowly now. He could not climb as he had. He did not need to. The gardens he had planted spread across the sunny side of the terraces like a quilt, each patch sown with something that helped: comfrey and yarrow, mint and balm, foxglove and feverfew. He knew where each root was. He could tell you when the rain came last and how much it gave. He could tell you which part of a plant to use for a cut and which part would make a heart beat wrong. When Rowan could not sleep from the weight of decisions, he walked up to the garden and found Ashwyn with his hands in the dirt, and somehow that was enough to remind him that most problems could be moved, even if only an inch at a time.
On the drill field, Toren shouted and two thousand boots lifted together. He had grown into his strength the way a tree grows into its roots—slowly at first, then all at once. His pale-gold aura came and went with his breath, brightening when he pushed men to the edge of their breath and dimming when he stepped back and nodded a line through a pattern they barely understood. He did not bite his words, and he did not waste them. "Feet," he said, again and again. "Feet, then hands." When a recruit made the same mistake three times, Toren put his hand on the man's shoulder and moved him by inches. "Here," he said. "Now try." When the man got it right, Toren did not smile much, but he said "Good," and for some men that was more than any feast.
And Rowan—Rowan walked. He could have ridden. People tried to give him horses and carts and chairs. He thanked them, smiled, and kept walking. He liked the way the ground felt underfoot. He liked the way people spoke when you were at their height. He crossed the bridges and checked the braces and traced the cracks in the stone with three fingers. He listened on the wall to Ari asking for one more round of volleys even when wrists were tired. He stood near the field and watched Toren turn stumbling boys into soldiers with patience and repetition. He paused at Lyra's door and waited until she looked up from her ledger to nod, because he had learned that a nod meant the stores were fine and she did not need him to ask silly questions. He looked into the hospital and did not step in unless Tamsin waved him, because he had learned that people who are healing do not need crowds.
He went down to the river when he could, because the river was the first thing that had listened to him in this world, and he did not forget friends. It ran clear along smooth stone and sang a little song when the wind pressed it. When Rowan put his hand in the water, it smiled up his wrist. The first year he had only been able to pull a thread. Now he could lift a sheet. He could raise it, hold it, fold it, and let it go without a splash. He did not show that to many people. Power was easier when it was not a performance. Once a week, quietly, he took a group of young flickers who had asked to learn down to a shallow bend and taught them what Ashwyn had taught him: start small, feel first, ask before you pull.
Afternoons tasted like bread and river air. Mornings tasted like iron and sweat. Midday tasted like apples if you were lucky and a handful of dried peas if you were not. Evenings tasted like peace.
By late light a bell rang at the gate, low and friendly. It was not the warning bell. It was the one that told cooks to stir their pots and workers to wash their hands and mothers to shout for the last small feet to come down from roofs and off walls. The rope swung, the sound rolled, and hawks rose from the wall with a rush of wings. Oriel circled once over the river and drifted down to the post near Ari's hand. Pan vanished into the first thin darkness that collected in the alleys, because that was where Pan lived best when the sun went down. Artan flopped with a huff and a sigh big enough to stir dust.
On the high terrace above the square, Ashwyn watered a bed of basil with a battered tin can and watched the shadows slide along the lane. On the drill field, Toren clapped the last line on the shoulder and said, "Enough. Eat." In the hospital, Tamsin tied off a bandage with a neat knot and told a boy he could run tomorrow if he did not run tonight. Lyra closed one ledger and opened another, eyes moving sure and fast, lips counting under her breath. Ari leaned her elbows on the wall and let the wind pull the heat from her cheeks. Brenner straightened, rolled his shoulders, and found that he had somehow collected three sleeping children, one on each arm and one against his chest. He carried them to their families and put each down like a sack of flour; then he stood in the door of the baker's shop and paid his "tax" with three apples and a grin.
Rowan stopped on the middle bridge and set both hands on the stone. The river slid under him. The sea breathed beyond the cliff with long, slow ribs. Behind him, the town settled like a big animal finding a good place to lie down. People talked in low voices. Pots bubbled. A lute found a tune and kept it. It had been a long day of ordinary things, the kind of day that children forget and old men count as treasure.
He looked from one bank to the other and saw the pieces of his people where they were meant to be. He did not feel like a king. He did not feel like a hero. He felt like a man standing in the middle of a thing made with many hands. His chest loosened. He breathed, and the breath did not hurt.
Bells finished their last slow ring. Lamps came on, one by one, like small stars catching. The sky went the color of plums, then ink. A guard on the south tower called down a good night and got three good nights back. On the far terrace a child laughed in its sleep and kicked once, and a mother's hand found a small foot in the dark and held it until it was still.
Rowan turned from the rail and stepped into the lane. Someone pressed a loaf into his hands without looking to see who he was, and he took it with a word of thanks and a promise to bring the board back in the morning.
He did not look for signs. He did not listen for steps that were not there. He walked toward the square where the smell of soup hung in the air and the sound of a story rose and fell. This was Wraithborn, and it was evening, and for once that was all it needed to be.