By the time Crownspire's bells finished telling the city to wake up, Sera and I had already walked a heat curve across six jars of steeping leaves and a rack of damp gloves. The pantry smelled like patience and mint. The emberling perched on the shelf like a polite stove-stone, veil tucked close, Trace humming quiet in its pocket.
Sera tapped the belly of her pot with a knuckle. "Kitchen Trace—done. Field Trace—done. Murmur for yeast—still smug." She tied off a paper label with her teeth. "Quill's going to 'hm' so loudly he'll fog his own lens."
"You say that like it's not a compliment," I said.
"Compliment adjacent."
A knuckle rapped our doorframe. Professor Quill leaned into the pantry as if he were checking weather. He had a folded slate under one arm and the look of a man who had already argued with a wall and won on principle. "Bricklayer. Brewer. Marshal Osk has stolen my morning block and assigned you to me."
Sera blinked. "As a treat?"
"As remediation," Quill said, but his mouth tilted. "With me. West tower. Bring what you trust."
We followed his fast walk through corridors where stone remembered a thousand boots. The west tower's lower level was not for students—at least not the ones who liked rules. The door Quill opened burped cool, warded air. Inside, the Ward Room looked like the spine of a saint: ten pillar-crystals encircling a sunken floor, lines of silver braided between them in tight weirs and loops. The whole thing hummed like a lidded cauldron, low and even—until it wasn't. Every few breaths, the pitch stuttered and a ripple of wrong ran the loop.
Sera stopped dead. "Is that supposed to happen?"
"No," Quill said. "Which is why we are here instead of pretending kitchens are apolitical." He nodded toward the pillars. "Crownspire is wrapped in weirwork—channels that tame the local tide. The west anchor began to hiccup last night. It is either fatigue, miscalibration, or mischief."
"Mischief," Jes Toller said from the corner, where she had been leaning against a rack of tools like a cathedral buttress. Her living hammer winked as if it had an opinion. "You can hear the wrong kind of curve."
"Jes will say it's heat," Quill said, "because Jes believes rightly that half of life is heat. She is half right. The other half is grammar."
Jes grunted. "Grammar burns you just as dead."
Two gray coats stood at the far bench, pretending to be invisible again. Their lapels had found their edge; their faces had not found smiles. They weren't the same pair from the demonstrations; that didn't matter. Gray is a species, not an individual.
Quill clapped once to let the room know who the conductor was. "Here is your task: Audit. Do not write. Do not touch. Tell me what is wrong."
I swallowed the greedy urge to dazzle and stepped to the edge of the nearest pillar. The crystal was old, veined with faint caught lightning, its latticework dense and confident. I drew the Audit rune in air—loop with two short crossbars—and set it near the edge of a weir line. It didn't rewrite; it asked. A tiny tug pulled at the crossbars—cost leak south-southwest. I paced it, Sera at my shoulder, pot trundling like a scout.
We traced the loop around the room—Audit, step, Audit—until the tug turned from whisper to finger to poke. At the third pillar, the weir line kinked where it should arc, like a river someone had tried to make run in a straight ditch. Jes rolled a channel stone in her palm and pressed it to the line. It glowed reluctant.
"Someone swapped Type to Edge for two strokes," I said, stomach going cold. "Then swapped it back."
Sera's eyebrows climbed. "Edge? On a ward?"
"On a weir," Quill said, gaze very hard. "That's not a mistake. That is whittling at a dam." He looked toward the gray coats, who did not look back. "This is the part where you tell me your hearing will move forward next week without interruptions."
They didn't answer. That was its own answer.
Jes snorted. "We fix now. You can make your speeches on clean stone."
Quill's eyes flicked to me and Sera. "Demonstrate," he said. "A repair that does not overpromise. Riven—heat memory. Tallow—range steadiness. We will not reset the whole lattice. We will insert a baffle and a stitch."
"Baffle?" Sera asked.
Quill sketched a small adjunct rune on the bench: two bars angled into a V, open toward the incoming line, with a narrow slit that let only what kept cadence pass. "Weir Baffle. Filters surge without choking flow. Jes?"
Jes had already lifted the panel that covered the anchor's hearth. Inside lay the heat sink—a block of old stone with iron veins, sitting in a shallow bed of ash. Spirits lived in everything here; the brick remembered winters. The emberling leaned from my coat to feel the cool air and decided it did not enjoy it.
"Trace on the sink," Jes ordered. "Soft—kitchen curve. We're calming, not hardening."
I knelt, set the emberling on the ash lip, and wrote Trace: up four, hold eight, down six, hold four. The memory pocket hummed with recognition, the slag barb catching corners before they bulged. Sera fed the anchor a thin, steady line of heat through Concord—her pot acting as a metronome, the emberling as a hearth. The weir line's shiver eased. The wrong pitch flattened.
"Baffle ready," Quill said, hands hovering over the weirwork without touching—teacher and surgeon.
I shaped the Baffle in the air above the kink: bars angled like a catch, slit like a letter that takes a polite breath. "It'll push back," I warned.
"It should," Quill said. "Boundaries that don't push aren't boundaries."
"On mark," Jes said, because she refused to count like a metronome. "Go."
I set the Baffle. Sera breathed into Concord. The emberling held Trace. The weir resisted with a low growl—then took. The kink smoothed into arc. For three breaths, the room sighed.
On the fourth, the anchor hiccuped again. Not because of our patch. Because something else upstream pushed, like a shoulder through a crowd.
"Again," Jes said, and when we tried to add a second Baffle, Quill lifted a hand.
"Not there," he said, and touched just beside where I would have placed it. "Here. You're fixing the symptom, not the fault."
I moved. The Baffle seated like a key in the right lock. The hiccup flattened. The ward's hum settled into the good kind of boring.
"Stitch," Quill said then, and chalked another adjunct rune: a crossed loop like lace, meant to hold two edges without welding them into arrogance. "Do not weave. Stitch."
I placed the Stitch across the scar where Type had been swapped. Instead of fusing, it laced the edges across a small space, as if leaving the wound room to breathe while it closed. Jes gave a begrudging hm that meant: better.
The gray coats exchanged a murmur—short, unsmiling—but even their silence felt relieved.
"Who did it?" Sera asked, looking at the scar the way bakers look at loaves that someone else has sliced badly.
"Someone who wanted to test if we're watching," Quill said. "Or someone who likes to see if they can make a river act like a knife. Either way—" He glanced at the gray coats. "—we will audit the rest of the anchors before sundown."
Jes rolled her shoulders. "I'll walk east and south. Brewer, you're with me. Bricklayer, you're with your professor. If a pillar screams, you fetch me. Don't be heroes. Heroes trip on their own capes."
We split. Quill set me a pace behind and made me Audit every curve. My rune hand ached; my back ached worse. Twice, we found little wrongs that weren't malicious—age, overenthusiastic maintenance. Once, we found another nick where someone had tried to sharpen a weir. I set a Baffle; Quill set a Stitch. He wrote notes in a small ledger without looking like he'd written.
By noon, my head felt rung. Quill took pity on bones if not on brains. "Eat," he said, and pressed a small wrapped bundle into my hand that turned out to be bread with something savory and an attitude. "We'll finish after drills. Tell Osk he can have you on the condition that you do not allow anything dramatic."
I found Sera on the green with a smear of ash on her cheek like war paint. Jes had one hammer up in the air and the other bound to her wrist and looked like an altar that had learned to walk. "North and south clean," Jes said. "East had a stutter. Brewer scolded it into rhythm."
"It listened because I was polite," Sera said. "And because I bribed it with a snack."
"You bribed a ward anchor?"
"Tiny Trace," she defended. "Kitchen curve. It was sulking."
"Good," Jes said, which is how you know she'd intended that result all along.
Marshal Osk barrelled through the middle of the green like a storm and we all pretended not to be glad to hand him our heads for an hour. "You look like men who found a leak," he said out of the corner of his mouth while instructing a row of first-years how not to faint while sprinting downhill. "You did not try to drown in it, I trust."
"We plugged it with a stitch and a scold," Sera said.
"Good," Osk said, and then, "Drop," to the first-years. They dropped. He looked at me. "You'll run today on tired legs and write with a tired hand. If you can't, return your seal."
We ran. We Concorded. I Trace-fed Sera's pot through a slalom while Osk shouted set changes as if he were calling a dance no one wanted to attend. When my ankle whispered mutiny, the emberling warmed it once and then scolded me with a nudge of heat that felt like Quill's raised eyebrow. When the block ended, I felt like a rope someone had wrung out.
Quill met us at the edge of the green with a ledger and a look whose corners had given up. "One more anchor," he said. "Brann. Aureline. You two are conscripted."
Brann perked like a dog whose person had just put on boots. Aureline accepted conscription with a nod that would have made a queen proud of a niece.
"Why them?" Sera asked as we jogged behind Quill back to the Ward Room.
"Because the south weir runs hot," Quill said. "Because Ms. Belisar's salamander understands hot. Because Mr. Calder's insect is a machine and machines see straight lines where the rest of you see scribbles."
Brann puffed a little. "You could just say I'm useful."
"I'll die before I give you that outright," Quill said, without breath to spare for a smile.
The south anchor was louder than the west, its hum a little sharp. The weir lines shone a fraction too bright. Jes had chalked the hearth stones with a map of yesterday's temperature. "It's not failing," she said, "but it's rude."
Aureline's salamander lowered its head to the sink and exhaled a line of blue. The stone took the heat like a held hand. Brann's ant crouched at a weir node and clicked, listening to vibrations none of us could hear.
"Overshoot," Brann said, unexpectedly grave. "It's ringing. Not Fitch—too tidy. Someone adjusted a curve with numbers and forgot that curves have pride."
"Council," Jes muttered, too loud for politics, too quiet for the gray coats to pretend they hadn't heard.
"Fix first," Quill said.
We laid out roles without being told. Aureline steadied the heat supply with a patience that surprised me—down from blistering to temperate, step by deliberate step, until her salamander's blue softened to orange. I set Trace—Field this time—low and shallow. Sera wrote a Concord to carry what little extra the sink gathered into the harmless crawl of the room's old brick. Brann watched the ant's mandibles, clicked twice, and told me where my Baffle angle would stop a ring without chafing a line.
"Stitch," Quill said softly when the hum settled—not a command so much as a benediction.
I set the lace loop across a hairline where someone's tidy edit had choked the weir into a straightness it hated. It wasn't sabotage. It was thoughtlessness. It's hard to be gentler with thoughtlessness than with malice; both cost the same if you pay in attention.
The room eased. The weir sang like a held note. Jes exhaled a breath shaped like three summers.
"Level?" she asked out of habit, and I blinked—because the emberling had slipped past a rung while we were working, as if the room's quiet had freed it to grow a thread along the ninth channel. It wasn't wide. It existed.
"Seven," I said.
"Good," Jes said. "Write it down."
The gray coats made a note. Quill did not look at them, which is how you know he saw everything. He took Aureline aside for three breaths and said something low that made her mouth quirk the way it does when she is trying not to be pleased with herself. He clapped Brann's shoulder once, the smallest nod toward a dog that had herded sheep instead of chasing them.
We finished by rubbing our Audit runes off the air with a habit I'd learned at my mother's table: don't leave tools where someone will trip. On the way out, one of the gray coats stopped Quill with a polite cough.
"The Council thanks you for your vigilance," he said, with all the warmth of a polite kettle.
Quill smiled without teeth. "We keep our own house in order," he said. "You're welcome to send someone with a mop when you remember how."
The coat blinked. Jes laughed once, silently. We left.
Evening found me at our small table with the emberling warming my ink and Lark pretending to read my notes. I drew the Baffle and the Stitch beside Trace in my ledger and wrote what actually matters and always gets forgotten: where I stood, what we fed the sink, how the room sounded when it decided to obey.
My mother came up from the root cellar with a basket and a question in her eyebrows. I told her the short version. She shook her head in the slow way country people do when city people tell on themselves. "Rivers don't like straight lines," she said. "Neither do people."
Before I could answer, someone knocked on our door like they were urgent but trying not to wake a baby. I opened to find Neri with her wisp hovering like a polite cloud and a paper parcel in her hands.
"Bread," she said. "From Ren. She's fine. The menders made her promise to eat and sleep and not look at lightning for a week."
"Good," I said, and meant it more than I could fit in the doorway.
Neri looked past me to the emberling and then at Lark. "Your kitchen has good manners," she said.
"It's learned," I said. "Long practice."
She nodded and then, unexpectedly, blurted, "Thank you. For shouting policy. On Copper Row."
"It was Sera's elbow that did most of the work," I said. "And Quill's note. And Osk's eyebrows."
Neri grinned, which looked tidy on her face. "They're a matched set."
After she left, my mother set the parcel on the table, cut thick slices, and buttered them in a way that meant: you did enough today; eat and shut up. I did. The emberling hummed, full of slag memory and work. Lark chimed once, a small clean sound that made the kitchen remember other mornings.
When I slept, I dreamt of rivers that remembered their own curves and walls that learned to flex at the right places. In the margin, where the dream ledger keeps jokes, someone had drawn a salamander with a very smug expression and an ant wearing earrings made of tiny channel stones. I woke laughing, which is a luxury and a warning.
At drills, Osk announced we would be "boringly excellent" for a week, which meant sprints, ladders, and formulas written while walking backward. Quill put Audit on every lesson plan and frowned at anyone who tried to be interesting. Jes sent me a sliver of slag wrapped in a scrap of wool that read: Trace isn't a trick; it's a trust.
The Council posted its hearing date for Fitch on the boards. Students pretended not to be curious and failed. Jes muttered about doors. Sera started a list titled Things That Are Cake and wrote only Not us under it.
In the quiet between bells, Aureline found me at the end of the corridor that smelled like chalk and old coats. She didn't waste bows. "Good work," she said, as if paying a debt in coin you can't counterfeit. "On south. Your Baffle sat exactly where I would have put it."
"Jes saved us," I said.
"Jes saves everyone," Aureline said. "We can practice excellence while we wait for her to get tired."
She started to turn, then paused. "One more thing. Council auditors pulled copy of the ward logs. They'll look for numbers." She flicked her gaze toward my ledger under my arm. "Keep writing what the room sounded like. They won't ask for it. Bring it anyway. It's the only part they'll actually need."
"Will they listen?" I asked.
"They will if it gets cold," she said, and ghosted off.
That night the emberling learned a trick on its own. Not a Surge—no evolution tremor—but a habit: when I lifted my palm and asked it to dim, it let the Trace pocket hum alone, and for three breaths it kept a thread without my hand hovering. Not power. Trust. A little of my breath came back to me.
I wrote it down and went to sleep with the feeling that my bones had learned the right kinds of tired. In the dream ledger, someone had written in Quill's tidy hand: Bones before bolts. Weirs before knives. Memory before metrics. Underneath, Osk had added: Run faster.
I woke laughing again. The morning smelled like mint and work. The day ahead had ladders and drills and audits and the kind of foundry shift that left your clothes singing.
We were not spectacular. We were not interesting. We were learning to be trustworthy in rooms where interesting gets you floods.