Dawn was thin and precise, the kind that left fingerprints of light on the ledger's rain‑colored cloth. Derrigan woke with the small child's breath steady and Seo‑yeon already moving through the room like a well‑oiled hinge. The slate Hana had left lay on the workbench, its single charcoal rune smudged slightly at the edge as if someone had brushed by it in the night.
They began with the practical: inventory, food schedule, and a careful rehearsal of answers for any more curious inspectors. Seo‑yeon read questions aloud while Derrigan practiced short, truthful replies that gave away as little as possible. "How long have you lived here?" "What arrangements do you have for schooling?" "Who can be contacted for references?" The ward board's verifier had given them time, but bureaucracy crept like rust; preparedness felt like a small, steady cure.
Midmorning brought Hana back earlier than they expected. She arrived with a wrapped bundle and a face that held a quiet intensity. Her fingers were stained with charcoal and something darker—old ink or old earth—and she carried a shallow wooden box of tools. "I thought I'd be discrete," she said, "but there's chatter on the quay. A guild runner asked questions about runic anomalies. I wanted to speak before curiosity turned managerial."
Derrigan set the ledger on the table and unwrapped the cloth with the care of a man easing a sleeping thing into the light. Hana sat and opened her box, removing a small magnifier, a set of fine needles, and a strip of polished horn used for listening to faint resonances. She did not touch the pages yet. Instead she watched the margin where the five sigils lay like quiet moths.
"We test for resonance first," she explained. "Not to pry, but to understand the ledger's song." She tapped the horn gently against the ledger's cloth without pressing. The horn shivered and the faintest sound—like a bell from very far away—answered. Derrigan felt the ledger under his palm as if it were holding its breath.
Hana leaned forward. "I want you to read the entries you made about Dock 9, aloud if you can. Tell me how you felt when you wrote them."
He did. He read the short lines—the names, the ash marks, the simple notes about shelter and food. His voice stayed low, the way one speaks to sleepwalkers. At the margin, the sigils reacted. The straight‑rule sigil brightened, a small, inward flicker like a struck match. The spiral hummed under his fingertips as if something amused. The comma‑like mark quivered and then settled.
Hana nodded, eyes narrowed. "They're listening in different ways," she said. "One measures, one remembers, one judges. It's as if five separate readers are folded into the book."
"Can they be asked to do anything?" Seo‑yeon asked.
Hana hesitated. "Not yet. They are impressions—echoes from a division of intent. If they become voiced, they'll answer the ledger's records directly. That can be useful. It can also be dangerous. The question is stewardship, not utility."
While Hana tended small experiments—tracing sigils with charcoal, letting the horn hover over the binding—the day's interruptions came in thinned threads. A courier paused at the gate and left a message pinned to the door: a short note urging caution and suggesting a meeting at dusk if Derrigan wished counsel. The courier's handwriting matched the one who had offered coins; the city moved in repeating patterns.
The afternoon brought a different kind of test. The smaller child woke with a fever—hot and surprising—and Derrigan felt his hands go thin with worry. He buried the ledger under a cloth and fetched the doctor Hana had helped summon. The doctor arrived with brass instruments and a steady voice. He took the child's temperature, soothed with careful hands, and pronounced it a fever likely from exposure and stress rather than any arcane cause. He stayed long enough to offer a salve and some instructions and then left with the promise to return twice that week.
Derrigan wrote a careful entry: Small fever treated; doctor visit noted; watch through night. As he wrote, the ledger shifted beneath his palm—a pattern of letters that were not quite words curling at the margin, like the memory of a name half‑formed. He paused, pen poised, and the curl settled into something he could not read. It was not ink he knew; it felt older, like a voice hearing itself for the first time.
When the fever broke that evening, the household exhaled. Seo‑yeon hummed as she dried blankets and Hana closed her instruments with the economy of someone who had seen small human misalignments before. "Keep a log of the doctor's notes in the ledger," Hana said. "If the ledger answers, its care should be part of the record."
Dusk folded into the harbor like a careful hand closing a book. The courier's dusk meeting arrived—but not as an emissary. Instead a shadowed figure lingered near the warehouse wall, watching. Derrigan stepped out to meet them and found a woman with a lined face and quick eyes, wrapped in a merchant's scarf. She spoke in the low voice of someone who had learned to bargain without being heard.
"You keep accounts, yes?" she asked. "Names have weight. A guild man sends curiosity. He is not the only one who keeps books."
Derrigan's answer was measured. "We protect the children. That is our work."
She smiled once, not unkindly. "Protection draws attention. If you need true discretion, there are ways. Not all are mercenary. Some prefer balance." She produced a small token—an emblem carved in bone—and pushed it toward him. "A network. Keep this in a place the ledger sees. If men who read ledgers sense it, it tells them these names have guardians."
He accepted the token, feeling the faint chill of bone. Seo‑yeon watched him, then slid back into the doorway, a shadow keeping watch over household economics. He slid the bone token into a hidden pocket in his satchel and, on impulse, pressed it briefly to the ledger's raincloth. The cloth warmed slightly where it touched, as if recognizing an ally.
That night, after the children slept and the house settled into the low sound of breathing, Hana asked Derrigan to read one more page—this time not rescue entries but the ledger's oldest margin notes, the weather lines and the admonitions left by earlier hands. He read: Bind with care; ledgers keep more than names. When he reached the line, something small happened: the five sigils in the margin leaned toward the passage, and for an instant he thought he heard, not words but the texture of memory falling into place.
Hana's voice was barely a whisper. "They are still fragments. But they remember voices before you—craftsmen, binders, someone who divided intent here. If they wake fully, they will bring their memories with them. That could mean help, or it could mean inherited loyalties."
He closed the ledger slowly, the raincloth sliding into place like a promise made private. Outside, the harbor breathed in and out. Derrigan sat a while in the dark and considered the litany of small obligations stacking against him: the ward board's checks, the guild's curiosity, the courier's notes, Hana's counsel, and the bone token's quiet promise. The ledger lay heavy and patient at his side.
Before sleep he added a short line in the margin, careful and clear: Stewardship first; do not bind; seek those who keep, not those who own. The sigils warmed under his thumb as if in reply, one after another, not a voice but a cadence. It was an answer without promise—and for now, that was enough.