Page 59 of Pocket Wife

“No,” Celia says at once.

“Celia—”

“No.” The word cracks through the bakery. Celia turns then, eyes wet and fierce. “This happened because men with ships and lawyers are afraid of old women who keep accounts. Do not give them the dignity of making this your fault.”

I feel the words settle where guilt had been.

Celia bends, picks up a torn bread cloth, and folds it with slow care. “My grandmother knew this day might come. So did her mother. So did the people who hid covenant clauses in cisterns and burial stones. They did not do it because they believed we would never be hurt. They did it because they believed hurt should not be the end of memory.”

Jessa enters with a slate. “The witness settlements are still connected. Most of them stayed after Helix left.”

I turn toward the square. Relay screens still hover outside, faces watching from Stonebend and Lark Hollow, from Tamsin Ford and the settlements past it. They saw Celia handled like evidence. They watched Helix try to walk away with a ledger and leave a bakery gutted behind them.

Fear has not left.

But it has gained witnesses.

Rethan crosses the room only after I glance to him. “The note says First Hall. Your current council hall was built ninety-one years after settlement.”

Celia wipes flour from the edge of a surviving table. “Then it is not that.”

“Do you know what the phrase meant?”

“I know songs. Not maps.”

I straighten. “Songs?”

Celia looks embarrassed, which is almost absurd given the state of the bakery. “Children’s song. My grandmother sang it when storms pinned people indoors.”

“Sing it.”

“No.”

“Celia.”

“I am not singing in front of half the outer valley.”

Torren’s voice sounds from the doorway. “For the record, I support the song.”

Celia points at him without turning. “For the record, be silent.”

A few people laugh. The sound is small but alive.

I take Celia’s good hand. “Please.”

Celia looks suddenly younger, and far more tired.

Then she sings under her breath, low enough that the room leans in to hear.

“Where first we stood when waters rose,

beneath the grain and over stone,

three knocks for bread, two knocks for bone,

the hall below will know its own.”

The final word fades into the broken bakery.