Mayor Brody stood by the first wagon like a man guarding a chest of gold instead of a creaking farm cart.

  “Two wagons,” he counted under his breath, fingers tapping the sideboard. “Five barrels. Twelve…no, thirteen baskets. Rope. Tapping chisels. Spare axle pins…”

  Villagers flowed around him in a loose, noisy river. Boots thumped across the packed dirt of the square. Somebody dropped a bucket; it rang against stone and drew a sharp curse. Chickens scattered from under a wheel with outraged clucks.

  Under the Founder's Oak, the carts waited in a crooked line. Kael’s broad-shouldered draft horses shifted and snorted, harness leather creaking. Barrels—two with fresh water, the others empty but laden with the weight of hope—sat roped in place. Bundles of poles and coils of rope rolled against one another with each hoof stamp.

  I stood near the chapel steps and rolled my shoulders in the Stonewall Regalia. The plates settled against each other with a low, smooth clink, like stacked crockery. It still felt wrong to move without pain. My ribs hummed, but the sharp catch on each breath had faded days ago. I inhaled to the bottom and only felt pressure, not fire.

  Finn hovered near my elbow with two smaller kids orbiting him. The three of them stared at my armor as if I wore a dragon.

  “Does it hurt?” The younger girl, Mira, gazed up at the breastplate. “It looks heavy.”

  “It is heavy.” I lifted an arm and let the pauldron catch the sun. The etched “stone blocks” glowed against duller steel. “Hurts less than boar tusks, though. Stronger than both of you stacked.”

  Finn squinted at the pattern over my ribs.

  “It looks like a house,” he decided. “A house you wear.”

  “A moving house.” I straightened. “Whole point is that things hit me instead of you.”

  Mira reached out and pressed the back of her hand against my thigh plate. Her knuckles met cold metal.

  “How do you walk in it?”

  “Like this.” I took two exaggerated steps, stomping so the sabatons rang on the cobbles.

  The kids giggled. One of the older men glanced over from the second wagon and grinned before hauling another basket into place.

  A shadow passed over us.

  Beakly dropped onto the lane in a gust of wind and feathers and smugness. His talons scraped sparks from the stone. Villagers near the gate flinched, then relaxed when they recognized him. The big bird flared his wings once in full display, then folded them with neat precision. His plumage gleamed, oilslick black fading to midnight and emerald. He had worked over every feather until not a scrap of dried blood remained from his gift two days before.

  That had been a morning.

  I had opened the inn door, still half asleep, and looked down at two hundred pounds of grumbleboar carcass laid across the threshold like an offering. Beakly had stood over it, chest puffed, head high. Finn had whooped. Elspeth had put a hand to her mouth, then clapped and called for knives. The rest of the day had smelled like singed hair and hot fat. Mara had already claimed a cauldron’s worth for soap before the butchering finished.

  I had pointed at Beakly then.

  “You know normal people bring flowers.”

  He had blinked his old-soul eyes at me, unimpressed, and started cleaning his talons on the dead boar’s ribs.

  Now he strutted across the square and lowered his head so that his beak almost touched my chest.

  “You’re late.” I rested a hand on his warm neck. The air around him held that same iron-and-earth scent from the first day, sharp and grounding. “Expedition’s about to leave.”

  He leaned into the touch, then pulled away and presented his shoulder, as if to say, Mount up, we have important kingdom business.

  Finn bounced on his toes.

  “Can I come this time?”

  Elspeth’s voice cut from the inn doorway.

  “You can come as far as the gate.”

  “Aww, Ma—”

  She stepped out with a covered basket on her hip, wiping one flour-dusted hand on her apron.

  “You heard me. Someone has to help with the rendering. I am not taking that job from Mara. She’d hunt me down with a ladle.”

  I caught Finn’s look and raised a hand.

  “Listen. I need someone keeping an eye on quality control for the bacon. That is important work. I can’t walk back from the forest and find you burned it.”

  He straightened at once.

  “I won’t burn it.”

  “Good. I believe in you.”

  His chest swelled like I’d handed him a sword.

  Elspeth snorted and stepped in close enough that only I heard her next words.

  “Bring them back,” she murmured. “All of them. If you can.”

  The chain under my cuirass felt heavier for a second.

  “I plan to,” I answered.

  Kael appeared from the direction of the forge, leather armor strapped over his usual work clothes. It fit him like an extension of his apron: plain, reinforced at shoulders and chest, darker patches where oil had soaked in. A long-hafted hammer rode his back, the steel head dull from real use, not some shiny ornament.

  “You look like you wrestled a cow and the cow lost,” I called.

  He touched one of the straps by his collarbone with a vague grimace.

  “Mayor insisted on something more than a shirt. Claims I’m ‘a vital asset’.”

  “You are. Also, you bleed like everyone else.”

  “Armor chafes.” He gave the side of his chest a short, irritated rub. “At least yours looks proper.”

  “Mine also weighs as much as Finn.”

  He glanced at the engraved plates, then at my face.

  “And how are your ribs?”

  “Good enough.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Which means what.”

  “Which means if a boar hits me again I won’t die of it, and if you ask one more question I will make you wear my armor.”

  That earned a rare, near-silent grunt of amusement.

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  “Fair.”

  Mayor Brody circled past us, his lips moving. He counted the tools lashed to Kael’s wagon without pausing his larger tally.

  “Three tapping mallets. Six chisels. Resin pot. Stirring paddles. Field bandages. Iron hooks. Good. Good…”

  His hand flicked from rope coil to rope coil, tugging each knot as if monsters might spring out from under fraying hemp.

  “Mayor.” I raised my voice over the general clatter. “We’re fine on gear.”

  “We will see.” His fingers worried his chain, then dropped. “We have not gone so deep in the forest in…years. I prefer excess to want.”

  “You and my attending would get along.”

  He blinked at me.

  “Your…?”

  “Never mind.” I jerked my chin at the barrels. “We tap sap first, glowgourd after. Sap closer, gourds further in. Less to carry by the time we’re tired.”

  He hesitated.

  “If things…if we meet trouble—”

  “We will deal with it.” I rested my palm on Beakly’s feathers and nodded toward Kael. “You have your vital asset. Plus me. Plus Beakly’s ego.”

  Beakly ruffled, as if the word offended him.

  Brody’s eyes slid to the big bird, then back toward the clustered villagers around the inn. Older folk, children, and those not fit to walk far already worked over the second boar carcass in the shade. Blades flashed. Someone salted strips of meat on a board. Mara crouched by a cauldron near the well, already melting down fat, her sleeves rolled past her elbows.

  The mayor drew a breath that lifted his shoulders.

  “Very well. We…go.”

  Sister Myriam came from the chapel, carrying a small bowl of oil. She had the Sunstone symbol hanging from her neck, her grey hair bound up in a knot. She stopped by the wagon line and raised her hand.

  “Hold there.”

  The noise quieted without anyone asking. Even the horses seemed to settle.

  She walked first to the horses and touched their brows with her thumb, murmuring a short blessing to steady their feet. She moved along the carts and dabbed oil on each wheel hub. She turned to us.

  “Emily.”

  I stepped forward. The whole village watched.

  She looked up at the helm under my arm, then at the open curve of my throat.

  “May the Architects who built the bones of this world see you as a worthy steward within it,” she spoke in her chapel voice, low yet carrying. “May the Steward Gods guide your steps through what they grew. May stone remember you as kin.”

  She reached out. I bowed my head enough for her fingertips to trace a small circle with oil just at the edge of my gorget. The spot warmed, then cooled in the morning breeze.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Thanks.”

  “Bring them back.” Her eyes cut over my shoulder to the group forming under the tree. “I would prefer not to conduct more funerals.”

  “On my list,” I answered.

  She snorted.

  “Then go get your sap, child of no god.”

  We mounted in our own ways. I swung into the saddle on Beakly’s back with the ease of practice, my mount proficiency substituting for muscle memory. His muscles bunched under me. The leather creaked, familiar. Kael took his place at the front left of the first wagon, hand on the horse’s halter. Harn, the lanky woodsman with the best eyes, moved to the right flank with a bow across his back. Two more men and a woman I only knew as Lysa took positions around the carts, staves and spears in their hands.

  Brody walked a short way down the lane with us, still counting, then stopped where the last fencepost met the gate.

  “Remember,” he called, “stay within sight lines. No wandering alone. If anything larger than a boar shows itself, you turn back. The trees will hide you from the walls.”

  “Yes, Mayor.” Lysa waved her spear without looking back. “We heard you the first three times.”

  He fussed with the gate rope one last time and then stepped aside.

  The world narrowed to the lane beyond the crooked barricade, where packed earth turned to weed-choked ruts and then to honest forest path. The fence’s sharpened stakes cast long shadows behind us. Children and elders lined the inside, a jagged rank of faces. Finn had found a station right by the gate, hands gripping the top board, jaw set in a hard line.

  I lifted my hand in a quick, two-fingered salute. He copied the gesture with fierce concentration.

  Beakly stepped through the gap. His talons left shallow dents in the softer ground. The air changed. Village smoke faded. Leaf mold and damp earth took over, thick and cold in the back of my nose.

  Kael clicked to the horses.

  “Walk on.”

  We moved.

  The forest swallowed us in stages. First the old, familiar stretch where villagers still cut firewood: trunks scarred by axes, low branches lopped for kindling. Birdsong kept up a steady background. Sunlight reached the ground in wide, warm discs.

  “Tap trees in this band,” I called over my shoulder. “Past the stone outcrop the sap runs too thin.”

  Harn trotted forward until he paced Beakly’s shoulder.

  “How do you know that?” His eyes scanned the trees with workman focus. “We only ever took pitch from the edge.”

  “In another life I spent hours mapping out respawn nodes like a crazy person.” I pointed with two fingers. “You want the taller pines with the thicker crowns. More resin in the trunks. Also see the way those lean? Soil’s drier here. Better flow.”

  He followed my gesture and grunted agreement.

  “You talk like Myriam when she gets going on roots,” Kael muttered from below.

  “I spent a lot of time with fake trees. This is an upgrade.”

  We reached the first marker: a half-buried boulder split by some ancient frost. Roots wrapped around it in a slow choke. I raised my hand.

  “Here. Park the wagons, spread out twenty paces in each direction. Look for deep-barked pines. Not the young smooth ones, not the half-rotten ones. We want trees that look like they survived a few storms and plan to outlive us.”

  Kael set the brake on the lead wagon and walked along the side to start untying tools.

  “Children of no god, master of trees,” he muttered. “Anything else we should know, oh wise one?”

  “You’re holding the mallets upside down.”

  He looked at his hands, turned the hammers without comment, and passed them out.

  I slid down from Beakly’s back. The impact ran up my knees. Armor cushioned most of it, but my muscles still had to care. They held. A week of walking laps around the village with Mara clucking over my posture had done its work.

  Beakly stalked to the nearest pine and stretched his neck to stare up the trunk.

  “If you pull that down, I swear to god,” I warned him.

  He rasped his beak against the bark in a long scrape, testing it, then stepped back with an offended shuffle. His feathers puffed along his spine. The great predator, reduced to tree inspector.

  Kael watched him out of the corner of his eye.

  “He always listen like that?”

  “Depends whether he thinks I’m right.”

  “And?”

  “He thinks I’m right.”

  We got to work. The villagers moved with that awkward mix of eagerness and unfamiliarity that belonged to any new procedure. Lysa swung a mallet with more enthusiasm than aim. I stepped behind her, caught her wrist, and adjusted the line.

  “Hit along the grain, not across. Same as splitting firewood. You want a clean wedge to set the tap.”

  She frowned, then nodded.

  “Like this, then.”

  The chisel sank on her next strike with a more satisfying thunk. Resin already beaded around the cut, thick and golden against the dark bark.

  I breathed in the scent. Stronger than the little pot we’d boiled in Kael’s yard. Sharp, sweet, like someone had cracked open a world-sized air freshener.

  “This stuff,” Harn muttered, watching sap form, “you’re sure it’ll harden wood that much? Sounded like a story.”

  “You saw the plank.”

  He flexed his hand as if it remembered the shock through the hammer.

  “True enough.”

  We set simple wooden taps—Kael’s work, each a smooth wedge with a shallow channel cut along one side—into the cuts and hung clay pots from the high taps, and a bucket from the lowest one. Sap began its slow drip.

  “Don’t cut too deep on each tree,” I called. “We’re milking them, not gutting them. Two or three taps per trunk, no more. They need to survive the year.”

  Kael moved through the group like a foreman, correcting grips, shifting stances, catching wobbling pots before they fell. His usual stable scowl stayed in place, but there was a light under it, as if he enjoyed bossing people around for something that wasn’t a patch job.

  Brody hadn’t come this far; he’d turned back once the trees started to crowd the lane. That idea lodged under my breastbone. We were beyond the line adults in this village usually crossed. Their trust walked with us on every creak of harness.

  Beakly roamed the perimeter. He didn’t range too far; his sense of distance never matched mine, but some instinct kept him within earshot. His head moved on that smooth, predatory swivel, eyes cutting from undergrowth to canopy and back. Every time a squirrel broke cover he tracked it with whole-body stillness that ended in a faint, disappointed feather ruffle when it escaped.

  I moved through the tapping line, helmet under my arm, hair damp at the temples. From the other side of the little clearing, Kael called.

  “Enough standing about. Emily, how far to these glowing gourds of yours?”

  I glanced past the first ring of trees to where the forest darkened.

  “Another half-hour’s walk from the stone outcrop. West and a little south. There’ll be a stream. Gourd vines climb the taller trunks along that bank.”

  He loaded his hammer back onto his harness.

  “And what eats gourds?”

  “Same things that eat everything I guess. Boars, deer, maybe the odd wolf if it’s bored.” I scratched under Beakly’s neck feathers as he came in range. “And us.”

  “Then we should hope they left us a few.”

  We let the sap drip and broke for lunch: boar meat (what else?), bread, hard cheese, and some apples. They would hang and fill up again when we came back this way. That should give us enough to fill two barrels, maybe even three.

  I swung back into Beakly’s saddle. He stamped, eager now, the forest path ahead like a drawn spear line in his mind. The others formed up again around the cart.

  As we walked deeper, the light thinned. Branches knit above us. The air cooled. Birdsong changed to rarer calls. Underbrush grew taller, denser, starting to brush the wagon axles.

  Harn pointed with his chin.

  “Tracks.”

  We halted. In a patch of soft earth, the ground bore the memory of passing hooves. Deep clefts, splayed slightly, edges still dark with damp.

  “Boar,” Kael judged.

  Harn shifted his bow on his back and grunted.

  “Well. If they want a fight, they’ll learn the same lesson their fellows did.”

  Beakly clicked his beak in agreement and fluffed his neck feathers until they brushed my shin.

  We followed the path of the prints, wagons creaking, leather whispering, people breathing in time with their steps. The ground dipped. The distant chuckle of water reached us through the trees.

  “Almost there,” I called, lifting my voice enough to reach the back cart. “Stay tight. Once we see the stream, watch the trunks. Glowgourds look like dead wasp nests in daylight. Keep an eye on the ground for fallen gourds, and up in the high branches.”

  We walked on into the green dim, and the forest closed over us.