"He is softening," Miren said.
"Softening is not the same as changing," Sibley replied. "A softened king can still harden overnight if a clerk whispers the wrong fear. You have something under your dress that rustles like slate."
Miren drew out the etched plate. Sibley held it to the last light and went very still.
"Veyne's water-veins," she whispered. "I saw a cousin of this map when I was a girl, in the castle steward's cupboard. It was said the wellscales made them—memory pressed into stone, not ink. If the deep lines are true, our well drinks from the same dark lake as the castle cisterns. And if the old talk is true, that lake feeds a spring under the capital's oldest quarter when the channels are clear."
"Vetch wants them open," Miren said. "Wants its kind able to move again. Wants no more fire over water."
"And you?"
"I want Stonewell to still be Stonewell when the carts leave. I want Pip and Nessa to chalk goats next year. I want Edric to build the porch he keeps measuring with his eyes. I want the King to leave owing us a term he is afraid to break because breaking it would make him the man who burned the water as well as the stone."
Sibley returned the slate. "Then you will need more than a speech. You will need a demonstration he cannot dismiss as village cleverness. Take him into the ruin. Let the wellscale choose whether to be seen. If Vetch will not show itself, we bargain with the map alone and pray his clerks are greedy for water-wisdom."
"Into the ruin," Edric said from the doorway. He had brought a lantern without being asked. "Tonight?"
"Tomorrow," Sibley said. "In daylight. Ghosts are less persuasive when men can see their own feet."
That night the army's cookfires made a second constellation across the cut wheat. Miren lay on her pallet and listened to distant singing—soldiers' songs about girls and rivers and not about burning. She thought of Vetch in the cool dark under the shrine, clutching a scrap of the King's own color, waiting for humans to become worth the climb.
Edric's voice came softly through the shared wall of their neighboring cottages, the way it had since they were children pretending sleep was optional. "Miren."
"I'm awake."