"It chooses," Miren said. "I will ask. I will not command."
She went to the cistern rim and knelt. The stone was cold through her dress. She did not call Vetch like a dog. She spoke as she had at the hatch—plain, equal.
"You climbed to us. We brought the King to the water you remember. If you want him to see you, come. If you want only the map to speak, stay. We will honor either."
For a long minute there was only wind through broken arches. One of the guards shifted. Tobin watched the dark mouth as if expecting a story to climb out of it.
Then a scrape. A wing-shadow. Vetch rose from a side cleft in the cistern wall—not from the deep water but from a tunnel mouth half-hidden by fallen masonry—and perched on the rim with the crimson scrap still in its claws. Up close in daylight it was more itself: scars on one wing membrane, a notch in the left horn-ridge, resin eyes that held no petition and no fear, only assessment. It looked at Osric the way Osric had looked at the ruin—measuring what remained.
Osric did not reach for a weapon. He did not coo. He inclined his head the smallest degree, a king greeting a fact.
"I remember your kind in the lower courts," he said. "My brother fed you kitchen scraps against the steward's rules. I told him it was sentimental. He told me sentiment keeps the deep paths open." His voice roughened. "He was right about more than I admitted."
Vetch set the crimson cloth on the stone between them and placed one claw on it, then on the slate in Miren's hand, then pointed down the cistern and outward—toward the capital's distant idea, toward Stonewell, toward the network.
"A bargain," Miren said, heart hammering, keeping her voice level. "Not a surrender of our wells. Shared clearing of the channels. Village knowledge and crown labor. In return: the levy this year stands as written, but the seed remains untouched, and next year's levy is cut by a tenth if the springs under the old quarter run clearer. Written. Witnessed. Breakable only in public."
Dreven inhaled to object to percentages. Osric lifted two fingers and the objection waited.
"You ask me to bind the crown to a creature's map and a village elder's memory," Osric said.
"I ask you to bind the crown to not repeating the fire in a quieter way," Miren said. "Neglect is also a kind of burning."
Edric spoke then, unexpected and steady. "And we ask you to leave Sergeant Bramble's kind of cleverness outside our seals. We will pay what we owe. We will not pay what fear invents overnight."