Chapter 347: Ledger
They came down out of the highland on the fifth day.
The trail stopped climbing and began to fall. The brown grass gave way to scrub, then to fenced ground, then to the first plowed field they had seen since the east. Somewhere ahead a dog barked and a child answered it. The empty country was behind them now. They were walking into the part of the world that kept records.
The town sat where two trails crossed. It was small — a cluster of stone houses, a feed store, a well house, a smith whose hammer they heard before they saw the roofs. Not a place anyone wrote songs about. But it had a Guild relay desk, and that made it the first place on their road where the work could become a line of writing.
Kai felt the difference before he saw the desk. It was not a thing he read off the ground. It was a thing he knew from two years of carrying messages east. A town with a desk was a town that talked to other towns. What was said here did not stay here.
