In the pale moonlight streaming through Caer Krea’s broken rafters, two humans watched each other with hawkish eyes.

  Mara the Hopla stood between them, slowly assessing the situation. She froze where she sat, paws pressing hard into the grit.

  Malak filled the doorway like a tree that had decided to walk.

  “It is not you who I have come for, child,” he said again, and his voice was the sound of bark when you press your ear to it—quiet, but carrying.

  Agna did not rise. She settled her palm on the drumhead and stilled it with a touch. Her eyes stayed with Malak’s as if she were measuring the space between them grain by grain.

  “You’ve come all the way to the ruins,” she said, “for a singer with a broken instrument.”

  “For a citizen,” Malak replied. “Who remains outside the circle that keeps our citizens safe.”

  Mara’s ears dipped. Circle. Miss Fauna used that word in lessons. Circles kept storms from blowing roofs off. Circles kept the bad old thoughts from barking too loudly. Circles meant together, and together meant good. She swallowed and looked from one adult to the other.

  “I am safe here,” Agna said. She smiled, but it was the kind of smile you gave a child who had dragged a chair across the whole kitchen to reach a pot just out of reach. “Even when the stars are noisy.”

  Malak stepped in, boots scuffing ash. “Safety is not a feeling we leave to chance,” he said. “It is built. With food and walls and law. With schools where children learn to read each other as well as their letters.” His gaze flicked to Mara, softened, then steadied. “With hands that agree not to harm what they share.”

  “Law can be a kind of song,” Agna allowed. “But it is not the only song.”

  “You refuse the Mandate.” Malak kept his voice level, almost curious. “You will not join the labor rolls. You will not receive the ration tokens. You will not accept quarter in the housing district. You will not leave this place and you will not accept exile.”

  “I accept my own feet,” Agna said. “And the doorstep I chose.”

  Mara’s chest squeezed. The words slid past her like fish. She understood them, and she didn’t. She knew what Malak meant because Miss Fauna had drawn pictures on slates—rows and rows of bread and roofs and numbers, all tidy. She knew what Agna meant because her songs made the spaces between things gentle.

  “Why won’t you just come?” she burst, then winced at herself. “I mean—please?”

  Agna turned her head toward Mara, and the softened smile came back, the blanket-corner one. “Because a promise that says ‘You may choose,’ little rabbit, must also live with the pain when someone says ‘I choose otherwise.’” She lifted her chin to Malak. “And because I am not convinced your circle is large enough to hold a voice that does not match its pitch.”

  “Our circle is large enough for argument,” Malak said, and this time his mouth almost remembered how to be a smile. “I eat with Minxit who would prefer I talk to trees and never to them. I work with a Dixit who I know wishes me gone. We quarrel every day and still build bridges with the same stones.”

  “You also dig tunnels under villages,” Agna replied, mild. “So that if any resist you, they may be stopped.”

  Mara looked quickly at Malak to see if he would deny it. He didn’t. He drew a slow breath.

  “Sanctum is not ashamed of what it must do to hold what it has promised,” he said. “The tunnels are teeth we pray never to bite with.”

  “And if you bite?” Agna asked, almost gentle. “What hymn do you sing then?”

  “The one that keeps children alive.”

  Mara’s ears shot up. She didn’t like being a measure on the scale. She didn’t like that she was a reason and a word in their mouths at the same time.

  Agna’s gaze slid to her again, and the pressure in Mara’s chest eased. “You have a good advocate,” the singer said to Malak. “Little and fierce. Your Mandate is lucky to be defended by such paws.”

  “The Mandate does not need defense,” Malak said. “It needs participation. You are skilled. You could teach. You could sing new songs to help old wounds knit. You could have a warm bed and a ledger with your name written in a neat hand.”

  “My bed is warm enough,” Agna said. “The ledger can wait until a hand who loves me writes my name.”

  Malak’s eyes cooled. “Many hands will love you if you stop making yourself a banner for those who wish to stand apart.”

  Agna tipped her head, unoffended. “You want me to sell my voice to your market.”

  “I want you to stop setting an example that weakens the fabric,” Malak said, and the bark-sound of his voice thickened. “We are not Kaedmon’s empire, but we are not a patchwork of private kingdoms either. A child is bitten by a bird because her fear is not yet taught from her memories”—his look at Mara was knife-sharp and kind all at once—“and somewhere not far away, a man raises a knife because he prefers the old days. We cannot afford to applaud those who refuse to choose a side.”

  Agna’s eyes went briefly sad. “You want me to be your side.”

  “I want you to be on the side with food and schools,” Malak said. “The side where human children learn Invisi-tag from Hopla and Hopla learn to write the letter ‘b’ instead of ‘d’ from human teachers who have pen ink on their fingers. The side where your songs are sung in courtyards, not in a ruin among skulls.”

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  Mara flinched. She’d stepped on that skull. She still felt its tiny ache in her paw.

  “And when your side forgets its promise?” Agna asked, quiet as prayer. “When circles become fences? When law becomes a mouth that only eats and never feeds? When tunnels do more than scare? Will I be allowed to sing the song that names it?”

  Malak’s jaw moved once. “Yes,” he said. “And you will be answered. For I have heard those songs - the Archon himself has sung them to me.”

  “And if I prefer to sing here,” Agna said, tapping the floor with one finger, “where the angel’s eye is missing and I can teach a child one tune without your ledger writing it first?”

  “Then I will take you to Arcona by your arm,” Malak said, and he did not say it as a threat. He said it as if saying the sun would set. “Because the Mandate is not a poem. It is how we survive.”

  Mara felt something pinch behind her eyes. Take her? By the arm? He would just…take her?

  Is that what Mr Ethan would want?

  She got to her feet without quite remembering how she decided to. Kimi’s claws scritched on iron as he shifted, and a beating sound built under the roof—a restless murmur in the rafters.

  “Mr Malak,” Mara said, and tried to make her voice steady like Miss Fauna’s when she told them a hard thing. “Please don’t.”

  “Mara,” he said gently, turning that heavy patience onto her, “this is not a matter for you. You are a child.”

  “I’m a citizen,” she said, and her heart kicked because she had never said it out loud. “That’s what Miss Fauna says. And citizens can ask things.”

  “You can ask,” he said. “But you cannot decide. Beliefs at your age are borrowed clothes. You try them on because they are warm, not because you know whether they fit. It is our task to choose for you until you learn your own shape.”

  Something in Mara that had been crouching since the playground stood up on its back legs.

  “She’s not a coat,” Mara said. “She’s a person!”

  Agna’s eyes flickered—surprised.

  Malak’s mouth went kind. “And I am a person who will answer for what happens when a whole village watches a singer refuse the circle and thinks they can do the same.”

  He started forward.

  Mara did not think; she reached up her small fear with both paws and squeezed.

  The rafters erupted.

  A ragged storm of wings poured down from the broken roof—rooks and crows and a solitary owl, feathers black and brown and dust-gray. They did not strike Malak; they did something worse for a person who wanted to walk straight—they thickened the air with bodies and sound, a feathered curtain, beaks clicking, wings beating, eyes bright coins in the gloom. They settled on beams and the staff and his shoulders and the stone in front of his boots, made the doorway smaller and the path to Agna a series of small decisions.

  Kimi shrieked once, triumphant, then quieted to a watchful keen.

  Agna’s mouth opened. She looked at Mara as if someone had shown her a door she had not known was in her own house.

  “You’ve a flock,” she breathed. “Little one.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mara blurted to Malak, ears flat with the force of it. “I won’t hurt you. I won’t. I just—don’t take her. Please don’t take her.”

  Malak had paused with his foot halfway to the next stone. A rook resettled there, glossy eye fixing him, and he slowly withdrew the step. He lifted his staff a little and the owl glared at it and decided not to move.

  He looked at Mara through the beating air. “Do you think safety is a bird’s decision?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “I think sometimes birds can see things before people do,” Mara said, words tumbling. “Like when a storm comes. Or…when a boy’s hand looks like a knife when it isn’t. Or when a song is kind of like a home.”

  Agna made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. Malak’s eyes moved to her. She met them, still seated.

  “You would have been a good priest,” she said to him. “In the old days. You have a gift for naming the hard medicine as if it were honey.”

  “I have done things I am not proud of too," he replied. "And when my life finally reaches its close, I am prepared to pay for them."

  They regarded each other. The birds breathed. Mara held very, very still.

  Then Malak did something Mara did not expect. He bowed his head.

  “I will not bruise a child to bind a singer,” he said. “Not today.”

  Air left Mara in a whoosh; the birds felt it and shifted as one, a soft wave.

  “But hear me,” he continued, and the bark was back. “By tomorrow’s sun I will return with soldiers who will carry you if you will not walk. You may bring your drum and your songs and your stubbornness; none of those are contraband. You will have a bed and food and an audience who will frown and then soften. Or you may choose exile and I will assign you escort to the border. These are the Mandate’s doors.”

  Agna’s eyes went to the broken mosaic, then down. “And if I choose this floor?”

  “Then you choose to be dragged from it,” Malak said, and sorrow touched the edges of his mouth. “And I choose to be the one who gives that order, because it is better that I do it than a man who thinks you are a symbol instead of a person.”

  Agna breathed out. “Honest,” she said. “If not kind.”

  A tremor thrummed the air.

  It wasn’t the birds. It was the ruin itself that seemed to speak—the stones carrying a sound from very far away and very everywhere at once, a voice rolled large by magic so it could cross hills and sleep and still be heard.

  “People of Westerweald,” it boomed, a Minxit accent wrapped in power—the council’s voice, Cormyr’s timbre ironed out and made public. “By order of the Council at Arcona: invaders mass at the Northern Perimeter! All militia, muster. All magi above rank D, to stations. This is not a drill.”

  Mara’s fur prickled. The birds went still as if the voice had frozen them.

  Malak straightened like a drawn bow.

  “Child,” he said to Mara, already turning, “Our realm needs us.”

  Mara’s paws wouldn’t move. Her body remembered the playground and a boy’s offered hand and what her eyes had turned it into. It remembered Kimi’s bloody beak. It remembered Agna’s song about bowls and bread and breathing.

  “Go, small one,” Agna said softly. “You will help best by being where your people need you.”

  Mara looked at Agna. “But—he said—tomorrow—he’ll—”

  Agna’s smile held a new glint now, not teeth, not mischief—metal under velvet. “Tomorrow is a country we have not visited. I will be here when you return. Or I will be somewhere else and singing there. Either way, you will have kept faith with more than one promise.”

  Malak’s voice snapped from the doorway. “Mara!”

  She flinched. Agna reached and touched her paw—warm and dry and not a leash.

  “Take a song,” the singer said. "It is the only parting gift I can give you."

  She hummed, quick and simple, a tune a body could walk to. The words came after like footsteps finding a road they already knew:

  “Hold your small fire cupped,

  shield it from the wind;

  warm it with your breath—

  promise is a tindered thing.

  Carry what you can,

  share it when you must;

  walk with open hands—

  stone can learn to trust.”

  Mara swallowed the song like bread. It sat warm behind her ribs.

  “I’ll be back,” she heard herself say, though she knew promises were heavy and she was small. “I’ll – I’ll show you that Mr Ethan is making a world where we can all be free. And you can be part of it!

  Agna smiled.

  “Child,” she said, gazing up at the silent stars above them. “As long as someone sits up there, we can never be free.”

  Mara hesitated. Malak was already moving, staff in hand, cloak snapping like a green flag behind him. But the Hopla child’s heart had been thawed and then chilled anew by these words – spoken by someone who believed them and who Mara believed, too.

  All the same she turned and followed Malak outside Caer Krea to what was soon to be a battlefield. In a way, that held a certain simplicity.

  Pure hatred was simpler to stomach than whatever this Praise Singer was.