Rowan’s shoulder had gone raw under the timber before he noticed he was carrying it.
He crossed the yard at midday hauling beams from the half-collapsed shed toward the north wall’s gap, and the web hummed thin and wrong with every step not fourteen separate threads anymore, just a single wrongness with fourteen different aches buried inside it, the way a bad tooth hurts everywhere in the jaw at once and nowhere in particular.
Three days since the burning, and it still hadn’t settled.
The Standing Sense had been bearable at five threads.
Ignorable at three.
Fourteen threads thinned across a frame meant for four was a chronic weight that sat behind his eyes and made the world feel too bright, too loud, too close.
He dropped the timber beside the scorched gap and turned to find Bili standing there with a bucket of nails, frozen mid-step like he’d walked into a room that wasn’t safe.
“Set them down,” Rowan said.
Sharper than he meant.
“The frame’s not ready yet.”
Bili set the bucket down and stepped back, and Rowan felt the boy’s thread flinch a small cold spike of fear that hadn’t been there before.
He hated it.
“Wait,” Rowan said.
Softer.
“I didn’t mean”
But Bili was already gone, quick and quiet the way young men moved when they’d learned not to draw attention.
Rowan stood alone beside the gap and pressed both palms against the timber until the splinters bit, because the sharp immediate pain was at least a thing he could locate and understand.
The web was everywhere and nowhere.
A weight in his chest and his head and his blood that wouldn’t let him rest and wouldn’t let him think and made every small frustration into a thing that landed on someone else as a wound.
The gift made his worst moods into scars on other people.
He closed his eyes and counted the threads one by one until the sense settled to a bearable ache, then went to find the man whose thread sat coldest.
Joram lay in the granary loft where Aeldra had set up a pallet near the warmth of the chimney.
His legs were wrapped in clean linen Rowan knew they couldn’t spare, and his face had the grey, hollowed look of three days spent deciding, over and over, whether living was worth the effort.
His thread sat at the very edge of Cooling.
Not soured yet.
Not even begun.
But cold enough that Rowan could feel the potential like a blade resting against skin one more failure, one more debt unpaid, and the rot would start.
Aeldra was spooning broth into the man’s mouth when Rowan climbed the ladder.
She looked up and frowned.
“He needs rest,” she said.
“I need to talk to him.”
“What you need is sleep. You’ve been awake two days running and you’re snapping at children.”
Rowan stopped halfway across the loft.
“I didn’t”
“Bili came to me crying,” Aeldra said.
Flat and plain, the way she said everything that mattered.
“Said he’d done something wrong and didn’t know what. Took me an hour to convince him you weren’t sending him away.”
The splinter behind Rowan’s ribs twisted deeper.
“I’ll talk to him,” Rowan said.
“You’ll sleep first,” Aeldra said.
“A man who can’t rest his mind will misjudge, and this fort can’t afford it.”
She set the bowl aside and stood, and Rowan saw the way her own thread had sharpened over the past three days warmer than it had been, but edged now with something harder.
The plain-truth conscience he hadn’t known he needed.
“Let me sit with him,” Rowan said.
Aeldra looked at him for a long moment, then nodded.
“One hour. Then you sleep, or I’ll dose your wine and put you down myself.”
She left.
Rowan pulled a stool to the pallet’s edge and sat.
Joram’s eyes tracked him, dull and wary.
“You’re wondering if a ruined man is still worth feeding,” Rowan said.
Joram didn’t answer, but his thread pulsed cold.
“You are,” Rowan said.
“And I’ll tell you why. Because I put you on that wall before you were ready, and your legs burned because I was greedy. That’s my debt. Not yours.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and made himself meet the man’s eyes.
“You know horses,” Rowan said.
“Maddoc told me. Said you kept a stable in Baerlon before the work dried up.”
A faint nod.
“The fort doesn’t have horses yet,” Rowan said.
“But it will. And when it does, I’ll need a man who knows how to keep them through a hard winter and how to stretch fodder when the stores run thin. A man who can teach a boy to shoe a mount and tell a good line from a bad one.” He paused.
“A man doesn’t need two good legs for any of that. He needs a mind that works and hands that don’t quit.”
Joram’s throat worked.
“You’re saying I’ve still got a place.”
“I’m saying I owe you one,” Rowan said.
“And I don’t walk away from debts.”
He stayed there through the night, close enough that Joram could see him if he woke.
Aeldra brought him a blanket and a warning look, but she didn’t argue.
Rowan sat and felt the man’s thread slowly, slowly pull back from the edge not warm, not whole, but no longer teetering toward the rot.
The web was still thin.
The ache was still there.
But one thread, at least, had steadied.
It was something.
Aeldra found him at dawn, still awake, his eyes grit-dry and his back stiff from the stool.
“You didn’t sleep,” she said.
“I will,” Rowan said.
“After I talk to Bili.”
She crossed her arms.
“The sense will never let you rest again. You know that, don’t you?”
Rowan looked at her.
“A man who can feel every fear his people carry,” Aeldra said, “will either learn to put it down or drown in it. And you’re the kind who’ll try to carry it all.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“So what do I do?” Rowan asked.
“You do what you just did,” Aeldra said.
“You honor the debts one at a time. You sleep when you can. And you stop expecting the weight to get lighter.”
She handed him a cup of something bitter that smelled like valerian and old herbs.
“Drink that,” she said.
“Then sleep. The fort will stand another morning without you hovering over it.”
Rowan drank.
It tasted like earth and ashes and the kind of care that didn’t bother being gentle.
Behind him, Joram’s thread hummed faint and steady in the grey light, no longer cold.
One debt honored.
Thirteen more to go.
He closed his eyes and let the exhaustion take him, knowing the sense would wake him long before he was rested, and that Aeldra had just described the rest of his life.