The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 74: Volume 3: Chapter 68 – Oak and Iron

Read chapter 74 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 3: Chapter 68 – Oak and Iron Chapter 68 – Oak and Iron Day 16 The Oaks Learn to Walk Yara counted gates on Valeria’s balcony and came up short on bodies. Two dozen posted, two dozen more needed, and that was before you counted night, rain, and men who got sick or scared. “We don’t have the numbers to hold an academy town with only twenty I can afford to change,” she said. “If Eldanian loyalists try us, we’ll bend.” Valeria’s eyes went to the walls, not Yara. “We can keep wards taut for a while. Not forever.” “Then we give the walls arms,” Yara said. “Something that doesn’t panic, doesn’t argue, and makes a thousand men think twice.” Mmm. Build a visible ‘no’ and nail it to the horizon, purred the Gem. I approve of theater. They walked to the green that lived like a lung in the city’s chest. Two lightning-scarred oaks stood where the siege’s last panic had run and cooled. Yara put her palm to one and felt old patience, old ache. “I’m not making pets,” she said softly. “I’m making coverage.” Coverage tastes like fear learning math, the Gem said happily. Feed me your numbers. I’ll give you silence at the gates. Yara gathered what the idea required. Two mice from a professor’s startled pocket, tiny hearts like fist-beats you can hear. Armor plates taken from dead city defenders (not from her attack, but a raider attack last winter), scrubbed and unnamed. Three stones from the previous wall repair, still carrying the shock of being asked to be rubble. Thyra set a circle with copper wire unmended from her forearm, hands precise now where burns once shook. Orrin wrote a grammar for trees, no verbs a root could not understand. Brother Candle placed his metronome on a flat stone and set it ticking at a gate’s patience. Yara let them help. The wards argued less when too many disciplines spoke at once. “Before we start,” Valeria said softly, eyes on Yara’s mouth as much as her hands, “how many more people do you intend to change in my city?” “As few as we can afford,” Yara said. “Your wards make every change expensive, and your city hasn’t decided whether it wants my help or my head.” Valeria’s mouth made a shape that was not a smile. “Sensible of them,” she said. “Proceed.” Spend the mice, the Gem murmured, bright with appetite. Give the trees an animal to envy. Give them armor so they know where softness ends. Give them stones to teach belonging. This will hurt. We like it when it hurts. Yara knelt. Her palms pressed the grass. The first exhale brought the circle up around them, not light, not wind attention. She laid the armor against the bark: breastplate to trunk, vambraces where future joints might remember needing shoulders. She tucked the wall-stones at the roots. She held the mice to her throat like a prayer, breathed once, and put them where the oak could hear a heartbeat if it had ever wanted one. The park listened. The change started the way winter starts quietly in the edges no one counts. Sap slowed. Then heated. Then remembered fire. Bark along the lightning scars split a finger’s width, then two, then a hand. The splits showed not flesh but wood-fiber strung like muscle: pale ribbons tight as drawn bow. The whole trunk shuddered as a joint realizes it has always been a joint. The roots tore free, not with a crack but with the sound of cloth ripped in a church, indecent, necessary. Soil sloughed off in cakes. The first of the great roots reached, tested, and found the ground didn’t hate it. It bent like a knee and held. The crown swayed. Branches that had only known wind began to arrange themselves as if memory had been given angles. A lateral limb thickened, split, and took a new purpose; another followed it; together they made an arm in the shape of a bough. The bark along those limbs split and re-grew as overlapping plates, iron-gray where it met the salvaged armor, stone-dull where the wall-chips taught it to be a gate. One of the mice squealed, gasping for breath. Its sound went into the wood and came out as mo