Rowen Ashvale worked by the river before dawn, when the fog pooled like a slow, patient thing between warehouses and moored barges. His hands moved as they always had, a practiced choreography of fingers and breath that had become more a part of him than the name he answered to. The mortuary's single window was a pale eye in the bleak gray of morning; through it he could see the water silvering where the city exhaled. He set the book upon the table with no ceremony; the Codex itself seemed to accept the small motion as if it were a tide returning to shore.
He had married ritual to routine until the two were indistinguishable. Each binding began with the same three gestures: the sweep of an open palm across the page like the closing of a door, the slow intake of another's last remembered breath, and the final fold that made memory manageable and still. Those who had come before him had called the movements by old names and performed them as prayer. Rowen called them labor and let their repetition steady the ache that sat under his ribs like a coin he could not spit out. He had learned to prepare for the weight of grief the way one learned to prepare winter stores—methodically, with a relentless focus that admitted no softness.
Today there would be two bindinds: an old ferryman who had drowned in a late-season flood, and later, a small child whose fever had taken her in the night. The ferryman's memories were heavy with current and rope, the clumsy jokes he told the gulls, the particular grief of a man outliving his boat. Rowen moved through each recollection with a tenderness he did not permit himself elsewhere. When a memory pressed too hot against his palms he would let it go into the Codex and watch it sink into the vellum shelves as one might place coal into a dark hearth. The book swallowed and held, folding the last light of lives into pages that shimmered when he set them upright.