Hands That Span the Hollow

The Broken Span

After the storm the Hollow looked as if someone had taken braid and bone and shaken them until the river coughed. The central crossing—Asha's city called it the High-Arch, proud and painted in seasons of guild work—had collapsed into a tangle of living timber and exposed sap. Planks lay like ribs across the water; where the bridge had breathed and answered footsteps it now hid a gape that hummed with exposed tendrils and the raw scent of resin.

Asha Trel moved across the wreck with a surgeon's calm. She knelt at an exposed tendril and pressed the side of her hand against the warm, pulsing vein. Her fingers tasted resin and the faint bitter of peat from the river stones. The fiber answered with a slow betrayal of warmth—alive enough to be coaxed, delicate enough to be broken by careless hands. Asha smiled in a way that was more calculation than joy.

She had come to the crossing in the gray hour when merchants were still arranging their stalls for a day of repairs and rumor. Children hawked hearth-spirals—steamed pastry cones rolled with fennel and sweet curd—calling them a cure for wet shoes and damp moods. Somewhere, a baker had left an oven lid open and the smell of browned crust lifted the air; the festival bunting sagged, damp with last night's rain, and a man tried to sell woven hats made of river reed that looked both fashionable and mildly uncomfortable.

“Master Asha, you look like someone who plans to scare the council into paying twice,” said Lela, balancing a shallow crate of resin pots on one hip. Her apprentice had the practical face of someone who measured beyond the next meal; she watched with the tense patience of someone who knew the difference between a clever trick and a useful solution.

Asha levered a splintered beam with the edge of her palm. “Scare-mongering does help with fees,” she said, easing the timber so that she could examine a splice, “but I have better plans.”

Harun Thale lounged on a half-broken railing, the old master who had taught her to read the language of living wood. He made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a cough. “Plans are nice,” he said. “Just remember: a plan is only as good as the rope that holds it together.”

Lela snorted. “Harun says that like knots are moral philosophers.”

“Knots are moral philosophers,” Harun replied, deadpan. “They keep secrets and tattle at the same time.”

Asha's eyes caught the ragged line of council heralds assembling across the river. They had set poles and ropes for a temporary crossing—enough to funnel wagons in single file while the High-Arch was replaced. The council's trumpet voice promised speed and a public commission for the builder who could deliver a lasting span before the Harvest Festival. The promise was a hunger in the city; a woodworker could sell a signature span and secure a workshop for a lifetime, the sort of security Asha had measured in late nights and folded plans. She felt the appetite like a physical thing, an ache behind her ribs.

But she also knew where the largest nodes of living fiber grew. Lower Breach, a narrow hamlet downriver, sat over a root complex the size of a child's cart. Their wells drank the same flow Asha wanted to borrow for a grand arc. She swallowed. The problem shifted under her feet: the commission was not merely engineering; it might take water from people who had always depended on it.