A Promise Between Stars

1
Vespera had been built according to promises. The city's bones were a lattice of small, polished stones—starstones—set into rooflines, street pillars, and the carved keystones above doorways. Each stone hummed faintly like a distant bell when you listened close enough; each one carried an oath that someone had bound beneath night skies on the day those streets were named. People put names into the sky the way they threaded rope through a raft—deliberate, fearful, hopeful—because the void beyond the city’s light would seize what was left untethered. That was the covenant the Oathkeepers upheld: a catalog of vows, a registry of things not to be forgotten. It was not a gentle art. It was law.

Eira moved through the market with the practiced gait of someone who had spent more hours in the Registry than in the kitchens at home. She carried a slim satchel of tools—filament wires, a cool cloth, a loupe to read the tiny etchings beneath a stone's glow. Her hands were sure. Her boots made no sound on the worn boards of the square. Around her, vendors called, children ducked, and a gull wheeled above the roofs where the nearest starline glittered like sequins across a dark shawl. The day wore the thin gold of late autumn; the city smelled of spice and riverweed, of roasting apples and wet leather.

She had been corralled into the Oathhouse at nineteen and apprenticed to Master Maera because a promise her mother once made had kept them from losing everything. The knowledge that an oath could be a bulwark against the nameless hunger made duty feel less like obligation and more like gratitude. Eira recited the Registry's practicalities to herself to keep a clamp on sudden alarm—the list of small repairs to make, the stones to poll, the families to check if the flux reading rose above a minor tick. She told herself the day would be routine. It meant she did not expect the vendor to ask, voice cracking, for the name of his own child and not find it in the memory where it had lived for twenty years.

He stood by a stall of glass bottles and ribbon, one hand on his head as if to steady the thought like a bird that had decided to land and then changed its mind. He stared at the stall's owner across from him, and his mouth moved around a word that did not come. The woman in the stall—someone who braided ribbons for wedding caps—flushed and began to pat the vendor's shoulder with a practiced, private irritation. There were mutters. A child tugged at the vendor's apron: a small, knot-faced boy with his hair sticking up and a bandage on his elbow. "Father?" he said, as though the word should unlock a door. The man blinked and reached out, eyes wet, and there was a sudden tremor in the square that wasn't wind but something that felt like forgetting.

Eira's training moved first. She crossed the boards and laid one hand on the vendor's shoulder, feeling the subtle cool of a weakening vow where a trace should be warm. Her fingers brushed the skin near his collarbone, beneath the place where the starstone above the stall was set in a carved brass ring. A small outcrop of light in the stone wavered. Repair was a set of rhythms—soft pressure, a whisper of words, the placement of a tiny filament to re-seat a slippage. She whispered the litany and drew a line of silver thread through the vendor's palm, held it to the stone's lip, felt a tiny shudder answer her touch. The man's eyes cleared enough to produce the sound pressed against his throat, and he said his daughter's name as if remembering a line in a play. He folded into himself with a woman's laugh from the ribbon stall—relief like a bell.

The tremor left before the square could notice its shape. Eira stepped back, quieting her breath. She should have catalogued the event, noted the coordinates for a minor slate entry. But something in the fiber of the stone had not been right beneath her fingers; the warmth was off by a fraction, like a heartbeat out of rhythm. She frowned, more at the sensation than at the vendor's return to ease. The Oathhouse catalog had no entry for a faint modulation of that sort on a midday on a market day. It would, if she wrote it down now, summon an inspector, a quiet ledger check, maybe a senior's inspection. She told herself not to overreach. Most slips were caused by calendar fatigue, or by a careless vow made and later neglected, or a child's mispronunciation. Most things mended with a stitch and a steady hand.

She left the market with the satchel heavier at her hip and the thought of the small miscalibration like a pebble in her shoe.