Dawn in Aldermere had the slow stubbornness of a thing that had forgotten why it rose. Mists unstitched themselves from the bay and pooled in low alleys, laying a cool, damp hand on cobbles and doorframes. Elara Voss liked the hour for the way sound sat in it: a chisel’s cough, a cart’s distant groan, the soft, irregular music of the city’s underflow. She worked by the stream of that music, fingers steady, back arched over a slab that hummed faintly when she tapped it. Her chisel struck a rhythm she had learned to read like a ledger of tides — not of water but of passage. A notch here would coax a footfall to swing left; a shallow bevel there nudged a courier into a safer step.
A pickpocket’s apprentice had once tried to steal a walk by stepping where the stones told him not to go; the novice had come home with a slipperless indignity and a sermon on respecting the bones beneath your feet. Elara kept that story for herself and a small grin for the months when the city still let her be invisible. Now, a woman with a basket of sugared crescents and an apron spattered with flour — not the main sort of thing one expected at a pathsmith’s dawn — shuffled past, nose wrinkling as she inhaled the morning. Smells were important in Aldermere: brined fish stalls, fried pastries, the woodsmoke of early bakers who swore oil and soot made better crust. The baker inclined her head at Elara the way one nods to a neighbour who has been entrusted with a secret.
A soft voice, more soap than steel, sighed close to Elara’s ear. “You serenade them again at that hour, and I’ll start charging admission.”
Elara didn’t look up right away. She threaded a hairline groove into the stone and rubbed the curls of debris free with the heel of her hand. The motion was more rubbing than thought: muscle memory had become a second language. When she finally turned, the apron was beside her, hands dusted white, Mara Jin’s face set into an expression that blurred annoyance with affection.
“You’re exaggerating,” Elara said, letting a small laugh hide in the rasp of her voice. “I don’t ‘serenade’; I coax.”
Mara quirked an eyebrow. “Same thing if you hum to it, heart-on-the-floor or not. The stones do react. Don’t pretend you aren’t tucking them into bed each night.”
The two women had worked close for years: not intimate friends, but kin of craft and habit. Mara sold herbs and odd remedies at the dock; she knew the city’s tastes and how much pepper one could put on a stew before folks declared it an insult. Their banter was a braid of long acquaintance, the sort that softens the edges of days. “You still refuse sugar?” Mara asked, waving a sugared crescent as if it were a treaty.
“I keep my teeth an honest distance from trouble,” Elara replied. She reached out and took the crescent with the index and middle fingers of one hand, tasting it like an offering and then, with a little theatrical sigh, breaking off a corner and letting Mara keep the larger share. “Besides, guild rules discourage intemperate snacks during an annual lay. Or was that only in Vale’s stories?”
Mara cackled. “Vale will tell you anything if it makes him sound more endangered than he is. Come on, the waterfront’s buzzing. They’re early with the line-markers this year. Guild’s setting a new calendar for the great settling.”
At the phrase “great settling,” Elara’s breath pulled in. The settling was the ritual she had apprenticed under and risen through: the day the city’s keystone — a large, joint-studded stone at the heart of one busy lane — was inspected and, if necessary, reworked. It was supposed to be a balancing act that kept Aldermere’s moods gentle and traffic fair. Craftspeople and merchants talked about it as if it were the turning of a wheel in the sky. For Elara it had the more private weight of a ledger closing on a year of choices. She felt her hands tighten on the chisel handle.
“You’ll go to the feast, won’t you?” Mara asked, more curious than pleading.
Elara shook her head. “I prefer not to be ogled while they eat.”
Mara snorted. “You’d be ogled anyway. People like you because you keep them from tripping into the canal.”
Elara said nothing to that and bent back to her stone. The city made a chorus of small necessities, and she liked that almost as much as the craft itself: the boatmen who mended nets with bright fingers, the bakers who argued about new syrups, the glassblowers who sold tiny blue wind-beads children strung to their sashes. All of it moved along lanes she helped to order with minute, blunt talents: a chisel that could echo a footfall and a hand that could hold a pavement’s shape while the underflow resettled. It kept her safe from asking for anything untidy.