Knots Over Galesong

The terraces of Galesong rose like accordions, folded tiers of plaster and timber stacked against the wind. Each level kept its own angles of sun, its own recipes for bread, its own rules about who might cross a threshold. From below, the High Gardens looked like a green ledge of improbable calm: beds of clipped herbs, trays of soil like polished mirrors, gardeners walking on narrow catwalks and talking in the clipped, efficient language of pruning. From above, the market smelled like salt and fried fish and the tang of baked sky buns — dough rolled thin and puffed so quickly it remembered the gusts and came out feather-light. Isla Verran liked the smell of that bread better than people’s opinions.

She sat in a stall that leaned into the lee of an alley, where the city’s wind pressed and thought it had the right to ruffle everything. Her hands moved with work that began before speech: fingers smearing sap, palms coaxing loop over loop, kneading singers — small living vines that hummed when she spoke in the right pitch. The ropes she made were not merely cords; they carried laughter and shipments and, once, an entire boat’s good luck from one terrace to another. She named knots as if scolding cats: a sharp click of tongue for a stubborn loop, an indulgent hummed name for a braid that had done what she asked.

Hana Rill dropped into the stall like a shoal of chatty sparrows, cheeks flushed with early market heat and pockets full of gossip. "You still teaching the big anchors to behave, Isla?" she said, tipping a basket towards the row of cords. Hana loved grand metaphors and small practical bribes: a bit of sugared sea-molasses or, occasionally, a tether of her own pet singer.

Isla grunted, winding a new splice. "I teach them to hold and not to tattle. Anchors are proud beasts, they don't like being told how to sit." She gave one cord a corrective tug; the singer sighed and aligned its tendrils obediently. "If they gossip, they cost me customers."

Hana laughed and then sobered, watching the street. Above their heads, a child on a timber balcony tossed a paper bird and the current took it like a mild scandal. An old man below sold sky buns with a flourish so theatrical the bread wanted to be paid attention to; a gull had learned to swoop at that stall at precisely two past noon. Galesong kept ridiculous rituals. The High Gardens kept rituals that smelled of wet loam and the silent, precise cleanliness of someone who counted blades of grass as currency.