POV: Cael
Lantern Night always arrives like a forgiven secret. The river wears light like a necklace; the bridges grow sails made of glass and song. Crownward is a machine tuned to joy, and my job is to keep its gears from eating fingers.
“Firebreaks in thirds,” I tell Jax, pointing with a gloved hand. “Coal buckets at each arch. Wet canvas rolled, not folded. If a wick sulks, we smother mood before flame.”
“Understood,” he says, dispatching Shields with the elegance of a well-practiced sentence.
Music spills from the lower promenades—pipes, frame drums, the clatter that means families remembered to bring spoons. Hearthworks is a river unto itself: Silvie’s crew running hot lines—stew, dumplings, tide tea—where the crowd flows thickest. They move with rehearsal, trading trays and jokes, redirecting the hungry with three words and a palm. Order masquerades as kindness. It is both.
Rhun prowls under my breastbone, quieter than usual, sated by the city’s humming throat. “Mate laughs,” he notes, and I don’t ask how he knows.
I hear it then—Mara’s laugh—low, unpretty, unafraid. Pia says something scandalous; Mara drops her head and shows her teeth to the night like a promise that isn’t for me. My spine loosens two ribs before I remember it shouldn’t.
We run the outer ring, Jax and I, checking rope tension, testing ladders, letting festival guards know where the wind would try to be a god. I accept congratulations I don’t deserve and deflect questions I don’t have time to answer. The Regent keeps to the hibiscus hall balcony with a cloak around her shoulders, watching the city do what it’s best at: insisting on life.
Under the south arches, two children misjudge bravery and chase a paper bird into a knot of dancers. I step into their path, catch one by the collar and the other by momentum, and nudge them toward a doorway guard with a warning that earns me a grin and a grimace. I am a wall with hands. It is enough.
The crowd compresses for the first fireworks. A thousand faces lift; a thousand chests rise. I look down instead—habit—and almost walk straight through a woman emerging from the shadow of a vendor’s cart with a tray above her shoulder.
We both stop the clean inch before collision. The tray tilts. My palm finds her waist—heat, cloth, breath—and steadies the weight as she rescues every bowl as if shame would shatter if one fell.
Mara looks up. The world clicks.
“Sorry,” I say, which I rarely mean and mean now.
“Don’t apologize for existing,” she says, which is ridiculous advice and better than any prayer I remember.
My hand is still at her waist. I know it because every finger knows its sin. I step back first. She steps back a half-step more than necessary, the mathematics of dignity. For three heartbeats, the festival passes us like a river around two stubborn stones.
“Firebreaks?” she asks, because she knows my language now.
“Every thirty paces,” I answer. “You?”
“Every hungry mouth,” she says, and moves sideways into the crowd, tray high, trajectory precise.
Rhun snorts. “Ours.”
“No,” I tell him, and he bares his teeth like an understanding I will have to earn.
The first volley cracks the sky—red fans, gold rain, a white peony bright enough to make the river forget it is water. People gasp the way people do when beauty hurts. The second volley lifts; whistles stitch air.
“Eyes on the south runes,” Jax says in my ear, soft but urgent.
I pivot. Beyond the third arch, at ankle height where a lantern’s rune band meets the support rail, a wick flares wrong—too fast, too white, vanishing as if ashamed. Then it stutters back, licking a smear of oil someone placed like a careless blessing.
“Deliberate,” I say. Not loud. Certain.
Jax is already there. I’m one step behind, shoulder-first through the drift of dazzled onlookers. “Canvas,” he barks. A Shield throws a roll; I push it down with my forearms, smothering the flame instead of spreading it. Another Shield pours sand in a small, private ceremony. The fire dies reluctantly, like a gossip strangled by facts.
“Check the others,” I tell the nearest runner. “Every seam. Every rail.” He sprints, shouting for hands. Festival guards pretend they aren’t frightened and do as they’re told.
I check the rune band. The filigree holds—Lorre’s people made it to last—but there’s ash where ash should not be. It smells faintly of ground shell and vinegar. Not cookfire. Not accident. The shape of someone’s idea.
Overhead, fireworks cheerfully lie about the night, covering our small blaze with better stories. The crowd shifts around us, applauding light while we deny it the chance to turn cruel.
“Fast hands,” Jax mutters, scanning faces that are already looking elsewhere. “Wrong hands.”
“Find me every oil jug within fifty paces,” I say. “And every face that looks relieved.”
He snorts. “Relief is a crowd sport.”
We stand until the last ember admits defeat. Then I look across the deck toward Hearthworks. Silvie has noticed nothing, because noticing this is our job, not hers. Mara hasn’t noticed because I don’t want her to. She laughs again at something Pia lands with a flourish, and Rhun hums approval like a beast content to share a kill it didn’t make.
I dust my palms, taste smoke that doesn’t belong to celebration, and resume the circuit with a flock of eyes I wish were enough.
I try not to think of Mara. I still do.