Just before noon, Vhar reached the fourth stair and turned his key.
CLICK!
The ordinary lock opened. He entered and closed the door.
Vhar set the swords on the folded blanket and removed the white handling thread. Their weight and balance matched while sheathed, and only the Forge-born authorities told him which hilt belonged to Radrazh and which to Ulqor. The room gave him no reason to draw either.
The window peg complained under the crossed pair, so he looped the shoulder strap around the bedpost and secured both scabbards against the wall at his head.
They would be the first thing he could reach if the door opened at night, which made the room usable even if it did not make sleep easier.
He opened the shutter above the washstand.
Vhar could leave through that gate whenever he chose. No guard had locked him inside the room. No ancestor waited outside to decide whether his blood had earned another breath.
He closed the shutter only halfway. He wanted the light, and he wanted to hear the corridor.
He washed the dust from his hands, replaced the wrist cloth, and went down to the dining hall.
The room smelled of fried onions, boiled grain, and hot oil. Students sat wherever there was space, with no servant behind a chair and no branch mark carved into the benches. A boy with ink on his fingers tried to trade half a flat cake for more stew until a girl warned him the kitchen would remember his face.
The kitchen woman behind the serving pots noticed that he had come without the swords. "You left them upstairs?"
"Secured beside the bed."
"Take the corner seat. Less chance of an elbow finding your ribs." She filled his bowl. "More grain?"
"Yes, please."
She added another scoop without asking him why he looked hungry. Vhar ate slowly at first. The food was plain, but his body took it without the hollow weakness that had followed him out of the ninth branch. By the time the bowl was empty, warmth had reached his hands.
The boy with ink on his fingers looked over from the next seat. "You were at the yard this morning."
Vhar looked at him.
"You did the fall line without using your hands," the boy said. "Most people catch themselves and get shouted at."
"My wrists are wrapped."
The boy considered that, then pushed the last piece of flat cake across the table. "Take this. The kitchen gives out more at noon when crews return."
Vhar looked at the cake, then at the boy. "You were trying to trade it earlier."
"That was before I found out the stew had meat."
Vhar took it. "What is your name?"
The boy wiped his fingers on his trouser leg. "You can ask again when I have written something worth attaching it to."
It was an answer meant to be funny. The girl across the table sighed and took the empty bowl from in front of him before he could pile it with the others.
Dema found him at the end of the meal line. She carried a small bundle under one arm and a sheet of room paper in the other.
"The residence keeper left this at the desk," she said. "Two shirts, spare wraps, needle, thread, and soap. Your spending token is meant to cover anything you choose beyond that."
Vhar looked inside the bundle. The clothes were clean and functional. One shirt was dark gray, the other brown. Neither would catch an eye in a crowd.
"Where are the public stalls?"
"Past the rain cistern, outside the lower wall. Stay inside the marked road until the afternoon movement check starts after the shadow reaches the third paving line."
"How much time do I have?"
Dema looked through the open doorway at the courtyard. "Long enough to eat, though not long enough to wander."
Vhar folded the bundle over one arm and left through the lower gate.
The stalls formed a crooked line beside the road, protected by awnings that had been patched with different colors of cloth. A cobbler tapped nails into a child's sandal. An old woman sold cord and lamp oil. A man with a tray of combs turned one over in his hands and tried to convince a student that wood did not split in the rain.
Vhar passed all of them before he stopped at a tray of small metal pieces.
The vendor had arranged rings, clasps, hooks, and simple earrings on dark cloth. Near the center lay a paired set made from narrow red and black segments. They hung from plain hooks, each piece a little longer than Vhar's thumb joint. The red was not bright. It looked dark beside the black, like color caught under old lacquer.
They had no power in them. No seal. No hidden script.
Since waking on the altar, everything on Vhar's body had arrived through necessity, custody, or another person's decision. The earrings were ordinary, and he liked how the dark red sat beside the black.
He picked up one piece between his fingers.
"They are light," the vendor said. "The hook bends before it tears your ear." She glanced at his lobes. "You need them pierced, though the punch and cleaning are included."
Vhar turned it once. "The pair?"
"One token mark."
He set his brass token on the cloth.
The vendor took it, pressed the notched edge into a wax tablet, and handed it back with the earrings wrapped in a strip of paper. "Keep the paper until the counter clears it."
Vhar looked once more at the tray. "Do they turn green in rain?"
"Not unless you bury them for a month." The vendor pointed to the red segments. "Wipe those with a dry cloth. The color stays deeper that way."
"They are not painted?"
"Dyed metal: cheap to replace, worth keeping."
The vendor wiped a narrow spring punch with spirits, marked both lobes, and waited until Vhar nodded.
CLICK! CLICK!
Heat bit through both ears. She threaded the hooks through, cleaned away two beads of blood, and handed him a care cloth with the purchase paper.
Vhar returned through the lower gate and cleaned both lobes in the wash room as she had shown him. The red and black segments rested against his neck when he straightened.
They made him no stronger and carried no House or Academy meaning, yet he had chosen them because he wanted them.
***
The record office of House Talvern stood behind the branch archive, hidden from the lane by high windows.
The record officer had been repairing a torn grain ledger when the final-post sheet arrived. He left the needle hanging from its waxed thread and read the road stamp twice.
Vhar Blackvein had crossed the final House post alive while carrying a completed offering record. The recovery party had stopped there. A freight permit had continued toward the First Measure Academy.
The corridor report smelled of lamp smoke and dried blood. A surviving guard had described broken restraints, a dead controller, two wrapped execution blades, and Academy staff holding the room afterward.
The officer placed both reports beside the offering sheet bearing his office mark.
Offering accepted. Body consumed. Branch payment approved.
His own verification stroke stood beneath the final line.
The junior clerk watched him from the cabinet. "The elders sent two people to ask whether we are preparing another recovery order."
"Did either of them read this?"
"They wanted your answer first."
The officer turned the corridor report so the clerk could see the blood-dark corner. "My last answer sent men into an Academy hall with a dead boy's paper in their hands. One of those men did not walk out, so this time the elders can wait until I know what I am sealing."
The clerk's attention dropped to the offering sheet. "They will still expect us to bring him back."
"I know, so bring the custody book before the elders decide what we saw."
The clerk laid the cracked black volume open. The officer found the section for ritual evidence crossing into another public authority's keeping and left the body line untouched. Vhar was not a body awaiting return.
He requested preservation of the offering sheet, collar remnants, and witness accounts until a joint review established what had happened. Nothing pretended House Talvern still possessed the person it had recorded dead.
Wax softened above the lamp. The officer held the ninth-branch seal over it, paused, and looked again at his old verification stroke.
"Once I press this, my name sits beside both versions," he said.
The junior clerk swallowed. "Should I call a senior?"
"A senior signed the grain payment. I am the one who marked the death complete."
He pressed the seal.
The red wax took every line of the ninth-branch design.
"Carry it to the First Measure Academy registry and place it in a clerk's hand," he said. "Wait until they mark the copy, and bring that mark back to me even if the elders summon you on the road."
The clerk tucked the packet inside his coat. "What if another recovery party leaves before I return?"
The officer picked up the unfinished grain ledger, but his hand remained beside the report from the corridor. "Find me first. I will not verify another death before the living boy has seen the paper chasing him."
The clerk left at a run.
***
The afternoon bell had not sounded when Vhar returned to the public quarter.
He hung the spare shirts on the peg, placed the soap beside the basin, and folded the purchase paper into the back of his room record. The lock clicked shut behind him when he tested it, but he left the door unbolted while he changed for the movement check.
People still crossed the corridor outside. Bowls clinked. Someone laughed near the stairwell. A cart rattled across the lower courtyard.
The room had no chain.
Vhar picked up his key, checked that both earrings were secure, and settled the crossed scabbards against his back before walking toward the reader yard.
GONG!
The afternoon bell followed him into the stairwell.