Vhar woke to the smell of something roasting that hadn't been on the fire two days ago, and the sound of a camp that had stopped bracing for a second attack sometime while he slept. The morning light through the tent flap carried none of the gray tension that had colored every dawn since the western gate.
Nyra and Ossa were already at the sorting lean-to, both elbow-deep in the last recovered crates. The strainer-gland compound had held. The membrane coils had survived intact. Half the band had come to sort them, which told Vhar the cargo mattered.
The old man who'd first shown Vhar how to spot a false read was working the far end of the lean-to, humming something tuneless while he checked vial after vial against his own throat. He caught Vhar watching and gave him a nod that hadn't been there the first morning they'd met. "Faster work with more hands on it. Even careful hands." He set another vial into the clean-stock pile. "Ossa tells me you carried crates the first night without being asked twice. Some outsiders wait to be told what's expected of them. You just started lifting."
"Seemed like the obvious thing to do with a hand free," Vhar said.
"It was the correct thing to do. Most people confuse the two." The old man went back to his vials, and Vhar carried the next crate to the clean-stock pile.
"You're moving easier," Nyra said, without looking up.
"Four days of food and nobody trying to kill me." Vhar crouched to take a crate corner out of habit, lifting it clear with the same easy control he'd used the first night. "It adds up."
Tavik found them there an hour later, a coil of braided cord looped over one shoulder and a formality in his bearing that hadn't been there since the terms conversation their first night in camp.
THUD!
He set the cord on the flattest stone near the fire. Its knots struck hard enough to shift a pinch of ash.
"This is a guide-cord," he said. "Every band on this stretch of frontier ties one for outsiders they trust to walk contracted ground without an escort. Most outsiders never see one in their lives. The ones who do usually spend years earning it."
"We've been here six days," Vhar said.
"Six days in which you bled for people who owed you nothing, and Nyra walked two days alone into worse odds than either of us would have sent her into if we'd had a say in it." Tavik picked the cord back up, turning it once in his hands. "Years measure trust one way. What you two did measures it another. I'm not interested in pretending the first way is the only honest one."
Ossa had stopped sorting entirely to watch, and for once she didn't try to hide that she was listening. Behind her, other members of the band had drifted closer without quite gathering into a crowd, close enough to hear, careful not to make the moment about themselves. This was the first cord any of them could remember watching offered rather than hearing about secondhand from an older cousin's story, and it showed in the way nobody wanted to miss it by pretending not to care.
"What does it actually grant," Nyra asked. "Not the ceremony. The practical part."
"Passage through every stretch of ground my band or anyone who recognizes this cord controls, without challenge, without escort, without having to explain yourselves at a boundary rope again." Tavik held it out, not yet handing it over. "Trade priority when we've got something worth trading. A place at any fire that's ours to offer one at."
"Word about the quarry will reach the other bands fast. Show this cord at a boundary rope, and they will know Tavik's band vouches for you. They will not meet you with raised weapons."
Vhar took the cord when it was offered, the braiding rougher under his fingers than it looked, clearly made by hands more used to snares than decoration, each knot pulled tight enough to hold weight rather than merely look finished.
He ran his thumb over the knots. The outer braid was dark hide cord. A thinner pale thread had been worked through its center in short sections, each one tied off before the next began. Tavik saw him checking the construction.
"The pale thread comes from our boundary rope," Tavik said. "Any band that knows the work will recognize it. The knots tell them which camp made it."
"And if someone copies it?" Nyra asked.
"They can copy the color. They cannot copy the hand that tied it." Tavik took the cord long enough to turn one knot toward her. "This hitch runs left because my sister broke two fingers the winter she learned it. Every cord from our band carries that mistake. She says it is not a mistake anymore."
Ossa leaned in. "It is a signature."
"It is a knot," Tavik said. "Do not make it grander than it is."
"It keeps people from stabbing them at a boundary rope," Ossa said. "That is grand enough."
Tavik gave her a look that did not survive more than a breath. Vhar took the cord back and looped it under his coat where it would not snag on either sword grip.
Ossa watched him tuck it away. "Do not wash it in lye. The pale thread will stiffen."
"I will not," Vhar said.
"You would be surprised what outsiders do to things they have just been trusted with," Tavik said.
"I have been surprised before," Nyra said.
"This is more than thanks," Vhar said.
"It became more than thanks after the quarry," Tavik said. "You bled for this camp. Nyra brought back the second ledger. Keep our camps safe when you can. We will open our ropes and fires to you."
"How many of these has your band given out," Nyra asked, "in all the years it's existed?"
Tavik took a moment. "Three that I know of. A healer earned one and kept returning for twenty years. A trader took a debt that would have ruined a family. The third belongs to a story nobody in my band tells at a cheerful fire."
He nodded at the cord in Vhar's hands. "Four, now. I will tell the other bands how you earned this one."
"We'll honor it," Nyra said.
"I know you will. That's the only reason I'm doing this in daylight instead of quietly hoping you'd earn it eventually and never having to say so out loud." Tavik's mouth pulled briefly to one side. "Ossa wants to say something. She's been working up to it since you sat down."
Ossa's scent-slits flared once, caught. "I wasn't," she started.
"You were. Say it."
Ossa looked at Vhar first, then at Nyra, and let out a breath before the words came. "I used to think the Academy sent people like you because we couldn't handle our own ground. That you'd fix it and leave, and it'd be like we never needed fixing at all." She wrapped her arms around herself, not quite a shiver. "You didn't fix it for us. You made it so we could keep it fixed ourselves. I didn't expect that to matter as much as it does."
"It's supposed to be," Vhar said. "Anyone who tells you different is selling something." Ossa nodded once and held his gaze.
The band's fire that night ran later than any since Vhar and Nyra had arrived, food shared without the careful rationing of a camp still expecting trouble, voices carrying farther into the dark without anyone hushing them for it. Someone had found an instrument Vhar didn't recognize, strung with what looked like sinew rather than gut, and the tune it produced was strange enough to his ear that he found himself listening for the shape of it rather than the melody.
Ossa danced badly and without embarrassment, dragging a reluctant Nyra into it for exactly one song before releasing her back to the fire's edge, laughing in a way Vhar hadn't heard from her since before the quarry.
Tavik did not dance. He sat with his bowl and watched the band eat, argue, and refill the cookpots. When Vhar looked over, Tavik met his eyes.
"The cord protects this," he said, gesturing at the band. "Open trade keeps food in those bowls, tools on those tables, and families at this fire."
Vhar's Uvar had climbed back toward his usual reserve. For the first time since the western gate, no wound, pursuit, or incoming attack demanded it.
Nyra sat down beside him with two bowls, handing one over without asking whether he wanted it. "House Severin's letter is still unopened in my pack."
"You could burn it and they'd never know before the next report reached them."
"I know. I'm not going to." She turned the bowl once in her hands, not yet eating from it. "Whatever it says, it's true either way. Burning the paper doesn't unmake the terms it's carrying." She finally took a bite, chewing slowly before she spoke again. "I'll read it tomorrow, when it can't ruin tonight for either of us."
"Read it tomorrow," Vhar said. He looked at Ossa laughing by the fire and Tavik filling a bowl for an older woman. "Tonight, let the band keep one quiet meal."
The missing ledger name still waited north and east. House Talvern still had people on the roads. Tonight, the fire stayed warm, the guide-cord lay beside Vhar's bowl, and Tavik's band shared its camp by choice.