Chapter Thirteen: The Song in the Hall

The garrison at Estreth was more crowded than Callan had expected.
Merchants, families, even a handful of stragglers from towns upriver had pressed into its stone walls. The great timber gates stood barred, and the watchtowers burned bright with Charter-fire, though Arlo noticed the flames guttered more than once against the wind.

Inside the hall, a rough supper was being shared. Men and women in battered armor hunched beside scribes and children, all under the smoke-stained rafters. The air was thick with worry — every laugh too loud, every silence too long.

Arlo sat close to his father at one of the trestle tables. Doggy lay in his lap, half-hidden beneath his cloak.

A murmur rose at the other end of the hall. Someone had begun to sing.

At first Arlo thought it was only a drinking song, but the words were old, older than any tavern. A grizzled guardswoman leaned against the hearth, eyes half-closed, her voice carrying steady as the flickering fire.

"Before the stones and bells were sung,
Before the river’s binding rung,
The Charter rose, a silver flame,
That bore the world and gave it name.

It runs in ink, in blood, in breath,
It holds the line ’twixt life and death.
In every mark, a thread is sown,
A thousand hands, yet all as one.

Beware the gaps where Charter fades,
For there the Free and Wild have played.
But where the marks are bright and near,
The dead are bound, and life kept clear.

So speak the marks, both strong and true,
They watch, they bind, they carry through.
And though the bells may fail or fall,
The Charter holds, sustaining all."

When she finished, silence hung heavy. Even the smallest children seemed hushed by it.

Callan exhaled slowly. “I haven’t heard that in years.”

“It’s a prayer as much as a song,” said a soldier beside them, his eyes shadowed with weariness. “We sing it when the gates are tested. Reminds us that even when the Abhorsen is far away, the Charter still binds.”

Arlo stroked Doggy’s wooden ear. The toy gave off no light now, but Arlo thought he felt a faint pulse in its body, like a heartbeat.

He wanted to believe the song. But the spirals he’d seen on the wall would not leave his mind.

That night, when the fires were low and the hall’s noise had dwindled to whispers, Arlo dreamed again of the spirals — only this time they coiled around the poem’s words, twisting them into silence.

He woke before dawn, his breath clouding the air. The marks on the hall’s walls had dimmed again, as though something pressed from outside, waiting.