“Where did they go?” I asked.
“Where debt hides when it thinks it will not be found,” Merlin said.
Arthur stopped at the place the runner had pointed to. The lane curved around a stand of ash trees, then straightened. I had expected to see blood, broken wood, a dropped scarf. There was nothing.
Warmth lifted. Ink crawled across the top line of a fresh page.
Account removed.
“Removed where?” I whispered.
Arthur touched the page. It wrote again.
Off-book.
“Can someone do that?” I asked. “Take people out of this. Out of counting.”
“Only if they are not people anymore,” Merlin said.
We listened. A thin chime reached us from far off, sharp enough to sour the air. Gareth, who had followed without announcing himself, struck a flint and lit a stub. “Lights high,” he said under his breath. We all breathed easier when the wick caught. The ledger cooled from its angry chill to a steady warmth, like breath warming cold hands.
We followed the hedge to a gap where animals had pushed through. Beyond lay a field gone fallow, the earth scabbed and gray. At the far edge stood three figures where scarecrows might have been: armor fused to bone, faces turned to the road though no eyes in the sockets.
On the way to the gap we found a cart rut that ended mid-turn as if the earth had forgotten mid-sentence. A woman’s scarf hung on a thorn. It smelled of smoke and lemon oil, the kind you keep when grief is the only thing left to polish.
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“No drag marks,” Bedivere said. “No hoof break.”
“Off book,” Merlin murmured.
I hated the certainty in his voice. “How do we put it back on?”
“We make the book louder than the coin,” Merlin said.
In the grass we found a coin with a hole where the king’s face should have been. I held it up. The ledger did not warm. It did not want to write that name here.
“Tracks?” Bedivere asked.
“None that lead out,” Merlin said. “Some that lead in and then forget what they were doing.” He pointed at a shallow scrape in the dirt where a wheel had turned and left no departure.
“You can lift a cart,” I said.
“Or force the road to swear it carried one. But that oath steals someone's breath as payment,” Merlin said.
We walked the east path until the scrub took us by the sleeves. A strip of ribbon hung in the brambles.
“Anwyn,” Merlin said. “The Tutor leaves a sign when she wants you to think you have found her.”
“Statues,” I said, though the word did not fit in my mouth.
“Heroes once,“ Merlin said, his voice flat as iron.
“Who paid them to stand here?” I asked.
“No coin bought this,” he said. “They carried a debt the world refused to name.” He touched the air as if feeling for a seam in it. “There is another hand on this ledger, though. The Exile’s. The one they banished for loving across the line.”
“Across what line?” I asked.
“Between our world and the next,” Merlin said. “Between the people who kept their faces and the people who were taught to fear their own.”
“I want the missing back,” I said. “All of them.”
Arthur stepped into the field. The ledger’s heat rose with each stride until it felt like an ember had lodged beneath my ribs. One of the statues’ hands had been set upon the hilt of a sword that was half rust and half something that did not rust at all.
“Who set them here?” I asked.
“The same who learned to move accounts off the page,” Merlin said. “The same who tells the river when to breathe.”
Arthur stopped three paces from the center statue. “Speak,” he said.
The wind shifted. The wheat stubble rasped. The ledger’s ink slid downward, tilting with the field itself.
I heard a sound like wet paper being torn. The center statue’s jaw dropped as if a string had been cut. No lungs moved. No chest rose.
“Do not,” Merlin warned.
Arthur did not raise a hand. He only watched.
The statue’s mouth worked. A voice too deep for the empty chest came through the hole where a throat should have been.
“The Great Warriors stir.”
Quiet fell. The hedges groaned. The road narrowed, choking itself to silence.
Gawain, the living knight, bowed his head. Lancelot only stared. Bedivere tilted her blade as if to promise payment, someday. I waited for the ledger to judge and it did not. It only grew heavier.
I turned toward Arthur to ask what that meant, but his eyes were on the road, on the place where dust did not remember wheels.
The ledger wrote in iron strokes.
They will collect.