The Last Carving

Nine months ago, a thousand hands carved through the longest night at Caer Arian, cutting the debt out of the ledger-stones - every valley of Gwynt carving its portion of the un-making, willingly, in public. The Old Bargain was broken.

That same night, new glyphs appeared on every ledger-stone in Gwynt, in no human hand, in the oldest grammar: the bargain is broken; we are coming to collect in person.

They have not come. Not the way anyone expected - no walkers on the roads, no voices in the night. Only warmth under the hands of those who touch the stones. Glyphs rearranging themselves in the dark. The old workings stirring here and there without any carving at all, like a dog slipping its leash.

Madoc - fifty-eight, forty-one years a Reader of the Realm - is summoned to Cwm Rhos, where the ledger-stone is wrong. At Caer Arian, the Readers' Council debates the question no Reader was ever trained to ask: is the bargain broken, truly? Or have promises kept badly for long enough stopped being promises, and started being something else - something hungrier?

In Cwm Derwen, Eira the carver and her husband Bleddyn are learning what it means to carve honestly when no one can say what the stones have become. Six-year-old Cai walks the valleys asking the question Madoc has spent forty years avoiding: why do the stones take at all? And Sioned, the Uncut elder who has been right in all the wrong ways for thirty years, waits in her stone cottage above Cwm Afon with an answer Madoc may not want to hear.

The conclusion of The Old Bargain trilogy follows Madoc from the warm stones of Cwm Derwen to the citadel court and beyond - to an audit no ledger can hold, a moot of forty-seven valleys, and one last carving. What the valleys broke in a single night must now be reckoned across a generation: what do the living owe the powers they forgot - and what will it cost to ask differently?