Brackenhollow's night smelled of hot fat and wet wool.
The square swelled with bodies, happy the danger chose a different address. A trench of oil burned in the middle, coughing heat into the damp. Kael Morcant slid through the press without friction, a seam of dark moving where no one looked. Human eyes refused certain truths; tonight they refused him.
On the scaffold the mayor stood wide and pink, rubies blinking on his blunt fingers. Beside him, a man in black held a rope and a heavy blade. The mayor raised his hands for quiet, radiating the pride of being obeyed.
"As of tonight," he boomed, "the sickness in our midst is—"
The rope went slack. The blade fell. The body on the block bucked once and stopped. A head dropped into a wicker basket and tapped like a stone. Blood lifted in a fine line and dotted Kael's cheek.
He didn't move. A torn hem of blue showed between slats. A pale sliver of freckled skin. A coil of sooty red hair.
Something old and careful in him ripped.
The mayor kept talking, voice made grand by relief. "…so you may sleep in peace, Brackenhollow! So your children—"
Kael climbed the steps. No rush, no flourish. Space opened for him because fear had already drawn a map. He reached the boards and smiled at the man in black.
"Don't," the executioner managed, lifting the blade like a priest might lift a book.
Kael opened him from breastbone to belt. The man looked down, confused at his own insides, and fell quietly into himself. Panic found the crowd all at once. They screamed, tripped, prayed, lied.
The mayor backed away with both hands up. "Help! Help him—stop him—he's—"
"Busy," Kael said. He could taste the mayor's blood before he took it; it tasted like grease and naps.
"Monster," the mayor breathed, his eyes going wide and wet.
"Yes," Kael said pleasantly, and loosened the leash.
Hair broke his skin like silk tearing. Jaw stretched; teeth slid out of gum as if pushed by thought. He stayed standing, man-tall, man-shaped, but the wolf lay over him now, new angles over old habits. The mayor saw the change and soiled himself, which was at least honest.
Kael took him apart. Not art, not sermon—just cause and effect in red. Blood matted his fur. The taste was poor—salted with pork and cheap wine—but hunger was a kind of grief, and he swallowed.
Then the fire.
He hated fire. Heat needled his eyes, pricked the pads of his hands even through fur. He went down anyway, boots into oil, cloak catching ember. The trench breathed like an animal. He shoved bodies aside, kicked a man's leg free of a woman's wrist, peeled a hand from a shoulder that wasn't there. Flame licked his coat and laughed.
Blue.
A scorched hem snagged on a charred rib. He tore it free and cleared the pile, and there she was between two men he did not bother to know: Vespera Mirel, untouched by flame so far, hair a tangle of soot and red. Her head lay a handspan from her neck, tilted as if listening.
His throat made a sound he hadn't used since breath had meant anything.
He gathered her the way you gather a child who has slept through thunder, careful with limbs, careful with jawline. He tucked her head against his chest as if closeness taught belonging. Climbing out proved clumsier than going in; boards slick, night loud, his hands refusing to be steady.
The grass near the trench was wet from rain that had never fallen. He went to his knees in it. He laid her down—body, then the rest—and the world collapsed to the three-foot circle he controlled.
She was beautiful. It hurt to look. Freckles dusted her cheek beneath ash. Lashes clumped. Without a heartbeat, time had no lids; everything stayed open, and so did the pain.
He tried, briefly, to cry like a man. The eyes obeyed the old order, filled, spilled. The tears came red, poppies on snow, and pattered her dress. That was all. No shaking left to wring them free, no heat to turn them to steam.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and left a smear. "Vespera."
It wasn't a prayer. It was a name, and names did the only work that mattered.
The square moaned as if the village itself had found a voice. People ran. Some fell. Some bargained with the dark. He let them. He said her name once more, and the last soft room in him closed its door.
He stood. Not fast. Not slow. He touched her hair, then pressed two fingers to the place on his chest where a heartbeat might have lived once. The air tasted of fat smoke and iron; underneath it the orchard's sweet rot where apples bruised themselves on the ground for morning light that would not find them.
"Enough," he said—to heat, to night, to himself.
He overturned the basket that had been meant to hold heads and ground it flat with his heel. Then he looked to the lanes that fanned into dark. He could hear everyone. The old woman behind shutters, breathing like a broken bellows. The boy who had laughed when the blade dropped, now hiccuping in a pig pen. The man three doors off the square, kneeling in his hall with a kitchen knife and a plan to be brave when the door opened.
He walked.
A woman stumbled from an alley, saw him, and forgot how legs worked. He lifted her by the back of the neck. "You cheered," he said. She shook her head. Everyone always shook their head. He bit her anyway—quick; he had no sermons left—and let her sink like a sack. Fear thinned her blood. He licked his teeth clean and moved on.
He did not run. He did not need to. They came in the end, each in the turn of their own small courage: the baker swinging a peel as if bread rose from terror; the apprentice who had never killed a thing larger than a chicken; the father who believed in doors. He took them as they came. When one crawled, he followed. When one begged, he allowed it. When one quieted himself for the knife he did not have and offered his throat, Kael obliged him because mercy is a kind of neatness.
A child rushed with a stool. He kicked it aside and the child with it and walked on without looking down. Not every ledger line required ink.
The square emptied into lanes; the lanes climbed the low hill where grass grew thin and ground remembered frost. Torches guttered and died. The oil trench snapped itself smaller, then smaller again, and went out. Smoke hung like a bad decision. Kael kept moving. Villages believed trees made a wall if you put enough together. He reached the first rank of trunks with his hands and collar brown, his boots slick, his mouth clean.
He stepped into the dark between them.
They tried old tricks: splitting up, holes, the long quiet under a fallen cart with breath held like stolen coin. He let some run deep, then drew them back with the throat-note wolves understood. The wolves came because they loved him the way you love winter—against yourself. In the dark, eyes opened like coins.
He didn't count. He never had. He gave as a king gives—indiscriminately, until the need decided it was done.
A last one: a young woman with rain in her hair and someone else's blood to the elbow. She watched him from behind thorn as if thorns were strategy. He stepped through, tore cloth the way thorns intended to, took her face in his hand and pointed it toward the open angle of night.
"You burned her," he said.
"I—" she began, and that was all.
When the forest finished answering, when even the owls held their tongues, Kael turned toward the square again. The wolves loped beside him awhile and fell away one by one. Dawn put a pale thumb along the horizon. He hated dawn. He loved that it hurt.
He returned to the wet grass and arranged what could be arranged. Hair would never be right. Skin had smudged in the wrong places, like charcoal under a heavy hand. He set her head where it belonged and rested his thumbs at her temples as if pressure could persuade time to apologize.
"Tonight," he said to the dirt, to the world that took and took, "I bury what made me kind."
He rose. The trees waited. There was a cave that would do—a place the living did not love. Stone kept its promises better than wood. He slid his arms beneath her, lifted, and turned toward the dark path out of town.
Behind him, Brackenhollow learned silence.
No more sermons, he thought. Only work.
He stepped into the road.
[Foreshadow]: the cave and the phrase Only work seed the resurrection plan.