"He stepped into the road," and the road gave him to the trees.
Kael carried Vespera high so her hair wouldn't drag the wet stones. Smoke weighed his coat; ash cracked in small islands as he walked. The first pair of wolves slid out of the ditch on his right, pale as reeds iced over, heads low, ears fixed on him rather than the body in his arms.
"Left," Kael said without raising his voice.
They flowed left. The forest took the village sounds and folded them behind bark and moss until only the hill's damp breath remained. The path narrowed to a thought. Thorns stood like nails, as if they had something to guard. Vespera's hair brushed his wrist; the strand was cold and dry and smelled of applewood burned too quickly.
"You never loved warmth," he murmured to her. "I don't, either. Not anymore."
A branch snapped under his heel and sprang back. A third wolf fell in behind and pushed its weight against his knee as if to nudge him. Kael went on. Each step was a tick he wrote into the dark: I take. I keep. I return.
The slope climbed. Grass gave up. Stone showed through, grey as old bread. He stepped into a patch that never saw sun and his breath turned visible, thin, as if it rose from conviction rather than lungs. He bared his teeth without a smile.
"Almost."
The trees thinned—no kinder, only more honest. Between two black pines lay the cleft people called Skycleft, as if the sky itself had once been split here and left the scar. A stair hacked into slate gnawed upward, treads with a soldier's lack of poetry. Kael put his boot on the first. The rock was wet. Not rain; the mountain sweating.
"Keep watch," he said. Three wolves sat. Flanks worked slowly. Eyes fixed on the dark.
Kael climbed. Each riser lifted him into thinner air where sounds grew sharper. A drip somewhere found his pace and matched it. Vespera lay quiet—no will left to resist, only what remains when everything else has chosen. He held her so her mouth faced open sky.
"See," he said softly. "It isn't far."
The stair crooked within the cleft. Slate slid under his boot; he corrected without haste. At the top, a plank door had been nailed across a low black hole in the rock. The nails were bent. Whoever set them had believed in speed more than craft. Kael liked that. Haste betrayed belief. Belief betrayed fear.
He paused before the door. Vespera's hair moved in a draft, and he considered it the way a starving man considers a plate he cannot eat.
"Mine," he said, and set his shoulder.
The board split. Iron squealed. Damp air rolled out, sour with old water and iron. Kael stepped inside, boots whispering on grit. The ceiling hung low at first, then lifted into a cold mouth. Sound came back thin, like a lie told twice.
The chamber held a stone at its heart—a table grown from the floor. Once, men had laid lambs here and thanked gods who needed proofs. Kael brushed dust with his sleeve and left long clean arcs. He set Vespera down, body first, then—the rest. His fingers were exact, almost fussy. He arranged a coil of hair where it would not kink, then pressed his thumbs gently at her temples as if asking bone to remember.
"You are not a thing to be burned," he said. "You are a future to be built."
He leaned and put his mouth to the corner of hers. Not the kiss of heat and panting. A cold claim. It stung where his split lip met her ash and he tasted iron. He let a bead of his own blood fall from his tongue onto hers. It sat there like a dark thought until it soaked away.
A shard in his coat answered from the dark—a small triangle of crimson crystal no bigger than a thumb joint. Bloodglass. It woke to the taste and gave a soft, wrong light, like moonlight through meat. Kael held it above her mouth. The glow pulsed, faint and eager.
"Soon," he told it, and the glow cooled.
He laid the shard at Vespera's throat and it dimmed, as if pacified by purpose. He smoothed her hair back, palm slow along her scalp, a touch that in other nights would have raised breath and color. The memory rose of her biting his lower lip once, not to hurt—but to mark him as hers. Heat moved under his ribs, then cooled like a coin.
"You like my mouth," he said to the room. "You always did."
The cave listened with the patience of stone.
"Master?" The word arrived before the man—big, baffled, bouncing off the rock in the entry tunnel like a barrel set rolling. Boots scuffed, breath clattered, and then Brukk Ironhorn shouldered into the light, bent at first as if the ceiling still pressed on him. Horns curved from his brow. Blood dotted his chest in polite freckles that did not match his size.
"Brukk," Kael said without looking up. "Close the hole."
Brukk dragged the mangled plank back, propped it with an old pick haft, and turned with the hesitant smile of a dog who suspects he has done something right by accident. "I looked for you, Master. I smelled through the smoke. I—" His eyes found the stone, found Vespera, found the place where skin ended and continued elsewhere. Brukk's mouth opened. The sound he made had nothing to do with words. "Oh. Oh." His thick fingers worried the air, then knotted into fists. "They—"
"Yes," Kael said. "They." He stroked Vespera's temple once, a quieting touch, though she had no noise left to quiet. "Do not speak their names. They have none now."
Brukk swallowed. His eyes went wet. "What do you want me to break?"
"Not break." Kael lifted the Bloodglass between two fingers. It shone again, a fish heartbeat. "Bring."
Brukk inched closer, slow as if the stone would bite him. "Bring what?" he asked, miserably eager.
"A living tether," Kael said. He set the shard down and looked at Brukk. "Find me a human whose blood has known a vampire in bed. Not a bite in a fight. Flesh and lies. Warming and whispering. Do you understand?"
Brukk blinked hard. The words chased each other across his face and finally settled. "The… the kind who let one of us… close."
"Yes," Kael said. "Close."
Brukk's ears colored. He glanced at Vespera as if she might scold him for thinking in pictures. "Where?"
"Down. Stonecross. Ravenmarch. The farms between," Kael said. "Listen in taverns you are too ugly to enter. Watch windows. Smell sheets on lines. Follow shame. It moves like a fox at dusk—furtive but hungry."
Brukk nodded as if each place were a nail he could see to hammer. "Alive?"
"Alive," Kael said. "Unharmed. Unscratched. If you frighten them, they lie bitter. I need sweet lies that think they are truths."
Brukk's mouth worked around a thought. "If… if they are married?"
Kael let the question hang like a blade above them both. "Then bring me the one who chooses," he said finally. "Choice is the string that holds the bead."
Brukk looked relieved to be told what strings were. He edged sideways to the stone and—clumsy beyond hope—reached two fingers toward Vespera's knuckles, then stopped before he touched. "She is…" He made a soft noise, a calf remembering its pen. "She is beautiful."
"She is mine," Kael said, and Brukk's hand fled back to his own chest. Kael did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "You will call her Lady here. And you will bow."
The big head dipped. The horns made the bow look deep. "Lady," Brukk rumbled. "Lady Vespera." He tried the name again. "Lady Vespera."
Kael turned his wrist, studying the crescent where Vespera's tooth had once pressed through him when she laughed into his mouth. "Dress this place," he said. "Steal cloth and candles. Charcoal. Oil that doesn't stink. A brazier. A mirror without cracks. Bowls. Rope."
"Rope?" Brukk asked, eager to be helpful and probably wrong.
"For the living," Kael said. "Not for her."
Brukk brightened. He liked instructions he could lift. "And wolves?"
"They will hold the steps," Kael said. "No one climbs without bleeding first."
The big man grinned—the simple grin of a door with a good lock. Then it crumpled. "Master—if I bring the wrong one?"
"You will not," Kael said. "You have a nose a priest would envy." He finally looked at Brukk and let his gaze settle with weight. "But if you err, I will forgive you once. Only once."
Brukk straightened until his horns nearly clicked the stone above. "Once is enough." He thumped his fist to his chest, pivoted to the door, then back. "Master… the sun."
"I remember the sun," Kael said dryly. "It remembers me. It makes poor arguments." He ran two fingers along Vespera's cheekbone. "Go now. The east is already thinking foolish thoughts."
Brukk nodded. He wrestled the plank aside, ducked through the seam, then pushed it back until the cave was a quiet throat again. For a time there was only water and the careful sound of Kael's breathing.
He bent over Vespera. He smoothed the seam where head met neck and watched the skin refuse to make sense. "You always hated bad joinery," he said. "We will do better."
He took the Bloodglass up again. Its glow crawled along his fingers, as if tasting him. "Hungry," he said to it, and it flickered once. He set it at the hollow of Vespera's throat and pressed it gently into the chill there. "You will eat. But only what I feed you."
He arranged her arms at her sides, then changed his mind and folded one hand over the other on her belly, as if she were only sleeping through a sermon. He leaned close—closer than close—and let his breath move across her mouth. It was a cruel trick, and he played it because he was cruel.
"You used to bite my lower lip when you wanted me to behave," he whispered, the words grazing her teeth. "You never wanted me to behave." He let his mouth drift to the line of her jaw. His voice went low there, private as a hand under a hem. "When you wake, you will remind me exactly how to misbehave."
The cave did not blush. Stone never did. But the dark took his promise and kept it.
He looked at his hands. They were steady again. The hook of grief had stopped tugging. In its place the clean hum of purpose rose—like a blade near a bell.
He walked the chamber, testing shadow and trickle. He tasted the water. Metal and old teeth. He spat and wiped his mouth, then went to the doorway and listened to the mountain's breath.
A cry drifted up from far below—a crow or a man. Kael put two fingers above his brow, where the cold tried to live, and pressed until thought sharpened.
He returned to Vespera and adjusted a lock of hair by the smooth obstinacy of a knuckle. "When you open your eyes," he said, "I want the first thing you see to be me. And the second thing to be the world learning manners."
He set two candles from his coat—rescued without his noticing from some windowsill—and placed them at her feet. He did not light them. He wanted the dark to memorize her. He wanted the dark to serve as witness.
Outside, a wolf sang once, long and low, the note climbing the stair and laying itself at his feet like a token.
Kael smiled without showing teeth. "Go on, then," he told the night. "Bring me my tether."