The bed remembered their weight better than he did.
Rook Halden rose from a dream of ash and wolves with his heart miscounting and a taste on his tongue like a bitten coin. The rafters were a low black grid above him. The world had the thin gray of not-quite-dawn. Beside him, Iria lay on her side, hair tossed across the pillow the way a fire tosses sparks and then decides against them.
She felt him tense and opened her eyes without the startle. "You're here," she said, voice rough with sleep.
"I am," he said, and swallowed because his mouth had filled with the idea of iron. He reached for the mug on the stool and found only the cold round of the rim. Empty.
Iria's hand slid across his chest. "Bad dream?"
"That word works." He took her wrist and brought her knuckles to his mouth to change the taste. He kissed the first two slowly, like undoing buttons that had been done wrong all day.
She smiled. "That's not water."
"No. It's better."
"Show me." She leaned in and put her mouth to his, unhurried. The kiss began as soft questions and moved, by the kind of consent that looks like gravity, toward answers. Her leg folded over his. Her fingers combed through his hair until he had no excuse left for not holding her closer.
"It's still early," she whispered. "The town bell hasn't tried to be brave yet."
He rolled, bracing on one forearm so he wouldn't crush her. She arched to fit. Heat rose between them in the small, practical room. His mouth found the place under her ear where her breath always changed, and it changed.
The taste hit him again—copper and not-copper, an imagined cut. He pulled back. The ceiling swung a little. Iria's hand came up to steady his face.
"What?"
"Just a… spin." He pressed thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose until colors settled. "I stood too fast."
She propped herself on one elbow, hair a red mess he loved. "You didn't stand."
He tried to laugh and failed. "Then I'm very talented." He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and found a thin red smear he did not deserve to see. "I… bit my lip."
"You didn't," she said softly, and then softer still: "You didn't."
He closed his hand around the proof and let it be a fist. "The bell rings this morning," he said. "They want volunteers for Brackenhollow."
Her mouth hardened while the rest of her stayed gentle. "Let other men be brave at fires. You owe me this morning."
"I owe you all of them," he said.
She tugged him down by the collar and kissed him again, firmer, as if proof could be forced between them until it obeyed. His palms slid to her waist. She took his lower lip between her teeth with deliberate mischief, then soothed the bite with her tongue.
A howl landed in the lane outside—long, self-satisfied. Not far enough for the walls to do the whole job. Iria stilled lightly under his hands.
"They don't come so near," she said.
"They do when winter thinks about itself," he said, but it wasn't winter yet and they both knew it.
Another voice answered from farther off. The sound ran along the street as if the stones passed it on.
"Stay," Iria said. "Let them call each other clever." She moved his hand back where it had been. "Let them think they're kings."
He wanted to obey. He began to, with a slow care that set apology and hunger in the same sentence. Then his balance went wrong. He caught himself on the post and swore the way he swore at sacks that split in the storeroom—annoyed, not cruel.
"You're cold," she said. "Lie down. I'll get the stove."
"I'm not cold."
"You are." She set her palm to his cheek, then to his chest, then hesitated at the line of his trousers with a small smile that hid worry under paint. "You were warmer."
He almost said I am always warmer when you touch me, and then decided not to insult the truth. "Don't light the stove. Just—water."
She pulled on his old shirt and buttoned two buttons and none of the others. She went to the corner and poured from the clay jug. When she turned with the cup, the ring on her finger caught the low light.
"Drink," she said.
He did. The taste broke the metal for a moment and left only the water's honest boredom. The room stopped leaning.
Something tapped the shutter.
Iria tilted her head. "Bird," she said, then frowned at her own lie. "They sleep then."
He went to the window, lifted the bar, and opened the shutter two inches. The lane stared back, empty as an excuse. His breath came out in a small cloud and rushed away to join the others.
"Nothing," he said.
"Close it." She set her chin on his shoulder, hands at his sides. He closed the shutter and dropped the bar without an argument the night didn't need to hear. "Come here," she said into his shirt. "We were in the middle of something."
Say yes, he told himself, and mean it until morning.
He wasn't gentle about the kiss; he kissed like a man taking back a room. She laughed into his mouth and bit him again. He hid his groan in her throat and let one hand find the small of her back and the other the warm inside of her thigh where the shirt had forgotten its job.
A knock landed on the door—three firm knocks from someone who believed in being answered.
Iria pressed her forehead to his and cursed so neatly it sounded like gratitude. "It's Tawny," she said. "Or old Harg with the mirror again."
"It's the hour for neither." Rook's hand stayed on her leg. "I'll be rude."
"Be fast."
He opened the door to a slice. Candlelight outside made a small theater of the lane. Wind took it away and gave it back and took it again.
"Rook Halden?" The man on the step had the kind of tired that becomes a profession. Physician Calder Mott held his lamp as if he expected to hate what it showed. His coat smelled of camphor and other failures.
"Doctor." Rook put the word in the polite place. "You keep banker's hours now?"
Calder looked him up and down like a puzzle with missing pieces and then past him to the bed where Iria waited with that practiced face women wear for strangers in their nightshirts. "You weren't at the bell yesterday," Calder said. "Many had headaches. Today they'll have more. I'm walking a circle."
"I have a chair," Rook said. "And a cup."
"You have a pulse?" Calder asked, already putting two fingers under Rook's jaw. "Hm." He shifted to Rook's wrist. "Sit."
Rook sat. Iria pulled the blanket up without leaving the bed. Calder set his lamp on the stool and took out a tin that had hurt too many tongues. He lifted Rook's eyelid and grunted when the pupil refused to behave.
"Dizzy?"
"Earlier."
"Metal taste?"
Rook nodded once.
Calder made a noise that admitted the world without forgiving it. "Half the street has the same. Wolves are closer than they should be. The air's wrong. We live anyway." He tapped two dry pills into Rook's palm. "Bite these. They make you think you're better long enough to be better. They taste like a fence post."
Rook bit. The bitterness wanted to buy property on his tongue. Calder handed him the mug and watched him drink.
Calder turned to Iria. "He should rest. No running, no ladders, no favors." The physician's eyes warmed one degree. "No heroics before breakfast."
Iria smiled without giving him teeth. "He has a wife. He's lucky."
Calder's mouth twitched toward permission to laugh. "He is." He pressed a thumb into the web of Rook's palm and watched Rook fail not to wince. "If the taste returns, if you find blood without a cause, come to me. Don't guess. Don't chew on it. Bring it."
"I can follow orders," Rook said.
"You can," Calder said, and stood. At the door he paused. "Don't climb to Skycleft," he said. "Boys dare each other. It's a poor use of luck."
"We're not boys," Rook said.
"No," Calder agreed. "That's why I expect you to be smart." He tipped the lamp and left. The door took the wind's knuckles and shut harder than Rook meant. Footsteps went away in arithmetic done by a drunk.
Iria breathed out what she'd kept petty and precise. "He could see me."
"He can see where God goes; he can see you," Rook said. He stood and the room let him. The bitter stayed behind his teeth but didn't fight for the whole mouth. He went back to the bed and slid in beside her.
"You promised fast," she said, and found his wrist and put it where she wanted it.
"I did." He kissed her. The kiss went from polite to less.
The window gave a small, dry sound, as if a fingernail had decided to draw a line instead of knocking.
They stopped without meaning to. The sound came again, slow and deliberate, a scratch no wind would choose. Iria's hand tightened on his wrist until bones objected.
"Cat," he said, choosing a lie they could both afford.
"Then throw it," she said.
He took his spear from the wall. He unbarred the shutter with the point and pushed it open fast. Night made a narrow promise and kept it: lane, fence, the crooked apple tree whose fruit no one loved, and nothing else. For a heartbeat he thought he saw a fringe of hair at the corner where the wall and the dark argued—dark hair that caught a color not black, not blue, something the night would deny if asked twice—and then the corner was corner.
"Anything?" Iria asked.
"Just the night." He left the shutter open the width of a hand to prove something to no one. He stood with the spear at his side and listened. The wolves were farther now. Or quieter.
He closed the shutter to the width of two fingers and set the bar in its notch but not all the way. He stayed there longer than necessary, because sometimes men stand where they have nothing to do to prove they can.
"Rook," Iria said, voice tuned to bring him back without scolding. "Come be smart."
He slid under the blanket and let her pull him into the position that always worked—him on his side, her knee over his, her mouth finding his in the slow rhythm that tells the world to do its worst and wait its turn. Heat returned, walked carefully through his blood, and decided to stay.
The scratch came again. Longer now. A second line. He broke the kiss and put his forehead to hers. I'll sit the first half, he thought. Sleep. I'll wake you at the bell.
"You'll wake me if the cat writes a third line," she said, "and you'll kill it twice."
"Twice," he agreed.
He set the spear within reach and leaned back against the post with the kind of alertness that pretends to be calm. The window waited. The night wrote nothing for a while. Iria's breath slowed, not all the way to sleep, but to the doorway of it.
The third line began at the far edge of the shutter and traveled inward, slow as a thought planning not to end.
Rook closed his hand on the spear shaft and felt the grain answer like an old friend.