The third line bit all the way through the shutter and stopped, the groove bright as a wound in the poor light.
Rook didn't breathe until the wood settled back into being wood.
Iria's hand slid from his wrist to his forearm and stayed there, warm and exact. "If the cat—"
The fourth line began.
Not a tap this time, not a test. A slow, patient draw that started at the hinge and traveled inward as if the night were writing toward them.
Rook stood up into it, spear in hand. I said I'd open on the fourth. "Stay behind me," he said, voice quiet so it wouldn't break anything he might need.
He lifted the bar, eased the shutter outward, and took the night in. Cold rolled across the floorboards and folded itself around his ankles. The lane held its breath—fence, ditch, the crooked apple that never forgave spring. Four pale grooves glowed faint in the wood he'd just opened, tally marks scored from the outside.
"See?" he tried, but the word had nowhere to live.
Something shaped like his name threaded the air. "Rook."
He leaned out. "Who's there?"
The night disliked introductions. Wind combed the apple and found only what wind always found. Farther off, wolves made a low, satisfied note and then decided against being heard.
Iria's fingers pressed his back, firm. "Close it."
"Two breaths," he said. One for me. One for you. He tasted iron as if he'd been promised it. "Bar the door if I don't—"
"Don't finish that." She reached past him and touched the shutter with two fingers, a priest's blessing for a god that didn't deserve one. "Be fast."
He crossed the room, lifted the latch, and opened the door onto the lane with the kind of care that gets you called brave or stupid depending on how the story ends. Candlelight from the stool turned the threshold into a weak stage. The rest of the lane kept its opinions in the dark.
"Rook," the whisper shaped itself again, very near and not near at all.
He stepped out, spear forward, and the door whispered closed behind him—not shut, just resting. The air smelled of wet dirt and the old apple's sour ghosts. His feet found the grit they always found. The world forgot to wobble; the bitterness in his mouth remembered him and licked the back of his teeth.
At the far corner where the fence slumped, a strand of night-blue glinted and vanished—color that wasn't blue and insisted on being it anyway.
"Who's there?" he said again, and heard the foolishness of it.
A pebble knocked slate at the back of the house—three neat clicks that sounded like a child counting.
Rook turned, felt the spear's balance bite his palm. Don't split the night into two nights. He cut across the yard, boots whispering grass, shoulder brushing the wall. When he reached the corner, nothing waited but the rain barrel, the broom, and the low murmur of a world pretending to be empty.
He edged along the rear, eyes adjusting to thinner shades of dark, and that was when the front shutter thumped open wide.
"Iria." He ran.
The room had let a lot of night in. The bed was half off its pegs, the blanket twisted into a rope as if someone had tried to pull the room toward the window and given up on convincing the walls. The cup lay on its side, its last mouth of water having crawled sadly to the cracks between boards.
"Iria!" The word hit wood and came back small.
On the inner face of the shutter, where his hand had rested a dozen times a day for a dozen small reasons, someone had scratched a single word with a neat, cruel patience:
MINE.
The letters were shallow but sure. A hair—night-blue—caught on a splinter at the M and moved like a small, arrogant flag.
"Iria," he said again, softer, because he didn't have any other language left. He touched the groove of the N with his thumb and felt how clean the cut was. Not a knife. A nail that liked being a knife.
A draft went through the room quick and clever; the door slapped the jamb and bounced. He pivoted and took the threshold in two strides and the lane in three. He didn't think about shoes or neighbors or the way the spear point wanted to pull him like a compass wants north. He moved because he had a shape to fill and the world had just carved the outline for him.
The apple tree sighed and let go of one fruit. It dropped and rolled to the ditch, then stopped against another: a small thing, gleaming a wrong red in the dark. Rook leaned and saw a pebble of crystal no bigger than a thumb joint. It pulsed once—not light exactly; attention.
He didn't touch it. Don't touch the night's toys. He left it where it pretended to be a fruit the tree had made.
A shadow detached from the fence at the far end of the lane and crossed the road in one step that didn't respect human distances. For a fragment it had Iria's outline against its chest, head tipped back, hair streaming. Then the fragment ended and shadow became fence again.
"Hey!" The word was an insult. He didn't wait to see if the night got offended. He ran.
The wolves didn't announce themselves; they were simply there, two shapes slipping at his flanks like thoughts that agreed with him too much. One looked up at him and he saw his own run reflected back—messy, mortal, earnest.
"Help me," he said, and heard how little it cost his pride.
The left wolf peeled off toward the orchard; the right took the ditch and vanished with purpose. Rook stayed to the lane. He kept the moving dark in sight the way you keep the edge of a storm—by noticing what the wind does to the things that can't run.
The fence broke at the field path. He went over without elegance, caught the top rail with his thigh, swore, and landed on the springy side with mud pretending to make decisions for him. He kept his feet because Iria always laughed when mud won and he did not have laughter to spare.
"Let her go!" he shouted, and the field made him a liar by replying with absolutely nothing.
Something moved ahead—a fold in the dark where there should have been only flat. He shortened his grip on the spear, ran into the fold, and found it was a figure after all. Tall, slim, wrapped in a coat that made silence where it hung. Hair like night-blue spilled metal. A face he could not force his eyes to hold onto; every time he pinned a feature, it turned into another.
"Iria!" he said to the bundle in the figure's arms, and the bundle answered with a sound that was not fear. It was colder than fear and more disciplined—breath held by instruction.
"Hello, Rook," the figure said, three accents at once, none of them local. The mouth didn't move right, and yet the words were practiced. "You run well."
Rook leveled the spear. "Put her down."
The figure tilted the head—polite; amused. "Ask her."
He couldn't see Iria's eyes; the coat had them. He could see her hand, though—her left; the ring; the small scar at the base of the thumb where she'd married the knife instead of the onion one winter. The hand lay slack. It didn't reach.
He took one step. The figure took one backwards and did not sink into the mud. "No nearer," it said, lightly. "You have iron. I have other answers."
"What are you?" Rook asked, and then hated that he'd given the night a question it liked.
"Hungry," the figure said, and the word fogged between them without breath to earn it. "Curious." The slick night-blue hair shifted, and a smell like apples left too long in a cellar pushed at him and made his eyes sting with tiredness he didn't own.
The wolves arrived—one at each side, silent, teeth modestly put away, eyes doing the proper work. Their presence didn't trouble the figure. If anything, the figure's mouth learned a small, content curve.
"Call them off," it said. "They are on the wrong pack tonight."
Rook didn't, because he didn't know how. The wolves didn't mind; they mind very little when the night is this close to its own jokes.
"I'm taking her," the figure said, matter-of-fact. "You will follow because you are built for following. That is the story for tonight." It shifted the weight of Iria closer, like couriers do who love their packages. "Tell your physician to keep walking his circles. He will draw a neat one around a hole he refuses to see."
Rook took another step because he could, because the spear wanted something to do with itself. "Put. Her. Down."
"Make me." The figure smiled with someone else's mouth. "Better—ask."
He almost did. He almost softened his voice and said please like a fool. The urge didn't come from him. It came like a wind across wheat: a long, low suggestion of what a field should do when it wants to look beautiful. He braced the spear butt, leaned into himself, and didn't ask.
The figure's head tilted again—interested now. "Somewhere in you a bell that belongs to me rang," it said. "And somewhere else a hand stopped it." A small shrug that used no shoulders. "We will see which one tires."
The left wolf moved first, black ear forward, then whole body—a smooth arrow toward the figure's knee. The figure's hand flicked, almost fond, and the wolf pinwheeled sideways as if a giant had nudged it with a finger. It hit the ground wrong, rolled, yelped once, then stood again with that stubborn shame wolves hate to feel.
Rook lunged because he had been given an opening. The spearhead struck cloth and found resistance that was not bone and not wood—like pushing into packed snow that had decided to be metal. The shaft shuddered. The figure's coat whispered a contempt he would remember.
"Iron," the figure said, approving. "Keep it clean." It turned, easy, and stepped over the fence in a movement that claimed the fence had asked to be a river.
Rook hit the rail full because the spear wanted to be first and he'd let it run him. He clambered, swore, bled from a scraped palm, cleared, and landed in the ditch on his knees. He stood and the ditch kept some of his dignity as a down payment.
"Iria!" he shouted, and used the name like it could go farther than he could.
"Rook," she said, and her voice came back to him wrong—calm, as if she had learned it while he wasn't looking. "Go home."
He froze. "What?"
"Go home," she said again, from the figure's coat, steady as a woman telling a man not to set the pan where it will burn. "Be smart."
He saw her hand lift and lay itself flat against the coat as if to show him she had hands to use and had chosen not to use them on him right now. The ring flashed, a poor small star.
"Please," she said, and that word was hers.
The figure laughed, delighted it had been given the line it wanted to hear. "See? Consent is useful in all things."
Rook tasted copper so hard it felt like a coin had cut his tongue. Don't ask. Don't beg. Don't— He set his feet in the ditch wall and climbed. Mud sluiced. The wolf on his right came in again, low and silent. The figure didn't flick this time; it simply looked at the wolf and the wolf forgot the end of its own movement and sat down, confused that sitting had teeth.
"Stop!" Rook said—not a command; a prayer with sharp edges.
The figure obliged him by pausing at the lane's turn. It lifted its face, offered him the side of it the way a dancer offers a profile to a stage, and Rook saw the place where the mouth didn't belong to the rest at all—a mouth learned in mirrors and stolen from a woman who had practiced being kind. Night-blue hair shifted. Pleated shadow traveled the coat.
It leaned to his side of the dark as if sharing gossip. "Bring your spear to the orchard at moon-rise, Rook Halden. Bring no one who thinks bells are arguments. If you are brave, you will see her. If you are clever, you will leave again."
"Or what?"
"Or you will learn how many ways a night can make the shape of MINE."
The figure took the turn and went, carrying his life where it liked to be carried.
Rook ran. He discovered there are runs that are faster than legs and slower than grief. He hit the corner late and saw only field and ditch and the idea of a road. The wolves bracketed him, breathing hard now, ashamed of their soft bones.
He lowered the spear point into the mud because it needed to be in something or it would be in him. He stood with the night in his mouth and the word MINE moving around his teeth like a splinter he refused to spit.
No more, he thought, and the thought was not a line of prayer but a piece of iron inside a man.
He turned toward the house. The shutter still gaped, its new mark bright and petty. He went to it, set the bar, and pressed the wood until his arms shook. He leaned his forehead against it the way men do when they know they cannot push the world back into shape.
The apple he'd refused to touch still lay by the ditch, pulsing attention. He walked to it, knelt, and did touch it, because he needed to know what this lie felt like. It was cold and too smooth, and the heartbeat he felt through it was not his.
He dropped it like a hot thought, stood, and faced the orchard.
"Moon-rise," he said aloud, for the night to witness. "I come."
And because saying it wasn't enough, he said it again, louder:
"I'm coming, Iria."