The white coin took his shadow and waited for the rest.
Cold climbed his ankle like a hand that had learned manners in the dark. The clearing changed its breath; even the leaves seemed to make smaller sounds. The night-blue figure watched him as if he were a new instrument, the sort you do not play in front of friends until you are certain of the noise it makes.
"Good," it said softly. "I like a bargain when the fool understands it."
"Name it, then," Rook said. His hands stayed open, away from the knife at his belt. The spear lay outside the coin, obedient as a dog only because he'd told it to be. "We said terms."
The figure's coat drew a quiet the way knives do when admired. "I will take the part of you that believes bells are arguments," it said. "You will still hear them. You will simply decline to be persuaded." The way it said decline made him think of a gentleman refusing another drink while stealing the bottle.
"And in exchange?"
"In exchange," it tipped Iria an inch toward him, "you walk two paces and take back what you think was ever yours."
Rook looked at Iria's hand along the sleeve—the ring, the small winter scar. Her finger did not tap now. She held still with a discipline he respected and hated.
"Limits," he said. "No other piece of me. Only bells-as-commands. You touch nothing else. You touch nothing of her."
"Agreed," the figure said too quickly, almost cheerful. "I enjoy a man who thinks the law loves him."
"Say it clean," Rook insisted. "Tonight you take only the part of me that answers bells as if they were orders from God. You leave me my other answers."
The figure's head cocked. A long moment passed where even the wolves might have held their breath if they owned the word. Then: "I take only that. I leave you your other answers."
"Say tonight," he said.
It smiled—annoyed, fond, both. "Tonight."
Rook nodded. You can live a long time on one night of a bad rule. "Then count," he said. "I'm owed two paces."
"One," the figure said, almost sweetly.
He took it. The cold rose to his calf; the coin felt like a room that wanted to be a mouth. He set his foot down with the caution of a man placing china. The crystal in his pocket thrummed a little drumbeat that did not belong to him. He ignored it because men have always ignored drums when they had to.
"Two," the figure said.
He stepped again. The world did not tilt. The metal in his mouth swelled and softened at once, as if it had been melted and politely asked to shape itself around his teeth. He stood a hand's length from the coat now. He could see where the mouth did not belong—the curve borrowed from a woman who had practiced being kind for the wrong audience. He could smell the cellar-apple rot again, the scent that kept saying you are tired until your bones believed it.
"Now," Rook said.
"Now," the figure echoed, and placed Iria in his arms with the competence of couriers who do not trust the man receiving the package. Iria's weight was exactly what he knew it to be. Her hair slid against his forearm with the honesty of work. Her breath touched his throat—not quick, not slow, controlled. He wanted to cry and he did not have the parts to spare.
He looked into the coat's shadow for her eyes and found their shape, unfocused, as if she were listening for him in a language that punished speed. "Iria."
"Rook," she said, and the way she said it poured hot courage into his chest and then put a lid on the pot. "Hold me."
"I am."
"Smell?" the figure asked lightly, too near. "Cellar fruit. You will learn to name it faster. It keeps men honest—those who have some."
Rook took one measured step backward. The coin let him keep the shadow this time; the edge pressed his boot-sole with a neatness that would make accountants proud. He did not look at the spear. He did not look away from the figure. He held Iria, and the night held its breath like a clerk who senses a theft and wants to admire it.
"Price," he said. "You take it now."
"I already did," the figure said, pleasant as gossip. "The moment you set the second foot where the moon keeps the books." It lifted a hand as if about to demonstrate something with the air, then reconsidered and let the air remain itself. "We can do a proof, if you like. It's a night for proofs."
From far off—so far the sound should have felt like weather—a bell tolled.
Rook heard it clean. He measured the intervals the way men do who learned time by work. One. Two. Three. He noted where the tone broke and how the metal liked to speak. He looked down the road his body would have taken on any other night, and his body did not take it. No part of him rose to answer.
He waited for the tug—come, come, it is a call, it is yours to carry—and the tug did not arrive. The bell was a thing that happened in the world the way rain happens on someone else's roof.
"Proof," the figure said, delighted like a teacher whose student had finally failed in the proper way. "You hear. You do not go. What a mercy, to be free of so many tyrannies."
Rook breathed once for anger and once for the opposite of anger. "You gave me a hole," he said. "I will learn to walk around it."
"You will learn to watch other men fall into it and wonder why you do not help," the figure said kindly. "But that is a lesson for another evening."
He took another step back, slow. The coin's line kissed his boot and let it go. He kept his weight even, shifting nothing of Iria too fast. She kept her breath measured, soldier-clean. The wolves eased a pace out of the trees, uncertain of the arithmetic, ready to try anyway.
The figure's gaze—if gaze is the word for something that doesn't own eyes—dropped to Rook's pocket. "It came with you."
Rook felt the shard's wrong pulse through cloth like a child's hand on a window. "It was on my ground," he said.
"Nothing is your ground at night," the figure said, amused. "Even you are a guest." It inhaled the air by his coat in a way that made the air feel tried on. "Bloodglass wants work. It recognizes a promise."
Rook didn't ask what promise. He knew too well what he had said to walls a quarter hour ago. He let the shard thrum and let it be useless, because sometimes useless is the safest shape for dangerous things.
He took the last backwards step he would allow himself inside the coin. The rim sat between his boots now, one foot in the moon's book, one in the orchard's. He could feel the division run up his shin like chalk.
"Stop," the figure said—not a command now; an observation that wanted to see if the world agreed.
Rook stopped because he had chosen to.
"Rules are sweet when they are made with the mouth," the figure mused. "They are sweeter when they are made with the blood. Tonight we make do with words." It lifted its chin slightly, in the direction of the wolves. "Call them off."
"No," Rook said.
"Good," the figure said, pleased. "Then they may live long enough to be useful."
Iria shifted in his arms. Not much. Enough to tell him the numbness had edges. He angled her so the moon could fail to see her eyes better, because the moon doesn't deserve her face.
"You said you might take a habit," Rook said. "The bell one. Only that. Tonight only that."
"I keep my teeth sharper than yours," the figure said. "I bite exactly where I said." It drew the coat tighter—not for warmth; for possession—and then loosened it again, having remembered that theatrics are for men who cannot afford better tools. "Now, man with a spear nowhere near his hand, how will you carry your wife home?"
"With my legs," Rook said. "With my work."
"Good," it murmured. "Work keeps the world from dissolving."
It turned its head a fraction, as if trying on a sound. The wolves accepted the fraction as permission to lower their heads, not in submission exactly, but in the habit of beasts in the presence of something that had noticed them and not eaten them yet.
"Tell Calder Mott to keep walking his circle," the figure added, casual and bored. "Perhaps he will find the hole's edge by accident. He won't look down. Physicians seldom do. There's no tincture for what stares up."
"You know his name," Rook said.
"I know all the names that ring," it said, and laughed once at its own joke.
Rook hated the sound enough to use it. He eased his weight, shifted Iria high, and let the motion itself be his insult. "We're leaving."
"You are," the figure agreed. "And then you will return."
"Why," he said—flat, not a question he gave to it so much as a word he dropped between them to see who picked it up.
"To pay the rest of your bill," it said. "Or to pretend not to." It tilted its head again, studying him with a patience that learned as it watched. "You've done something clever with your mouth tonight. You have not yet done anything clever with your time." A thin smile. "Moon-rise again, Rook Halden. Bring nothing with a bell in its throat. Bring only your promise and the red stone you pretend you do not understand."
He felt the shard throb in his pocket, greedy at being named. He said nothing because silence was the only tool left that wasn't already a door.
"Go," the figure said, as if granting a favor.
Rook stepped the last half-step out of the coin. The cold let go. The night became ordinary again, the kind of ordinary that waits in corners with new teeth. He did not reach for the spear yet. He took two paces backward on bare ground and then turned, keeping Iria steady, and walked toward the lane with the pace of a man who could make his legs mean it.
The wolves ghosted at his sides, no triumph in them, only a duty they hadn't asked for. The orchard pressed its rows against the low wind like men pressed against walls at a riot—trying to look like they belonged to themselves.
At the clearing's edge, the figure spoke once more, almost companionable. "Tell Kael Morcant I am pleased," it said, like an aunt recommending a butcher. "When he comes, I will not pretend to be surprised."
Rook did not give the word a place to sit in his mind. He walked. He stepped over the fence, less clumsy than he had been, because carrying the right person will teach any man to be elegant. He reached the lane and did not look back because he wanted to, and wanting to look back was the part of him the night always tax-audited first.
The shutter at home waited open the width of a hand, still bearing the carved MINE like a fresh scar. He kissed the letters with his glare and took Iria through the door sideways to spare her feet the jamb. He set her on the bed. He didn't say are you hurt because she would have said not in ways you can fix and he didn't deserve the truth to be clever at him yet.
He laid his hand at her throat—not pressing, just resting, as if telling her skin what his skin planned to keep loving. Her breath stayed measured. She blinked, slow; the room learned to be a room again.
"Talk?" he asked.
"Later," she said, voice steady as a hand laying a plank. Then, because she knew him too well to let him build a cathedral out of one strong word, she added, "Water."
He poured. She drank, small sips like a woman bargaining with herself. When she finished, she touched his wrist—one tap, then another, the market signal rewritten for home. I am here. You did not kneel. We are not done.
"Rest," he said.
"Sit," she answered, and he did, because men make chairs mean something when they can't make the world do the same.
From far off the bell tolled again. He counted it easily. None of him rose. He swallowed the absence like medicine and told it it could not make a house of him.
The shard in his pocket pushed a little hello against his ribs.
"Stay," he told it, and surprised himself with the word. The shard warmed, faint as a lie that intends to work later.
He looked at the window. The MINE cut caught moonlight and gave it back wrong. He would sand it later. He would sand it until the wood remembered how to say OURS.
Somewhere behind the orchard, something laughed without moving its mouth.
Rook didn't go to the spear. He set his palm on Iria's knee, light as a promise he would not break, and kept watch with the quiet of a man learning which parts of him still answered the world—and which parts would have to be rebuilt out of work.