Every wolf in the trees lowered its head.
Kael felt it as a pressure change under the ribs, the way a room changes when someone important stands without making a sound. The Bloodglass at Vespera's throat answered with a faint, meat-soft glow. He watched the red crawl the shard's veins and cool again, small as a heartbeat that remembers it's a thief.
"What did you hear for me?" he asked the stone and the wolves together, voice low enough to respect the cave.
The wolves that held the stair stayed statues—ears forward, throats working slow. A draft wandered in from the slit the plank could not seal, pulled a line along the floor, and found his boots. He set two fingers to Vespera's temple and tapped once, the way he might wake a door that already wants to open. "They lower their heads to you," he said to her without heat. "Even now. Even headless."
He unbuttoned his cuff, folded back the linen, and bit the soft skin above his wrist—efficient, without theatrics. A round of black-red swelled, beaded, hung. Kael held the wrist above the shard and let one drop fall. It struck the facet like a polite knock and sank without stain. The shard brightened, then hummed—not a sound, an idea of sound, the way cold sometimes sings in your teeth.
"Tone," he murmured, lips close to hers. "Noted."
He leaned and touched the corner of his mouth to the corner of hers. Not heat; claim. "When you wake," he breathed against the place where her breath would be, "do not forgive me."
Footfalls scuffed in the tunnel—large, hesitant, hopeful.
"Master?" Brukk Ironhorn shouldered in, arms loaded: rolled cloth, a battered brazier, candles tied in twos, a small mirror with its gilt scabbed off by years of other people's faces, a coil of rope that looked proud of itself. An oil flask bumped his hip and left a darker apology on his coat. One horn clicked stone and Brukk winced like a man who has injured a house.
"Lay them," Kael said, not turning from Vespera.
Brukk obeyed with a devout clumsiness that somehow spared everything from breaking. Cloth went to the stone's edge. The mirror he placed and then re-placed, then placed again, trying to catch a light that wasn't lit yet. He set the brazier where it would make a little circle of heat not meant for Kael. The rope he offered up with both hands like a question he wanted to be wrong about.
"For the living," Kael reminded, and took it with two fingers, letting the rest of the sentence be contempt.
Brukk nodded hard enough to endanger his neck. "I watched a lane, Master. I smelled… I smelled apple cellar and… and coin-blood—like a penny you sucked when you were a boy." Shame colored his ears; Brukk had never had a boyhood worth sucking coins in. "The wolves saw a coat that moved wrong. It stepped the fence like a table steps when men carry it. It carried a woman. The house shutter said—" He swallowed the word.
"Say it," Kael said. Words do the work or they do not deserve breath.
"MINE," Brukk whispered, as if the wood could hear him being rude about it.
"Good." Kael let the syllable approve the shame. He slid the rope beneath the stone and tied it off in a way that would not slip even if stone learned to sweat. "And?" He turned, finally, spare as a blade moving.
Brukk worked a hand into a pocket and offered a pebble on his palm. Not light; attention. Wrong-red at the core, glass-hard at the edge. The shard in Vespera's hollow answered like a cousin recognizing family at a funeral.
"It lay by a ditch," Brukk said. "It wanted to be seen."
Kael didn't touch the pebble. "You carried it."
Brukk's ears colored again. "It was asking to be used, Master. Like a— like a—"
"Careful," Kael said gently, and Brukk let the comparison die before it disgraced the cave.
Kael leaned over the stone and whispered to the shard that belonged to him. "Hungry?" It answered with a friendly pulse, the sort you give a knife when you approve of its sharpness. He flicked his attention to the wolf at the right of the stair—the gray dog-bright one with the scar over its eye from a winter that had thought too much of itself. The wolf stepped forward and stood where Kael wanted it to stand without being told, which is obedience worthy of kings.
Kael reached to the ruff and parted hair, then pinched skin, a small careful hurt, and drew his knuckles along the scruff. The wolf did not object; wolves enjoy being read by those allowed to read them. He brought his fingers to his mouth and tasted what the coat had left in the air.
"Iron," he said. Not the spear metal itself—work iron, the stubborn of a man who would rather ruin his back than let a wall lean wrong. "Lane dust; apple-sour; and… camphor." He smiled, amused at the physician's habit of walking his circles where the night could step over them and not be marked. "[CHECK: scent-reading acceptable through beast?]"
Brukk made a noise that hovered between pride and fear. "I followed as far as the orchard, Master, like you taught: not the place, the path. I did not step into any coin the moon laid down."
"Good," Kael said again, and this time the syllable was approval. He looked to Vespera. "He didn't kneel." He wasn't asking. The wolves had brought back the way a body moves when a knee wants to learn humility and refuses the lesson. "A man with a spear chose standing. I enjoy that," he told the dark and let the dark be jealous.
Brukk, who enjoyed simple truths the way bees enjoy being bees, brightened. "Do we break him, Master?"
"Not yet." Kael curled his thumb across Vespera's knuckles and set her hand precisely in the fold of cloth he'd arranged. "A tool used cold behaves better than a tool heated in temper. We shadow. We watch what takes from him and what he keeps. Men declare themselves during loss."
Brukk tried the sentence on and found it fit. "He had a wife," he offered softly, as if the word might crack and spill.
Kael's mouth turned pleasant and sharp. "Say wife."
"Wife," Brukk rumbled, and the shard warmed, pleased with the mouth-shape. Kael noted the little vanity; Bloodglass liked possession pronounced neatly.
He set his palm flat on the stone beside Vespera's ribs and felt the echo under the Bloodglass like a tiny polite knock. Far away, something had been named. Far away, something had agreed to a rule it did not understand.
"Dress the cave," Kael said. "White cloth under her. No soot on the mirror. Oil quiet, not like fish. Candles at the feet; leave their mouths closed. This place is a throat; they will speak when I open it."
Brukk moved—careful now, reverent. He shook out the cloth, his big hands doing a small job with a tenderness that would have made other men complicated if they'd seen it. He wiped the mirror with the hem of his shirt. He set the brazier where heat would not touch Vespera's skin because Kael had said no heat, and Brukk behaved as if words were nails that held the world together.
Kael knotted two lengths of rope into an honest harness. He laid it aside. "For the living," he repeated, so the cave would know his economy. He took a lump of charcoal and marked three thin lines on the stone's edge, not sigils, not theater, simply reminders to his own hands about where they begin and where they must end.
Brukk finished the candles and looked up with a child's hope of being praised. "Master."
Kael cut him a sliver of a smile. "Adequate."
Brukk glowed like a hearth that had been told it's a sun.
"The living tether," Kael said, turning the words so they would find the right seat. "A human whose blood has known a vampire in bed. Not a bite in fear or fight; flesh and lie. Shame and whisper. Bring me that. Alive. Unharmed. The mouth must still make pretty promises when I ask. Do you understand?"
Brukk nodded so hard a candle almost lost its balance and then had the decency not to. "Stonecross first," he said, eager to prove memory. "Then Ravenmarch. The farms. Taverns I am too ugly for. Windows. Sheets. Shame. I will follow shame."
"Good," Kael said a third time, and that one was dangerous. "Shadow also the man who did not kneel. Do not make him afraid. Afraid men lie bitter. Feed him a night that looks like a bed turned down but not slept in."
Brukk frowned, heroically trying to want what his master wanted. "If… if the coat has bed with a human, Master, do we take that human instead?"
Kael's eyes half-lidded, amused by the blossoming of a reasonable mind. "If you can find the one the coat has, bring them. If you can find the coat's bed, burn nothing and tell me everything." He set his knuckles back to Vespera's temple for a soft, cruel count. "We prefer willing sins. They behave better under the knife."
Brukk nodded as if sin were a cord he knew how to coil. "And the physician? He walks his circles."
"Let him." Kael's smile thinned into exactness. "Men who draw circles around holes cure the hole of loneliness. They invite."
He went to the cave mouth and put his palm to stone. The mountain's breath came cool along his hand; he tasted it because tasting is a way of owning without making clutter. "Wolves," he said, and the three at the stair rose. "Steps. Teeth only when asked. If the east starts thinking, make it forget."
Two wolves lay down again with their eyes open. The scar-eyed one turned its muzzle toward the path like a thought that enjoys being a guard.
Kael returned to the stone. He adjusted Vespera's head by a thumb-width, because rightness matters or nothing does. He smoothed one last coil of hair and, because S2 is a tool when wielded like any other, he brought his mouth near her throat and breathed once, slow, so the Bloodglass would feel jealous and stay awake.
"Your city speaks MINE," he told her softly, and let her name for the world curl in his mouth like a blade sheath. "Tonight we will teach it the word OURS."
Brukk looked at the rope again, brave enough to ask a thing with small words. "Master… if the man who did not kneel is clever, do we make him stupid first, or do we make him useful first?"
"Useful. Then stupid," Kael said, almost kind. "In that order, if the world allows the courtesy." He straightened his cuff, then turned his hand and spread his fingers like a man choosing the first note for an instrument he will kill a room with. "Go."
Brukk did not go.
He shuffled, made a noise like a cart wheel remembering it could break, and said, "Master, the wolves told me another small thing." He held his fingers apart as if measuring fish. "The man's mouth tasted metal to itself. The wolves smelled it when he kissed his wife."
Kael's attention grew sharp and pleasant. "He kissed her," he repeated, tasting the architecture of consent. "Then you will bring me that consent, properly trained."
Brukk nodded, relief blessed by purpose. He thumped fist to chest and finally turned for the door.
The shard at Vespera's throat flared, quick and greedy, as if the night had just been given a word it loved. Kael stilled. The pulse ran his fingertips where they rested on the stone and vanished like a lie that intends to come back with better clothes.
Kael smiled with his teeth barely in it.
"He will come," he said to Vespera, to the wolves, to the shard that had learned ambition. "They always come when their house learns the wrong word."
He flicked two fingers. The scar-eyed wolf rose. Brukk looked back from the tunnel mouth without turning his head—a bull politely asking for a road.
"Stonecross," Kael said. "Orchard. Then the steps. Bring me a sin that likes itself."
Brukk went, the cave narrowing the sound of his feet into something that counted and then stopped counting.
Kael looked down at the woman the world had stolen and he had stolen back. He laid his palm flat on the cloth by her hip, claiming land without flags, and closed his eyes once—not prayer, inventory.
"Work," he said, and the cave agreed by not saying anything stupid back.