Stonecross had the kind of dawn that forgot to be brave.
Mist lay where the lanes pretended to be straight. Chimneys tried smoke the way boys try mustaches. Brukk Ironhorn came in by the tannery path because the river learned fewer people than roads did. Two wolves paced the shadows at knee-distance—one ditch-gray, one with a torn ear that made him look as if he'd once refused advice.
"Quiet," Brukk told them, and they were. Wolves liked instructions if the person giving them sounded like a hill.
He stopped where the lane widened enough for two carts to regret each other. The air tasted of stale yeast, wet wool, and a thin thread of camphor that remembered doctor's hands. He put his palm to the ground and felt last night's footsteps arguing with one another—panic, pride, running that remembered it had to make a turn.
"House," he said, and the wolves took him there like a thought following itself.
Rook and Iria's place looked like all the others until it didn't. The shutter was almost closed, barred angry, the gap the width of a man who wanted to prove nothing was getting in. Across the inside face the word MINE showed pale where new wood had been cut. Brukk read the letters slow with his mouth, not out loud, because caves had better manners than lanes.
The ditch-gray wolf sniffed, sneezed, shook off a thought. Brukk leaned in, breathed iron and a woman's water and the faint rot-sweet of cellar apples that had learned patience. He put two fingers to the groove of the N and felt how neat the tooth had been. Not knife. Not chisel. Nail—the kind that enjoyed its job.
"Master won't like that," Brukk told the wood. The wood decided not to care.
He backed away and watched the window not move. Inside, a chair creaked, the kind of sound chairs make when someone is almost done being awake and hasn't told anyone yet. That was enough. You learn more by not being invited than by talking.
"Smell," he said to the torn-ear wolf. It did, head low, tail carrying the weight of a decision. It padded along the wall, found where the old apple leaned over the ditch like a drunk considering reform, and huffed once at the ground. Brukk saw where something wrong-red had lain and gone and pocketed the idea without touching it.
He moved on.
Stonecross woke in layers: shutters yawned; doors coughed; someone cursed bread, then forgave it. Brukk kept to the wedges of shade and to the place behind things, where big men become small if they bother to mean it. The tavern on Wick Lane gave him voices that had been used too hard the night before. He crouched by the yard fence, elbows on knees, and listened to talk that thought it was private.
"…said the shutter spelled it, I saw it—"
"—spelled what? Anyone can scratch wood."
"Go write MINE on yours, see if you sleep."
Laughter, but not the free kind. Brukk smiled a little. He liked when words did work.
He left the voices to wear holes in themselves and crossed to the wash lines behind the houses where the lane's wind gave up and the courtyards kept secrets. Shirts hung like men who'd made mistakes. Sheets did a quieter shiver. A redheaded woman pegged a damp chemise and swore at the peg as if it were a man. Her hair was a city all by itself. Brukk pegged her for Tawny—the name Iria had breathed like a grumble. He did not step toward her. He stepped near the line she used and let the air tell him stories.
There. Bed. Not sweat alone—the after of it, the agreeables and the small ache, an hour that had decided not to apologize. Under it, colder: stone cellar. Under that, the coin taste Rook had been chewing when he said nothing about blood.
Brukk bent as if to tie his boot. One sheet had a crease he recognized—the fold of a body that had rested, not hid. His big thumb found the hem, saw a loose thread making its escape, and pinched it free with a reverence usually reserved for bread you didn't pay for. He lifted it to his nose. Cold. Sweet. The kind of sweetness that comes from two people who mean it. The kind of cold that comes from a visitor who doesn't learn the stove because the night is already enough.
Not fear, then. Not a forced thing. Brukk remembered Kael's phrasing: blood that has known a vampire in bed—flesh and lie. Shame, not horror. Whisper, not scream.
He breathed the thread again. Nothing of Kael in it—no mountain, no wolves. Another kind of night. He rolled the thread around the pad of his finger until it made itself a small promise.
"Morning," a voice said behind him.
He straightened with a speed that looked like a stretch. Tawny stood by the line, arms full of pins, mouth hard, eyes sharper than pins deserved. The chemise on her shoulder steamed court opinions into the air.
"You do your laundry with your nose?" she said.
"I do my work with it," Brukk said, and let the voice be gentle so it wouldn't break anything delicate she might still want. "Sorry for the looking." He inclined his head, which on him looked like a house deciding not to fall on a person.
"You're big for sorry," Tawny said, measuring him for either trouble or use. "You're not from around here."
"No," he agreed. "I'm from up." He didn't point. You don't point at mountains. Mountains point at you.
She glanced beyond him toward Rook and Iria's place and then pretended she hadn't. "You're not with whoever carved that."
"No," Brukk said again. "I spell different." He glanced at the line. "You hang other people's lies for them?"
Tawny's mouth twitched. "I charge. I fold. Sometimes I keep a thing an extra day and it forgives me. The town breathes lighter if I do." She clipped a smaller sheet to the line. "You look like a problem with solutions. If you came to sell the wrong ones, sell them somewhere else."
"Not selling," Brukk said. He looked at her hands. Washer's hands—raw where winter lives, strong where men forget to look. He tucked his hands behind his back where they wouldn't scare any of her bravery. "I'm looking for a kind of person. One who knows the night, not the way a lantern knows it. The way a bed knows it."
Tawny's eyes didn't blink, which was its own blinking. "We get drunks and married men," she said. "They know enough night to ruin the small hours. You want one of those, I can stack you a pile until your back breaks."
"Not those," Brukk said softly.
Silence had its say for a moment. Then Tawny looked past him again, but this time she meant it. "You're sniffing on behalf of that girl," she said, and didn't name Iria because names cost; you spend them or you save them.
"I'm sniffing on behalf of a promise," Brukk said, and let the word be heavy without being cruel.
Tawny made a professional sound that meant she was done being overpaid by grief. "Take your nose and your wolves and your up, and don't scare my line," she said, but she didn't move him along with her body. She pointed with her chin at the end house. "The physician likes to walk until shoes remember him. He'll be by in a handful of minutes. You can hide your shadow behind his. People let shadows in if they think the shadow knows Latin."
Brukk nodded his thanks in a language that used shoulders. "Your kindness," he said.
"It wasn't," she said briskly. "But neither is the world." She paused, eyes dipping to the line and then to his pocket where the thread had gone. "If you help the girl, leave something small on my sill. Bread. Stories. I take either."
"Yes," Brukk said, and meant it with the precision of a man who liked to keep promises because they stack well.
He slid out of the yard in a way men his size don't get credit for and found the circle the physician's shoes had made of the lanes. He waited near a gate he could use as a door if the world needed a door and smelled camphor before he heard Calder Mott's breath. Calder came like an argument you don't want to have and have anyway—tired, correct, ready to lose politely.
Brukk let him pass, then fell in behind at a distance where wolves aren't offense, just rumor. Calder's lamp guttered in a way lamps do when mornings think they're better. He stopped by Rook's shutter and laid two fingers on the bar as if taking a pulse from wood. Then he moved on. Brukk memorized the pace, the places Calder put his feet when not thinking—how he curved away from a stone he couldn't bear to trip on again. Circles, Kael had said. Brukk counted them. One. Two. The places where a circle became a habit. He filed that under useful later.
He didn't knock. He didn't need to. Knocking is what you do when you want to be owed.
By the time the town tried a bell, Brukk knew what the bell meant to him—noise, not gravity. He watched the lanes answer and not answer and took note of which men rose, which men didn't, and which men wanted to and couldn't because something had gone missing from inside their bodies. He gave those men a glance sideways and a mark in his mind. Holes, he thought, remembering Kael's smiles.
He looped back to the wash.
The sheet with the cold-sweet held its confession without shame. He stood there until the courtyards accepted him as furniture, then lifted the line a thumb's width and let it fall. It made the sound of beds making peace with themselves. He smiled into his chest where smiles don't leak.
"Stay," he told the torn-ear wolf, pointing at a stack of crates across the lane with his chin. The wolf went and turned itself into a shadow that remembered teeth when necessary. The ditch-gray he set at the orchard gate with the look wolves give apples when they're being professional. "Watch," he said. "Not eat."
He took the thread out and wound it around the first joint of his finger until it made a ring of someone else's night. He held his hand up where the light could see it and imagined saying to Kael, here is shame that will talk if you speak its right name.
"Work," he told himself, because words arranged tasks.
He left Stonecross by the same numbers he'd used to come in—tannery, river, place behind things. He did not look back. He did not need to. Wolves look back for you, if you let them keep their pride.
On the bank under the willow where river-sound makes secrets feel less proud, he stopped, knelt, and put the thread into a scrap of cloth he'd torn from his own sleeve so nothing cheap would touch it. He tied the scrap with a knot Kael liked because it held when you asked it nicely and held when you were cruel.
"Lady," he said into the willow's ribs, because caves aren't the only places that carry words. "We are bringing you something."
The willow did not answer. Trees rarely do, even when you use their full names.
Brukk stood, rolled his shoulders, and felt the mountain in his back like a pack he hadn't put down since boyhood. The wolves came to heel without asking for praise. He let himself be enormous again and gave the morning his shape.
Then he took the path up.
The town behind him spun its little arguments; the river kept its; the bell tried to be important. Brukk carried thread, scents, and a sentence he intended to earn: I found you a sin that likes itself.
He did not need to say the words out loud. The path would remember them.