Morning pretended to be kind.
It came in sideways through the narrow gap Rook had left between shutter and frame, not enough to warm anything, just enough to let the room know the world hadn't finished with it. He sat in the chair turned toward the window and let the chair mean something. On the bed, Iria lay on her back, hands folded at her stomach the way practical women rest when there is still work to do.
He watched her breathe. He liked that discipline when it belonged to her and not to someone else's order.
When she opened her eyes, she didn't start. She turned her head and found him like you find a familiar nail in a dark wall—by memory first, sight second. "You didn't sleep."
"I sat," he said.
She took inventory and then let her shoulders release an inch. "Good." She slid her legs under the blanket, testing, as if the bed were a boat and she was learning the water again. "Come here."
He went. He didn't try for lightness; lightness insults mornings like this. He sat on the edge and the bed recognized him. She caught two of his fingers and pressed them to the side of her throat where a pulse ought to live. It did. "Faster earlier," she said, letting him feel the calm return. "Now it understands itself."
"I don't," he said, because truth is also a kind of discipline. He turned his hand and put his palm there instead, not pressing—present. Heat moved from him to her and back again, enough to file under alive.
She studied his face as if it were a map. "Tell me something that hurts only a little."
He almost smiled. "You're beautiful," he said, and she allowed the answer to do its small job.
When she pushed herself up, he steadied her by the elbow. She let him. The shirt he'd made her wear by accident in the night—his—hung wrong and right on her at the same time. She put her forehead against his jaw, then drew back and looked at the window. The carved word on the shutter—MINE—caught the thin light and returned it meanly.
"We'll fix that," she said.
"We will." He adjusted the blanket around her hips, precise because precision is a way to steal back a room from the night. He reached for the mug and found it on its side, the last water already gone into the board's patient mouth. He put it upright anyway. "Listen."
They listened. Far off, the town bell lifted its voice—the same old tone, the same habit of telling people what the day wanted them to do. One. Two. Three.
Rook heard it. Not as weather; exactly as a bell. He watched his body for the little rise, the lean toward the door, the willing of feet to obey tradition.
Nothing moved.
He didn't armor his face. He let her see the absence so she would know where to put her hands in future.
"Does it want you?" she asked.
"It talks," he said. "I don't go."
He stood to show her. He walked to the door, not fast, put his hand on the bar, and waited for the tug—the come on then, man, there are other people's fires—and felt no tug at all. The room stayed his.
He returned to her. Iria's mouth had that narrow set it wore when she accepted a price in full before bargaining the next one down. "Good," she said. "It saves you for me."
He breathed. The relief was not clean; nothing about this was. But her choosing the word saves gave the morning a use. He slid a hand to her knee beneath the blanket and left it there, not to claim, to confirm.
A knock came, precise as a pen. Three taps with the patience of someone who had already decided what to think. Rook didn't need to look. "Calder," he said.
"Answer," Iria murmured. "And don't be rude unless he earns it."
Rook opened the door enough for practice and let the wind take a half-credit from the room. Physician Calder Mott stood with his lamp unlit, the day already doing the lamp's job. Camphor came with him like an apology he couldn't stop making. "You look better," he told Iria before looking at Rook, because some men practice surviving by learning the order of their courtesies.
"Sit," she said, nodding at the chair. "You'll have to share it with my husband; he thinks it's his now."
Calder set his bag on the stool and didn't argue the chair. He took Rook's wrist and watched the beat under his thumb. He didn't comment on how the bell was still going and Rook wasn't. He lifted Rook's eyelid, and the eye did what pupils do. "Taste?"
"Metal," Rook said. "Less right now."
"Good," Calder said. He let go as if he'd been holding a weight he respected. He turned to Iria. "Dizziness? Nausea? Holes where things should be?"
"Only the holes I already knew were there," Iria said, dry as a good cloth. She folded the blanket more neatly across her lap because neatness makes men behave. "And a word on my shutter I didn't order."
Calder went to the window, touched the carved MINE with two fingers the way he'd touched the bell-rope the night before—taking a pulse from a patient that believed itself to be wood. "Ugly work," he said. "Too neat." He let his hand fall. "You'll sand it. Or you'll learn to ignore it, which I don't recommend. People get good at ignoring, and then the wrong things happen in plain rooms."
He set his bag on the bed edge, with a look that asked permission and a look that already had it. He drew out a paper twist of salt, a small bottle, a strip of linen. "Rinses," he said. "Salt and boiled water; mouth and hands. It's a ritual more than a cure. Rituals help when lies get in. Put an iron nail under the threshold. Not because nails are magic; because you believe the nail is stubborn and I believe in giving the day every excuse to act like itself."
Rook nodded as if he could see the nail already, black and sure between wood and dirt. "We can do stubborn."
"You're good at it," Calder said. He glanced at Rook's pockets, not nosy, just counting tools a man might forget he had. "Any cuts? Scrapes? Strange warmth along bones that shouldn't be warm?"
Rook showed him the scraped palm from the fence. Calder cleaned it with a pour that stung; Rook accepted the sting as one accepts a tax that makes the road possible. Calder wrapped the linen with a neatness that made the hand look important. "No ladders," he said. "No brave lifting. No heroics before breakfast." The smile that came with the old line was smaller today, but it still arrived.
Iria watched both men the way a good captain watches a shore—grateful to see it, certain it will try to drown you anyway. "What do you think," she asked Calder, "in your words."
Calder stood there and did the thing he was paid for: names. "Something pulled close and then let go," he said. "It doesn't want witnesses; it wants stories. It wants to be the only instrument a room hears." He considered the word glamour and chose not to insult them with it. "It leaves a taste and takes a habit. People will talk as if the taste is the important part because they can name it. Watch what they do instead."
Rook looked at the door as the bell finished its tidy count. "It took a habit," he admitted. "When bells speak, I don't walk."
Calder's face didn't change in a way that still counted as changing. "That's a good habit to lose under the right conditions," he said. "Make sure you choose the conditions. If you find yourself being chosen—" He opened his hands, showing their emptiness. "Come to me. Don't guess. Don't chew on it. Bring it."
"We will," Iria said, because that was the agreement she wanted written into the morning.
Calder turned back to the window. He touched MINE once more, then the bar, as if comparing the two for tone. "Sanding," he said. "Warm salt water. Iron. The rest is your marriage."
"That we can do," Iria said. She reached for Rook's wrist without looking and found it. Her fingers tapped once against him—I'm here. Don't lie for me. She let go as if that was what she had needed to say.
Calder gathered his things with the dignity of men who know what parts of a day they own and what parts they do not. At the door he paused. "If you hear the wolves close," he said, "tell yourself you like them. People survive sounds better when they decide to approve." He glanced at Rook's spear. "Keep that clean."
Rook inclined his head. "Doctor."
"Be smart," Calder said, the way a father might toss a coin to a child not because the coin will buy anything but because the habit might. Then he left them to be people without a witness again.
The room waited.
Iria slid to the edge of the bed. He stood to help her; she took the help without guilt. Standing made her wolf-bright for a second, as if blood had to be reminded of how to carry her. When the color settled, she looked at the shutter. "We fix it now," she said, and that now had teeth.
They went to the chest. Rook found the old sandstone he used on tool handles, the one that remembered his fingerprints. Iria reached under the boards where she kept the good nails—long iron, straight as temper. She set one aside for the threshold and weighed it in her palm as if considering whether stubbornness had a mass you could measure.
He pulled the shutter open wide to let the light in on the insult. The lane looked back, innocent in the way places are after they have already done their worst. He set the bar down and put the sandstone to the first cut at the M. The stone bit and sang. M lost a little pride. He sanded again.
Iria stood close enough that their shoulders touched. She held the nail like a stylus. "Say it," she said.
He understood. He kept sanding. "Ours."
"Again."
"Ours."
She set the nail against the wood—not carving, not yet, just letting the nail think about the job. "We'll write it after the sanding," she said. "Not big. Not like a fight. Like a fact."
He breathed and kept the rhythm steady. The sandstone answered with a steady, sullen music. Sweat climbed his back; he let it. When his arms burned, he welcomed the ordinary hurt. The M dulled into nothing you could read from the lane. The I blurred. The N lost its neatness. E gave up last. He wiped the dust with his sleeve. The wood looked like itself again—marred, but not obedient to another mouth.
Iria bent and kissed the smear his sleeve had made, not because dust deserves kisses but because choosing where you spend tenderness is a way to survive. Then she knelt at the threshold. She set the iron nail under the board with deliberate hands, the head out just enough to see, as if showing the house its own spine. "Stubborn," she told it.
"Stubborn," he agreed.
He put the sandstone down. His hands were rough with grit; hers, too. He took both hers in both his and laced their fingers tight so the dust had nowhere to fall. He didn't ask if he could hold her like that; marriage answered.
"Tell me the bargain," she said, eyes on their joined hands, as if the wood might overhear and behave out of respect.
He told it simply. "Two paces into a moon-coin," he said. "It took the part of me that treats bells as commands. I asked for limits. Tonight, only that." He didn't dress the words. Dressing words makes them lie more politely.
She listened with her mouth thin and steady. When he finished, she rested her forehead against his and stayed there until breath switched sides between them and made a small treaty. "You didn't kneel," she said.
"I didn't."
"You didn't ask." Her smile cut like a soft knife. "Good."
He could have kissed her then and turned the morning into something greedier, but greed had had its turn last night and would again. He kissed the heel of her hand instead, where palms keep secrets. She closed her eyes for that. When she opened them, they were ordinary in a way that made him want to be better at everything.
"What now," he asked, because asking her now was a habit he wanted to make harder to remove than bells.
"Together," she said. "You don't go where I can't hear you. If you have to, you take something of mine that argues with your pocket." She tapped his coat where the wrong-red pebble lay pretending to be obedient. "We pick our own rhythms. We wash with salt. We eat. We work. We show the room it belongs to us. And when the night asks for another appointment, we decide if the night deserves us."
He nodded like a student who finally understood the problem was designed to be lived through, not solved. "Together," he said.
They set about small things: water to boil; salt to pour; the spear to oil; the bar to reset with the new word whispered into the wood. Iria rinsed her hands and her mouth and made faces at the taste; he rinsed and let the salt bite because he'd already learned to like honest stings. He rubbed a thinning patch of oil into the spearshaft and heard the grain say thank you the way wood says it—by not splintering when you need it.
When the chores were done, the room looked no cleaner, but it felt less available to strangers.
Iria went to the shutter and, with the tip of the iron nail, wrote a small word low, where only people inside the house would see it. Not deep. Not flashy. She leaned back and let him read.
OURS.
He touched the letters gently with his thumb and felt how stubborn they already were. She caught his hand and pressed it flat to the wood until his palm knew the grain. "Say it," she said, and he did.
"Ours."
Outside, the lane coughed up a laugh that wanted to be clever and wasn't. A wolf's breath slid under the door and away again, as if the animal had gone by and decided to leave them to their quiet. Rook stood with his forehead against the repaired shutter and let the ordinary weight of the timber convince his bones they were still in their body.
They ate bread and it tasted like bread. They drank water and it tasted like water. The bell tried again from far off; he counted it and did not go. He found that he could miss the urge and not mourn it.
Iria leaned her head on his shoulder and stayed there through the last of the morning's pretending. When she finally spoke, it was not to ask for a plan but to make one work by saying it aloud. "When it calls moon-rise again," she said, "we answer if we want to."
He put his cheek to her hair. "We'll want to," he said, and the sentence didn't frighten him.
She laughed into his shirt—small, undeserved, welcome. "Then be smart," she said. "And be mine."
"Yours," he said, and the wood learned the word again, and the day did not argue.