The mountain's breath met him at the mouth of the cave—cool, work-minded.
Brukk Ironhorn ducked in, one hand on the plank so it wouldn't scold the stone. The wolves on the stair recognized him the way night recognizes a habitual star: a glance, a lowered head, no fuss. He came on heavy and careful, carrying his size like a man carries sleep when he's sworn not to drop it.
"Master," he said, voice pared down to fit the chamber.
Kael did not turn from the stone table yet. He sat beside Vespera, sleeves neatly rolled, a bowl of water and a brazier the size of a broad hand near his knee. On the stone, the Bloodglass gem in Vespera's hollow lay quiet as a secret that had chosen the right keeper. Kael lifted an eyebrow toward Brukk without offering the rest of his face.
"Report," he said.
Brukk drew the small bundle from his coat—scrap of cloth tied with the knot Kael preferred, the knot that holds whether you are polite or cruel. He set it on the edge of the stone, knuckles tucked back like a man leaving bread without wanting fingers counted after. "From the wash," he said. "A thread from a sheet that smelled like bed and cold. Not fear. Shame and whisper. Also: apple cellar, iron, and the physician's camphor in the lanes."
Kael's mouth approved with half a millimeter. "Good nose," he said—credit given to Brukk and to the wolves who had lent theirs. "Stand there."
Brukk stood where a column might have stood if architects were allowed to feel. The wolves settled into their jobs as shadows that breathe.
Kael untied the knot with fingertips that never look hurried. He opened the scrap and revealed the single gray thread curled on a fold like a sleeping worm. He warmed the bowl-water by moving the brazier close, added a pinch of ash with a gesture that suggested he trusted fire only when it remembered how to be small, then lifted his wrist.
"Count," he told himself quietly, and the cave counted with him. One. Tap. He raised a bead of blood—clean, no theater—and let it fall to cloud the water. The bowl breathed once in the cold air. The Bloodglass at Vespera's throat woke with a thin meat-light. Kael laid the thread across the bowl's mouth so it spanned the rim, not touching the water.
"Listen," he told the shard, not as spell, as instruction. "Not to me. To that."
Light ran a vein through the gem; dimmed; returned. Kael leaned in until his mouth nearly touched Vespera's ear. "This is yours," he said, claim turned to comfort. "Not to eat; to learn."
He closed his eyes the way a scribe closes a book to remember the pages. He drew the thread to his nose without letting it drink. He tasted air around it. He did the work men do when they know the difference between a detail and a distraction.
"Cold-sweet," he said. "Consent. Whisper. A bed that isn't sorry it is a bed. Apple cellar—the sort that talks a room into being tired. Iron in the room, not against the act." His mouth tilted. "No mountain. No wolf. None of me." He opened his eyes. "A not-mine night. Good."
Brukk's shoulders released a tightness he hadn't admitted to. "The thread will talk for you, Master?"
"Threads are polite," Kael said. "They repeat what skin tells them if you arrange the room correctly." He lifted the fold with the thread and tied it to a thin bridge of rope he'd stretched between two hammered pegs over Vespera's throat—not touching her, near enough to make the shard jealous. "Let it swing."
The thread swayed minutely in the breath that found its way past stone. The shard responded with a domestic murmur, a low red attention that would have been sound if blood cared to own ears. Kael watched the phase—how the thread's tiny movement led or lagged the shard's faint bright—then nodded as if something had fallen into the right drawer.
"The living tether," he said, letting the words find their weight. "We take alive, unharmed, unscratched. We prefer a person who chooses, who believes in their own choosing. No bitter lie. Sweet one. Slept one." He did not look at Brukk to see if the shape of the command fit. He issued it as a measurement a wall must meet.
Brukk nodded anyway. "I can find choosing," he said. "If it eats alone, it hides. If it shares, it shames—and shame makes a path."
"Go back to the wash," Kael said. "Not as a thief. As a customer of air. Speak to the red-haired woman if she will sell you information. We do not frighten her line. Tell her: a knife that never cuts sulks itself into rust. Give her bread if you must. Give her work if she wants it. Do not give her a story about being saved."
Brukk worked this into his spine. "Yes."
"The wolves?" Kael asked without moving his eyes from the thread.
"I set torn-ear at the crates across from their house," Brukk said. "No bite. Only look. The other at the orchard gate. He can count to moon-rise."
"Good." Kael watched the thread's tremble calm. He lowered a finger into the heated water, then raised it to the gem. The Bloodglass took the steam and pretended to eat it, glow deepening by a stab. "You will shadow the physician as well," he added. "Calder Mott walks circles. People put secrets in the corner where circles fail. Count the corners. Note who hesitates when he passes."
Brukk's mouth did a slow yes. "What of the husband who didn't kneel?"
Kael touched Vespera's hair along the line where scalp remembers the part. "You will not frighten him," he said. "He is a door we may need to open again without breaking hinges. Give him nights that look like beds turned down and left untouched. Let him think the world is polite until it is not."
Brukk frowned his heroic frown. "If he comes up to the steps?"
"The wolves will remember their teeth," Kael said mildly. "But they will show them only if he asks. And if he asks, we will see what he thinks he is asking for."
The thread lifted a whisper of air, then eased. Kael adjusted the line one knot tighter so the drift stayed over Vespera's throat. He stood, wiped a dot of his own blood from the bowl's lip with a cloth that had touched nothing else, and set the cloth aside as if he planned to account for it later. He probably did.
Brukk watched his hands and learned a lesson without words: places obey when hands behave like rulers.
"Say wife," Kael prompted, as if continuing a thought Brukk had not heard.
"Wife," Brukk said at once, and the shard gave a satisfied flick. Kael filed that in the mental ledger where he kept what the gem enjoyed.
"Stonecross first," Kael said. "Then Ravenmarch—they pretend to be pious there; piety is a blanket with edges you can lift. Follow edges."
Brukk squared his chest. "If I find the one who chose the night in a bed," he said, carefully, "I bring them breathing. With their mouth unafraid. If I err—"
"I forgive you once," Kael said, familiar as a hunger he intended to keep. "Only once."
Brukk nodded like a door accepting a lock. He looked at Vespera, at the precise way her hands had been placed, at the mirror propped to show her face when the room earned light. "Lady," he said to her, and the word made him stand taller without meaning to.
Kael set his palms lightly on the stone's edge and leaned as if into weather. "She approves," he said, and made it true by saying it in a place that cares about tone.
He glanced to the rope harness he'd tied; satisfied it hadn't learned any stupid habits while he watched something else. He re-rolled his sleeves exactly two finger-widths tighter and turned his face fully to Brukk for the first time since the bull of a man had entered.
"You will go now," he said. "No heroics. No noise. If the red-haired washer plays price with you, pay her in work she likes. If the doctor looks at you, let him. He will decide you are tired. He will be right. Tired men do not alarm him."
Brukk nearly smiled; on him, nearly was enough to fog a mirror. "And if the night-blue coat shows itself?" He did not say the name he didn't have.
"Do not look at its mouth," Kael said. "It is borrowed. Look at its hands. If they are empty, it is hunting. If they are full, it is teaching. Most hunters are vain teachers. Let it teach you what it thinks you can learn."
Brukk weighed that, nodded once—heavy, affirmative—and slid the bundle's empty cloth into his pocket because cloth that has served deserves to be used again. He thumped his fist to his chest with a sound that suited the cave and turned toward the dark of the tunnel.
"Brukk," Kael said.
Brukk stopped, shoulders making the shape of a door that had learned manners.
"If the washer asks for a story," Kael said, "give her truth that will not spoil her breakfast. Men who bleed their stories into other people's mornings make poor allies."
"Yes," Brukk said simply. He went.
The passage narrowed the size of his footsteps until they were countable, and then even that gift ended.
Kael stood still and let the chamber settle. Sound in a cave is like breath in a sleeping chest—easier to measure once the excitement stops pretending it is purpose. He returned to Vespera. He brushed a single ash fleck from her brow with the pad of his ring finger. Then he leaned in and laid his mouth very near her ear, where vows think they belong.
"Work continues," he whispered, reprising the first promise he had made to the night over her. "I keep the parts. You keep the hunger."
The shard answered—not bright, not loud, but with the exact purr of a tool that has been fed its first crumb and recognized the recipe. Kael let his face soften one degree and then put the softness away in the place a man keeps clothes he wears only for one person.
He took the bowl in both hands, tipped it, and poured the blood-clouded water into the brazier in a thin line. The brazier took it and made no complaint—quiet heat, quiet steam. He set the bowl upside down to dry. He tightened the thread's knot once more so it would not betray him by stretching at an hour when he wanted to believe in physics.
He looked at the steps. The wolves watched the world with their usual literacy. He looked at the plank. It admitted the dawn in a narrow grammar and promised to let in more when told to.
Kael settled onto the stone bench he had made behave like a seat. He rested his hands palm-down on his knees—owner's posture—and breathed the room's shape into his chest.
"Work," he said.
The cave agreed by refusing to argue.