The yard gave them back to the lane with ordinary manners.
Tawny slipped her mending into a basket and stepped off the sill; Sera Vale adjusted her kerchief and set her hand on the basket's handle; Brukk Ironhorn checked the ribbon tied firm around his wrist and patted the rope on his shoulder as if greeting a quiet animal. The wolves wore collars and the discipline that makes wolves look like dogs; torn-ear yawned so extravagantly it read as boredom to anyone who needed it to.
"Gate. Lane. Well," Brukk recited, not to patronize, to make the world overhear. "Tannery path. River turn. Steps."
"Witness at the well," Sera added. She looked at Tawny. "You walk that far. If I blink wrong, you take me home by the ear."
Tawny lifted a brow. "You have more ears than I have hands. Don't blink wrong."
They passed under the weaver's gate. Sun had begun thinking about being someone else's problem; shadows lengthened like men who had stayed too long at work. The lane performed its usual afternoon: a cart, a quarrel small enough to forgive, a chicken boasting. Wick Lane smelled of yeast and old jokes. People noticed the size of Brukk, the calm of Sera, and the two dogs that were not dogs, and then pretended they hadn't.
"Rules," Sera said softly, as if laying cards on the air so the wind could see they matched. "You remind me of stubborn if my mouth forgets the word."
"Stubborn," Brukk said, letting the syllables set his jaw. "And I unmake any knot you point at."
"Good." She walked center, not tucked behind him. When a boy darted past with a string of brass bells on a cord, Sera turned her head and smiled, politely, deliberately, and did not reach. The bells made a foolish festival of the lane and went away, insulted that no one saluted.
A deacon thinned by soup watched them pass, hand resting on his stomach like prayer might be stored there for later. "Business?" he asked, as if that made him the ledger.
"Yes," Sera said, polite to the idea of men who liked to count. "Mine."
Brukk didn't slow. He knew what it means when a woman chooses to be her own answer.
At the public well, Calder Mott waited without theatrics, coat open, lamp unnecessary. He had the look of a man who had been told there would be a test and had decided to see which questions were about honesty. His eyes took inventory: Sera's color; Brukk's rope; ribbon on the wrist; wolves with collars; Tawny's chin lifted one degree beyond what she'd admit.
"Afternoon," Calder said. "You look like a procession pretending it's not."
"We're working," Tawny said, as if that would insult the word procession enough to make it behave. She handed Calder the bucket rope. "Witness us at the water, then go be clever at someone else."
Calder's mouth almost smiled. He pulled the bucket, tested the crank, and filled a tin cup twice. He pinched a twist of salt from his pouch, the way men take snuff when they're ashamed of liking it. "Rinse," he told Sera, "only because ritual steadies hands." Sera took the cup, swished, spit, swished again. The brine cut the sweet in the air and left it honest. Calder extended a second cup to Brukk wordlessly; Brukk complied as if the cup had been a command he liked.
"Any metal taste?" Calder asked Sera, not the others, and Sera appreciated that particular literacy.
"Only where fear wants to be fancy," she said. "I'm not buying."
Calder nodded once. He touched two fingers to the ribbon on Brukk's wrist, checking the knot the way he checked pulses. "Tie it where she can see it when she needs to," he said. "Memory has tricks."
"Stubborn," Sera said, by way of rehearsal. The word sat steady. Tawny exhaled, just enough to count as permission.
Calder's face warmed by half a degree. "Good. If you meet something with a borrowed mouth, look at its hands instead." His gaze flicked to Brukk. "You know this."
Brukk inclined his head. "Yes."
Calder set the bucket back in and wiped his palms. "I'll walk this far," he said, and did—half a dozen paces to the corner where Wick Lane slid toward the tannery path. There he stopped. "Be the kind of brave you can still eat breakfast after," he said. "No heroics before breakfast."
Tawny snorted at his favorite sermon, but her eyes softened him a fraction. She put a hand on Sera's arm, brief and strict. "If I don't see you at dawn, I come with iron in my mouth and three stones to the orchard." She pointed at Brukk in the exact tone she used for boys and debtors. "If she doesn't like a single thing, you carry her home fast enough to make me jealous."
"Yes," Brukk said, and the yes fit into the afternoon like a pin.
Tawny kissed the air near Sera's cheek—because some intimacies are better as promises than as touches—then turned and went the other way, skirts making the sound of a woman who runs a small country and intends to keep it.
They took the tannery path. Smell went to work: hide and lye, river breath, cellar apples asleep under the odor like a secret under a tablecloth. Children at the vats stared and didn't wave because you don't wave at processions; you count them. Sera's step stayed measured. The wolves matched with an elegance that would have read as training if anyone had been trained.
"Tell me," Brukk said quietly, "what you fear. Not for me. For you, so your mouth can hear you say it."
"Falling," Sera said, without shame. "Being made a story without my name in the mouth telling it. Begging by accident because I reach for an old lesson." She drew breath and added, "Not being able to laugh about any of it later."
"And what don't you fear," he asked.
"Choosing," she said. "And men with eyes that ask instead of own." A beat. "And rope that fits the person who ties it."
"Good," Brukk said, and kept walking. He didn't lecture the air; he let her answers belong to the road where she'd put them.
The river turn opened—a sudden widening where water liked to hear itself again. A boy threw stones; the wolves minded their business. A snipe startled and scolded them for existing. Sera looked left toward the orchard. The crooked apple tree whose fruit no one loved leaned like a man who had learned too much this week. The breeze rifled the leaves, and the smell of cellar came stronger, like a memory fingering a bruise.
"The coat walked here," Sera said. "I won't talk to its mouth again."
"Good," Brukk said. "If it talks to you, talk to me instead."
She smiled without giving him teeth. "Yes."
They reached the field path and the low hill that remembered frost. Sky thinned. The wolves put their ears up; the ditch one huffed at shadows the way professionals do—noticing without gossip. Brukk adjusted the rope on his shoulder. "Harness," he said. "Here?"
"Base," Sera said. "Let the stone hear me decide."
The Skycleft showed as a dark seam between pines; stairs bit up into it, wet with the mountain's patience. Brukk halted at the first riser and swung the rope around. He made the harness on himself first—chest, shoulder, hip—then set the second loop where Sera could see and correct it. "You put the knot where your hand likes to find it," he said. "If your hand forgets, I remember."
Sera stepped close, fingers competent. She moved the knot a handspan to the left, snugged it, tested with two tugs a midwife would approve of. She looked at his wrist—ribbon in place—and breathed once, slow, like a woman choosing to be stubborn about her own pulse.
"Say it," Brukk prompted, not because the word was magic, because it was theirs.
"Stubborn," Sera said. The mountain didn't answer; mountains answer by holding.
The wolves posted themselves: torn-ear at the foot of the steps—Here. Teeth when asked—and the ditch one watching the turn of the path—There. Tell me first. Brukk set his palm on torn-ear's head and pressed once, a brief crown. "Watch. Quiet." The wolf's tongue strolled out—dog for I understand—then disappeared again. Brukk glanced toward the lane, measuring distance not in paces but in decisions. Sera followed the glance and made peace with the yard and the well being behind her.
"No fear. No harm. Alive. Unscarred. Mouth free," Brukk said, renewing the contract in the ear of the place that wanted to forget people in favor of stone. He turned his face to the seam and pitched his voice low. "We go up for work. If the mountain has better ideas, it can tell the sky first."
Sera laughed then, a small bright thing that made the steps look less like a dare and more like stairs. "If the mountain talks," she said, "I'll ask it to carry my basket."
"It will," Brukk said, entirely sincere.
They put feet on the first riser together. Wet stone tried its tricks—slick in ways that can be learned, narrow in ways that make you respect your hips. Brukk didn't rush. He didn't play at valor. He set a pace a human could keep without hating herself. Sera's breath stayed practical. Wind in the cleft moved across their faces in thin seams.
At a kink in the stair, a man and a woman coming down stopped to make room and then remembered they didn't need to—space had been made around Brukk's size the way water shapes itself around a boat. The man pointed, polite and foolish, at the rope. "What do you fish for up there?" he joked.
"Manners," Sera said, and the man, who had learned some, laughed and moved on.
One step, two, thirteen; moss like velvet, slate like the back of a knife. Brukk chewed the air the way big men do when they decide moving is a kind of thinking. Sera kept center and didn't look down except when the knot under her hand reminded her she had built herself a handle.
They reached the stance before the planked mouth. The board Brukk had described lay splintered and propped, a ruined argument. The gap breathed cool; the cave behind held its thin silence the way a mouth holds an oath.
"Here," Brukk said, and stopped where stone goes from outside to inside and the wordours has to prove it can live in both places.
Sera set her palm to the rock—flat, fingers spread, claiming balance, not ownership. "My name is Sera Vale," she said to the seam and to Brukk and to the evening that had started its slow, necessary theft of color. "I'm here because I choose. I work. I leave if my mouth says stubborn or if I say my name and hear it wrong in return. I come back by dawn or the woman who watches over me at the wash cusses you out so thoroughly your mountain blushes."
Brukk bowed to the palm on stone as if it were a book. "It won't," he said. "Come."
They stepped through.
Cool gathered under their chins; sound changed flavor. The wolves stayed out where a promise had put them. Brukk's rope paid through his fingers with the tidy tick of competence. Candles at the chamber's far side waited their orders. The mirror set to catch a future face refused to catch theirs unless invited.
Sera paused three steps in. She looked at a line strung above a stone table where a single gray thread swayed minutely in the cave's private weather. She watched its patience and the way the air returned it to center. "That's mine, in a way that doesn't belong to me," she said, not asking, knowing.
"Borrowed truth," Brukk said. He didn't touch it. He didn't let it touch her. "It taught the room to listen."
Sera exhaled. The breath came out even. She set the basket down on a flat ledge Brukk pointed to—a place where clean could live—and pulled off her kerchief to let heat out. Hair escaped in the honest way hair does when careful women intend a complicated afternoon.
"You have bread?" she asked.
"Yes," Brukk said, offering the wrapped half with both hands, like the work it was. She tore off a thumb and put it in her mouth, not hungry, practical. She held a second piece toward the dark as if test-feeding a ghost and then ate that too. "If it can't stand watching me eat, it can wait," she said.
"Good," Brukk said.
He checked the harness, ran a flat palm across the rope, felt the knot Sera had set, and finally, finally, let his eyes go where he hadn't allowed them yet: to the stone where a woman lay with hair like a red argument and a gem in her throat that made a color men are not allowed to name if they intend to keep their mornings.
Sera followed his gaze, not with curiosity but with respect. "Lady," she said, speaking to a person, not to a plan. She did not cross the last two steps. She did not make herself important to the room. She set her palm to her own chest instead, as if to let the two women understand how breath works when shared with stone.
Brukk stood just behind her shoulder—present, not pressing. He changed his weight a fraction and the rope hummed a tiny agreement. The ribbon on his wrist lay quiet and certain.
"No fear. No harm." he said again, softer because the cave had already heard it and liked the sentence enough to remember it later.
Sera touched the knot with two fingers, then let her hand fall. "All right," she said, in a tone that would have calmed a mule without bribe. "Let's work."
Evening took one more step downward outside, and the cave let it, but on their terms.