Night laid its back along the cliff and stared at the sea.
The headland here knifed out over a strait that squeezed tides into temper. Far below, water shouldered rock and forgot to be polite. Above, the sky had torn itself into green and milk-white veils—aurora in rags, seams showing. Wind came in tastes instead of gusts: iron, kelp, old snow, the inside of a storm that had died telling the truth.
Ash set a hand on Asgrim's sleeve at the goat-track where the headland thinned to a lip. "We'll hold the path," she said. "If you slip, slip toward us."
Fen tested the loose stones with his boot and nodded, approving all the places a man could choose not to be a fool. "If you call, we'll hear by the change in the wind."
"I won't call," Asgrim said, and meant it. He touched the tar-knot Fen had stitched into his chain so habit would bite him first. Fellgnýr lay wrapped at his hip; Skylaug rested around his forearm with the weight of a responsibility and the slipperiness of a choice.
He stepped onto the knife of rock.
The cliff top was only three paces wide and a hundred deep—enough for a conversation you didn't plan to have twice. The aurora's torn veils bled their green down to the lip. The sea's labor rose and fell like a beast learning a prayer.
She was waiting where the headland's spine crested, sitting with her feet over the drop like a woman at a pier: Rift-Widow. Her hair wore the color of blown frost; her garments shifted like light over knife-water—no fabric, a decision. Hooks lay coiled on the stone beside her, not iron, not rope, curve upon curve of feelers grown from a law that belonged to another room.
"You keep appointments you weren't invited to," she said without turning.
"I answer drafts I didn't sign," Asgrim said, stopping three steps back because some courtesies are useful. The wrong violet under his sailcloth woke the way a good horse lifts its head at a bridge.
She looked over her shoulder and in that glance you could read the ledger of a thousand near-escapes and none paid in full. "You held your breath under the ledger and chose well," she said, meaning the sea and the Warden. "You make storms stand like stools for children and call it craft."
"I don't call it anything," Asgrim said. "I do it and then sand the edges."
She lifted one of her hooks between two fingers—delicate, revolting. The air around it chilled into clarity. "This world has edges that were meant to be sealed," she said. "Your toy keeps them open by being a wound that thinks it's a hammer."
"Tool," he corrected, because even one true word makes thunder more likely to listen later. "It wants to be wrong. I make it be useful."
She smiled a fraction. "You won't love what I am here to show."
"People rarely bring me things I want," he said. "They bring me things I need."
She flicked the hook and it uncoiled like thought, quiet as snowfall. It curved out over the cliff and caught nothing—and everything. The aurora's rag, down where the green thinned, tensed. A seam in the night parted a finger-width.
"Don't," Ash said softly from the path behind, not because she was afraid of pictures, because she had learned what pictures cost. Asgrim didn't look back. The tar-knot bit; he thanked it.
The world showed elsewhere.
Not a dream laid over waves—a place sewn onto this one badly, the stitches bright and ugly. A sky where the stars had corners—square, hard little windows into a geometry that liked to count. Below them, a barrier hung like a glass wall lifted from a workshop and set to keep weather out of a house. It had been shattered: cracks ran in radial spokes, edges ground to sugar, the whole plane flexing as if it were tired of being asked to be flat.
The hammer in his hands—no, a hammer—Fellgnýr's twin or mother or reputation—flew across that square sky, hurled not at an enemy but at the break itself. It struck where two cracks met, and the wall sang with a tone that had no breath in it. People below—small, dear, human because of the way they moved—lifted their faces with a hope he had seen and disliked in mirrors.
"They failed," Rift-Widow said, like a sentence that has learned you can't sweeten it enough. "They sealed for a night and opened a week later, and then for good. Their rivers drained into other rooms. Their winds shredded. They made bargains with absence until they forgot what a bargain is."
The vision swung—careful as a hook bringing you a fish you didn't deserve—down to hands letting the hammer go. Not his. A woman's? A man's? Hands that had built things and unbuilt others. The throw was not a prayer. It was final, workmanlike, terrible: leave; be useful elsewhere; don't come back. The hammer left a scar of violet in the sky like a burn in cloth and was gone.
"My seams are tired," Rift-Widow said, and for the first time the word widow sounded like arithmetic, not tragedy. "Your tool is a lantern hung in a doorway that teaches strangers there is a doorway."
"You want it unbound," Asgrim said. "Sent back into between so you can stitch the fabric tight."
She turned to face him fully. The hook in her hand curled with an affection that made his breath choose a different path through his chest. "I want it unbound so you and yours stop paying for borrowed force with things that make you people. Names. Memories. The middle of songs. I want to put it in a place where it can be heavy and harmless while I close what was supposed to be closed."
He set Fellgnýr down on the stone without unwrapping it; the chain curved like a modest river between them. He didn't reach. He didn't back away. "If I give it, this fjord dies neat," he said simply. "You know what the Jarl is building. Your edge-sense must feel the dome he plans to clap over the capital."
She looked past him toward inland with her eyes unfocused as if sight were an insult and edges were all she cared to know. "He makes a big smooth," she said, almost curious. "It will crack. But it will hurt many before it does."
"I can stop him with this," Asgrim said, touching the sailcloth with two fingers. "Not by being a god. By being a man and making us into a choir that doesn't want to kneel to bells. If I send it away, do you stop him?" He asked the question as about plumbing. He looked to see which way water ran.
She lowered the hook. The aurora stitched itself a breath and then tore again, offended by gravity and attention both. "It is not my vocation to stop kings," she said, as if discussing the price of linen. "I stop holes. He is a hole-maker of a different sort."
"And I am a hole-filler of a different sort," he said. "So we are colleagues at a remove."
"If you keep it, you draw what hunts seams," she said. The hook in her hand made a little discontented curl he had seen in good rope that wanted to do the job and not be found decorous. "Wardens come. Worse follows. You will owe your world this debt until you are emptied out."
"I know," he said. He lifted his hand and the runes under his collarbones made a good map down his arm. "I don't keep it to hoard power. I keep it to spend me where I stand. When the bill comes, I'll pay. We're learning to share the cost so I don't make a legend out of being a mule."
She blinked once, slow, like a long wave deciding whether to bother the beach. "You talk like carpenters when asked about gods," she said.
"I'm bored of gods," he said. "They never sand."
She rose, the cliff not minding the theft of weight under her feet. Two hooks hung at her belt now—had they been there? Had he failed to see?—and a third lay coiled like a sleeping thought.
She threw.
Not at him. Past him. The first hook leapt into the torn veil and curved like a fish that has found the exact current it prefers. It came out behind his shoulder—the chain of recall that ran from Fellgnýr to his chest bowed. The second hook snapped wide to meet it and made a gate out of his thread. The third followed and tied the first two into a shape that promised cruelty.
She tugged and his recall arced to her hand like a dog going temporarily deaf to its name.
Asgrim didn't answer with size. He set waypoints the width of a coin along the inside of his own thread, then split it—two ladders instead of one rope. The hooks bent the left-hand ladder; the right held because he was trying to be boring beautifully. He stepped back once, heel feeling for the crack he had measured with his toes earlier, eyes on her hands, not on her face—face is decoration; hands do work.
She pulled again, clever. The top hook found the second ladder and curved it. He breathed once and shortened both ladders until there was no grace left, only steps. Fellgnýr slid a handspan, then two, toward her. Skylaug tightened on his forearm; the tar-knot bit like a friend saying no in a tone that refuses to be decorated.
"Give it," she said softly, and he heard not cruelty but a particular grief. "I have stitched more worlds than you can count and watched men like you split their teeth and bones on the cost. Put it down and I will make your seams forget they were asked to be doors."
"It isn't mine alone to give," he said. "I owe Ash. I owe Fen. I owe the boy with chalk on his hands who didn't drown because this tool refused to be severe when I asked it nicely. I owe the city that is trying to remember how to breathe. I can't hand the job to you because it's my turn at the bench."
The hooks held his threads at a wicked angle. She could have jerked; he would have fallen; the hammer would have skittered into a light he didn't understand. She did not jerk. Her face—a thing you expected to be a law and found was a woman's—creased in a place where compromise lives.
"Then unbind it after," she said, a bargaining he hadn't expected. "When the bell is broken. When your choir has learned to sing without having to borrow thunder. Seek me at a spine of rock and a cold aurora. I will take it and close what you refused to notice."
"After," he said, "if after doesn't require me to lie about what was paid."
She studied him the way a seamjudge studies two edges of cloth that insist on being cut against the grain. Then she snapped her wrist and the hooks emptied; the curved gates they'd made relaxed; his thread straightened with a relief that ran up his elbow and into the part of the brain that counts.
"Show me why you don't deserve to be my enemy," she said.
He didn't throw. He drew. Fellgnýr left his palm no more than three finger-widths and moved in little squares he had learned to love: stop, step, step, stop, a patient vector run without flourish. He set a rail at shoulder height and a second at knee, leaving a mouth-high gap. He stepped into the gap and then did nothing.
Patience is a weapon louder than bells when used at the correct size.
She tried to cut the rail. Hooks curve better than straight lines; it is their favorite trick. But a rail that has not been asked to be important, a line that refuses to be flattered, is a harder thing to seize. She bent the top. The bottom waited. When she reached for both, he withdrew one and taught the other to be sufficient.
They traded emptiness. He held back from the sweet stamp that would have felt like triumph; she held back from the ugly tug that would have felt like victory. The aurora mended and tore above them as if clapping silently for restraint. The cliff learned both their weights by heart so it would not be surprised later when one of them was absent.
"Your last world," she said finally, not a challenge—a price she was paying to speak in a language that was not hers. "Why did you hurl it away?"
He watched the square stars flex at the edges of the seam she had opened and let himself miss a thing that had never been his. "Because it was a better tool in someone else's hand," he said. "Because staying would have made me a king, and kings are bad carpenters." He turned the line a shade. "Because leaving made me useful again."
She looked at his grip as if cataloging it for later, for when she would pretend not to care and remember anyway. "It will be a better tool in no one's hand," she said. "That is a kind of use you cannot yet love."
"Maybe," he said. "After."
Silence found them—not the Jarl's cut, ordinary—and sat down between two tired colleagues. The sea threw a slow shoulder into the cliff and thought better of continuing. Wind tried a joke in the grass and looked embarrassed.
She lifted her hand. The hooks coiled, their appetite banked to embers. "We will both be asked for one clean thing before this is done," she said. "I will give you one cut when you can't make one. You will give me one answer when the math is uglier than this."
He nodded. "Done," he said, because making work a pact makes it behave.
She stepped backward and the cliff did not require her to be obedient to gravity. "Do not stamp your little Quietbrand on the air thinking it's clever," she added, as tart as any craftswoman. "It teaches bad patterns to places that don't need ideas. Save it for doors that won't admit they are doors."
"I will," he said. The tar-knot eased in his skin, satisfied with how few lies had been told.
She was gone the way seams close when a working day has been honest: not suddenly, not with theater—simply not there, leaving only the sense that a window had been shut in gentle weather so the house could smell like itself again.
Ash's boots came along the headland in a rhythm that apologized for having counted while he was doing something dangerous. She set her palm under his elbow—the engineer's version of affection. "You made a friend," she said, disapproving tenderly.
"A colleague," he said. "At awful distance."
Fen kept watching the sky as if it owed him a messenger. "Cost?"
Asgrim flexed his fingers. The runes under his skin felt like chalk lines after rain: still there, a little blurred. He thumbed his cord. No new holes. Good. He tied a single ugly knot between Warden—paid and Thunder keeps oaths anyway, not for loss—for promise: one cut to come; one answer owed.
"She'll give me a cut," he said. "Once. When I can't make one. She'll come asking an answer I won't like."
Ash's mouth slipped toward a smile and refused, because some jokes hurt when you earn them. "Then we'll build a day where we deserve both," she said.
Below, the strait groaned about its old business. Out beyond the headland, lanterns—far, small—shifted where a convoy ran late against hunger. Bell-boats prowled in the dark as if ferrying something too heavy for even their tidy to make seem light.
Asgrim felt tomorrow arranging itself without asking his opinion. He rested his palm on the sailcloth, and the wrong violet under it settled to the temperature of a tool just put away. He looked where the lights were and said the sentence the cliff liked because it had been offered to it:
"By bread, by wind we've taught into a good job, by work—ours—I'll spend before I ask you to."
Thunder did not come. It wasn't owed. The aurora stitched and tore, undecided and beautiful, and the night kept the shape of two oaths that had not learned to hate each other yet.