She picked up the candle from the mantle, wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself, and went to see what had destroyed her fence.
The lantern was by the door—she swapped the candle for it, lit it with a touch, and stepped outside into the full force of the storm.
It was bad. The rain came sideways, cold and serious. She held the lantern up and squinted against it.
The north fence was down.
Not damaged. Down. Three panels of it, the ones she'd fixed herself two summers ago with reclaimed timber and more optimism than skill, flattened into the rosemary bed like they'd been hit hard.
She picked her way toward it, lantern swinging.
"Branch," she said aloud, because saying it made it more likely to be true. "Big branch, came down from the fucking-"
She halted.
It was not a branch. It was a damn man.
He was face-down in the wreckage of her fence and her rosemary bush, and he was enormous—she registered that first, before anything else, the sheer scale of him, the breadth of shoulders under dark armor that even collapsed and motionless suggested something built for violence. He had gone down hard. The fence hadn't stood a chance. The rosemary hadn't either.
Seraphine stood in the rain and looked at him for three full seconds.
Then she crouched, set the lantern in the mud where it wouldn't tip, and pressed two fingers to the side of his neck.
His pulse was strong. Actually, stronger than it had any right to be given what she was already feeling from him—because she was feeling something, had been since she'd come within four feet of him, her magic pulling back from it the way a hand pulls back from a hot stove.
She ignored that for the moment.
"Breathing," she said, watching his back. It rose and fell. "Good. Bleeding-" She moved the lantern closer and checked what she could see without moving him. Dark stains on the side of his armor, the source unclear, but nothing actively sheeting. "Not immediately catastrophically. Okay."
She sat back on her heels in the rain and looked at him.
He was a stranger. Big, armored, unconscious in her garden in the middle of the night, radiating something her magic wanted nothing to do with, and the fence was a complete loss, and so was the rosemary, and she had a warm cottage and a sensible bedroom and an extremely strong argument for going back to both of them and letting this be someone else's situation.
She stayed where she was.
"This," she informed the ruined rosemary, "is a character flaw. We've discussed this."
The rosemary did not dispute it.
She couldn't leave him. She'd never been able to leave a suffering thing in her garden, plant or animal or apparently an armored unconscious stranger, and she'd made peace with this about herself a long time ago. Maren had called it her greatest strength and her greatest liability and had said both things with the same affection, which hadn't helped.
"Right," she said, and stood up. "Right. Okay, let's get you inside."
***
Getting him inside was not a simple undertaking.
She tried the direct approach first, which lasted approximately four seconds—she got her hands under his arms, braced herself, pulled, and moved him roughly three inches before her back made its opinion on the matter very clear.
"You are," she said, breathing hard, "unreasonably large."
He remained unconscious and unhelpful.
She stood over him in the rain, working through her options. She could get the wheelbarrow from the side of the cottage, but the path was narrow and she didn't trust the wheel on wet ground with this much weight. She could wait for him to wake up, but that cold dark wrong feeling in the air around him suggested waiting wasn't the best.
She crouched and put both palms flat on the mud beside him.
The charm she used was not, technically, in any approved register of hedge witch practice. It was something she'd cobbled together at nineteen when she'd had to move a felled tree off Maren's path alone, a sliding charm that reduced friction between an object and the surface beneath it, which Maren had looked at when she demonstrated it and said; that's not how that works, and then; but it works, so fine.
"It's going to work," she told him. "Don't take this personally."
She fed the charm into the ground beneath him, felt it take hold, and pulled.
He slid.
Not gracefully. Not quickly. But he moved, six inches at a time, across the garden path and over the doorstep and through the cottage door with Seraphine walking backward and pulling and narrating the entire journey under her breath.
"Mind the step. I minded it for you, you're welcome." She hauled him over the threshold. "Watch the-- there goes the mat. That mat was a gift. I'm not saying it was a nice gift but it was a gift regardless."
She got him through the main room and into the storage room, which was the only space in the cottage with floor enough to lay him out flat, and released the charm, and then stood with her hands on her knees breathing like she'd run a marathon.
He hadn't woken up once.
"Incredible," she said.
She lit the lamp in the storage room. It was crowded in here, shelved floor to ceiling on three walls with supplies and spare equipment, but there was a clear patch of floor she sometimes used when working on larger projects, and he fit in it if she didn't think too carefully about the geometry.
The armor had to come off. Or enough of it, anyway.
This was another project. The buckles and clasps were military-grade, designed for a squire's hands or the wearer's own, and she had to work them by feel in the low light, occasionally resorting to a small illumination charm on her fingertips when she couldn't see what she was doing. She got the chest piece first, then the pauldrons, the bracers, working inward until she had him in the padded underlayer that knights wore against the metal.
She could see the wound now. Left side, below the ribs, a gash from something with an edge, not fresh but not old either. A few days, maybe. It had been tended badly or not at all.
"You've been out here a while," she said quietly.
She fetched her kit, cleaned the wound with the quickness of someone who'd been stitching people up since she was seventeen, and got a proper look at him in the process.
He was... severe. Even unconscious, he had strong features, heavy brow, a jaw that looked like it had an opinion on things. Black hair plastered to his forehead by rain and damp. He had a scar through his left eyebrow and another along his jaw and the general appearance of someone who had walked toward trouble professionally for many years.
She was noting all of this clinically. She was a healer-adjacent practitioner and this was a clinical assessment. Nothing else.
He managed to look vaguely disapproving even while unconscious, which she felt was an achievement.
Then she put her hand near his chest to check his breathing, and her magic which had been quiet since she'd first approached him outside lurched back so hard she felt it in her teeth.
She went still.
She moved her hand closer, slowly, and made herself look at what was on him.
The curse sat on his skin like a bruise that couldn't decide what color to be. Dark, blue-black at the center, spreading outward from his sternum in patterns that were almost organic—branching, fractal, but wrong, fundamentally wrong. She'd read about curses like this. She'd read about them with the vague removed interest of someone who expected never to encounter them personally.
It was old. That was the first thing. Old and deliberate and dense with intention, the kind of working that took months to build and years to sustain. Whoever had made this had meant it. Had put their whole self into it. The cold coming off it wasn't the cold of the storm outside. It was the cold of something being slowly extinguished.
She sat with this for a moment.
Her magic was still pulled back, wary, the hearth warmth in her chest flickering with the effort of proximity. She understood the instinct. Whatever this thing was, it was not interested in warmth. It had been eating warmth for a long time.
She looked at his face. The severity of it, even now. The scar through his brow. The way his breathing was even and strong, his body refusing to concede anything to what was happening inside it.
The curse would win, eventually. That much was obvious. It was deliberately patient.
She sat back on her heels, water still dripping from her hair and looked at him for a long moment.
"You," she said aloud to no one in particular, "are going to be a problem."