For a moment, all anyone heard was the rattle of shutters and the dogs outside screaming their opinions of eternity.
Then Maeryn stood. "Wardens," she said, and they became a wall without moving their feet.
The cloaked men fanned into the common room, bringing the cold with them. Their leader was not tall, but the air moved around him like snow around a fire—reconsidering its loyalties. He wore no mask. His eyes were the giveaway: not mad, not rapturous. Certain.
Rowan breathed slow, setting wolf against blood in a patient braid. The chain at his wrists hung slack, a polite lie between strangers.
"You're far from your temple," Maeryn said.
"We carry ours with us," the man replied, and touched the brand on the dead man's chest. The skin rang like struck iron. "We've come for what you thieved."
"No theft," Maeryn said. "Seizure under old law."
"Old law breaks," the man said. "Everything does, if you ring it long enough."
Two cultists lunged. The Wardens met them. Tables went over, stew met floor, knives found the kinds of places knives like. Rowan stepped into the spill and made himself small. Then he made himself fast.
He caught a wrist, turned it, and borrowed the knife for a moment long enough to convince its previous owner it had always been Rowan's. He moved with his chain like it had grown him rather than the other way around. When the third cultist reached for the door to the stable—where the sled and its secret waited—Rowan met him there and introduced his face to the doorframe. Twice.
The leader watched, head slightly cocked, as if Rowan were a novel instrument being tuned. "Vesper," he said, tasting the name. "Twilight born. Two hungers. You hear it, don't you? The bell under the blanket."
Rowan didn't answer. Which was answer enough.
The leader smiled, not kindly. "It calls to all debts. Yours is exquisite."
Harrow, the freckled Warden, shouted from the back: "Captain! The sled—"
Too late. The stable doors blew inward. The blanket was gone. The bell sat in its crate like a small, sullen planet. Not large—a handspan taller than a man's knee—but dense in the way of things that have been convinced to be smaller than they are. Its surface was iron the color of old bruises, etched with lines that tried to look like vines and failed, becoming letters no one had taught men.
It rang. Once.
Rowan saw nothing. He saw everything.
A white hall whose pillars were men. A wolf-king kneeling to drink from a silver bowl and rising without a shadow. A queen with teeth like pearls that were not pearls. A hand—his hand—reaching for a chain that was also a crown that was also a throat.
He came back with his knees on the floor and blood in his mouth that wasn't his. The bell's note hung in the room like smoke that had chosen not to leave.
The cult leader took a step toward him and stopped as Maeryn's spear kissed his sternum. "Forget," she said. "What you think you own."
"You can't own a bell," he said, almost gently. "You can only ring it or be rung."
Behind him, two cultists dragged the sled toward the door. Wardens fought to stop them. Harrow slipped in blood and went down with a cry. Rowan's wolf-heart lunged. His vampire-heart calculated angles around the spear, the bell, the door, the boy.
"Captain," Rowan said. "Take the leader."
Maeryn didn't look back. "Why?"
"Because I can take the rest."
Her eyes flicked to his wrists. The chain hung loose, last link dented by some recent history. She made a choice that would get her commended in some worlds and killed in others. "Harrow!" she shouted. "Keys."
The boy half-crawled, half-slid, and pressed a ring of iron to Rowan's palm with a look that could have been fear or faith. The lock gave reluctantly. The silver fell. This time the relief did not come as comfort. It came as permission.
Rowan stood into his own weight. He let the wolf roll his shoulders. He let the vampire stack his thoughts into a clean, austere line. The two hearts didn't agree, but they did not argue either. For a breath, perhaps two, he had something like peace.
He used it.
He took the nearest cultist by the back of the neck and the belt and introduced him to the bell's crate with all the tenderness of weather. He slipped past a knife and past the man who held it as if both were old acquaintances whose names he had not cared to learn. He kicked one ankle, broke it, and used the scream to locate the next danger.
The leader whispered a word that was too expensive to say and the room tilted. Maeryn went to one knee, spear wobbling. The bell's tone thickened. Rowan felt it reach for his spine the way a hand reaches for a tool it has owned too long.
Not yours, he told it, and for once belief arrived when called.
He pivoted, chain whistling, and looped it around the bell's handle. The silver smoked. It always would. He hauled the bell off the crate and dropped it. The tone choked, then climbed into a higher, pettier register—annoyed, not enthralled.
"Sacrilege," the leader hissed.
"Practicality," Rowan said, and hit him with the part of the chain that had learned to love him.
They drove the cultists out into the snow a yard at a time, then another. The door stood wide and the night came in, full of listening. The last of the enemy ran for the chapel and vanished into its shadow as if the building had turned its mouth the wrong way.
Breath steamed. Blood cooled. The bell lay on its side like a toppled crown.
Harrow leaned against a table and wiped his face with both sleeves. "Is it over?"
"No," Maeryn said. "It's begun."
She faced Rowan. "You can hear it. You can make it misbehave. So you're either the lever that keeps this from turning the world, or you're the hinge it turns on."
"Which would you prefer?" Rowan asked.
"I prefer options that don't exist," she said. "We march at first light for the River House. With you."
Rowan glanced at the bell. Its surface caught the firelight and made it look tired. He felt a warmth on his chest and pulled his collar aside. A mark like frostbite, shaped like a broken moon, bloomed over his heart.
"It rang me," he said softly.
"No," said a voice from the doorway, the leader's, bloody and amused. He held the chapel's rope in one hand, and with the other he raised a brand that smoked the same shape on his own chest. "It recognized you."
Then he smiled and pulled the rope.
The chapel bell answered—the wrong god's note hammered through a right god's mouth—and the ground under Dunclare moved.
Cliffhanger: The town itself is waking to the bell, and the march at dawn won't be a march—it will be a retreat under siege.