The spire's last ladder went from timber into a word.
Stone thinned to air. The linen screens at his back breathed the city's held patience. Above, where spire meets sky, the dome's false roof forgot itself and a seam showed—green veils torn, a mouthful of aurora like wet silk caught on a nail.
Asgrim set his palm on the warm coping and told it a little truth so his feet would believe the height. "I don't like up," he said. Thunder didn't come—wasn't owed—but the coil of runes under his collarbones lifted their heads and agreed to stay useful.
He climbed the last steps anyway.
The platform was a hand wide and a body long, a mason's apology added to the city's crown so the brave could stand somewhere and regret it. Below, the Grand Bell waited in its cradle, its ribbed carriage stalled at the cathedral's lip. A procession coiled around it—Choir squared, guards steady, Ash's work crews like punctuation along the rooflines, Fen a steady pivot at ground. The quartered wind he had laid yesterday walked its rails through the lanes—smaller than the roof, larger than despair.
She sat on the coping like a woman on a pier.
Rift-Widow. Hooks coiled beside her: not iron, not rope, a grammar of curved refusals. Her hair was the color weather makes on blown frost; her face wore the clarity of a rule that has been tested by hungry people and not found kind enough to pretend.
"You climbed as if you were counting," she said, gaze on the seam as if it might change its mind while she watched.
"I count," he said. He did not draw Fellgnýr; it lay wrapped across his back, a wrong violet sleeping under sailcloth like a dog who knows when to keep still. Skylaug sat close on his forearm. The tar-knot Fen had sewn bit him where the wrist thinks sugar first—early, as asked.
"You can end this neat," she said. "Give me your tool; I will unbind it. I will send it into between to be heavy in a room that has no doors, and I will sew your seams until Wardens have to invent new reasons to wake. Your city will still crack—your Jarl makes large smooths—but cracks will be smaller."
He stepped onto the platform proper, measuring with the soles of his feet the spots a man could afford to put weight. He set three coin-waypoints in the air at knee, hip, shoulder—little rails to keep muscle from forgetting itself when wind remembered to be unhelpful—and left them there, no drama.
"If I hand Fellgnýr over," he said, "that bell takes a city before bread rises. I don't have a chorus big enough yet to hold the roof off a whole harbor without it."
"You could have a chorus large enough," she said, as if reading a speculative recipe. "It would take winter. It would take children. The bill would be paid by people who do not have the names you find useful."
"You came to offer the cut you owe me," he said gently. "You didn't come to win the argument you keep having with yourself."
She tilted her head. Hooks hummed in sympathy the way good steel does across a shop. Far under their feet the bell drew a breath and swallowed what men were about to say; the wind off the rails slid in after it like a thief with a conscience.
"I like you least when you are boring correctly," she said.
"Good," he said. "Boring saves bread."
She uncoiled one hook and let it hang from her hand. The light bent around it as if the world had learned manners from a seam and didn't want to be seen breaking them. "You think this is a story about mercy," she said. "It is a story about math. Your hammer teaches worlds that there is a door. Doors mean drafts. Drafts mean strangers. Strangers mean the house becomes a station. Stations become wars."
He let the sentence hang, then took his share. "Your stitches suffocate," he said. "We differ in which risk we prefer. I live where the field meets the harbor. I would rather teach men to shut a gate they can see than make them forget there was ever such a thing as a road."
"You would rather be indispensable," she said—no sneer; a measurement. "You would rather spend yourself beautifully than stop being needed."
He looked at her hands, not her face. "I would rather spend than own," he said. "I would rather be a beam than a roof. I keep the tool not to rule with it. I keep it because I can be spent through it where I stand."
The seam tensed under that truth as if something honest had tugged on the hem of its dress. For the first time since she sat, Rift-Widow looked at him the way carpenters look at joints that refuse to be pretty and insist on being strong.
"You owe me an answer," she said, reminding him of a bargain on a cliff. "I asked for it when the math is uglier than this."
"I owe it," he said. "You'll get it. Not here."
The hook in her hand described a minute curve in air, almost shy. "Then I give you the cut," she said, and the seam brightened like knife water. "Once. Where you choose. If you cut flesh with it, I will take it back on the edge of your breath. If you cut world with it, it will open and you will pay what opening costs."
"What does it cost?" he asked, because Ragna would ask him later and she hates guesses.
"Whatever you name," she said. "Whatever you can't carry through your mouth and must carry through your friends instead."
He did not look down to find Ash and Fen in the press; he could feel them in the way men feel two posts under a beam they can trust not to wander.
"Cut the right thing," she said, and the instruction was not a threat; it was a prayer spoken by a woman who does not normally speak to gods.
She set the hook in his palm.
It was colder than iron. Not temperature—decision. His hand wanted to flinch. He let it. He let the flinch complete, then closed his fingers. The hook lay against his calluses like a refusal taught to be helpful for one day. It had no barbs; it made its own by inviting the world to pretend to be simpler than it is.
"One use," she said. "If you try to draw a second line with it, I will come and take your name myself because the world will be busy elsewhere."
"Understood," he said. "I will cut a bell."
"Cut its skin," she said. "Not its bone. You have a hammer for bone. And you do not have the right to shatter men's work when a wound will teach better."
Below them, the square shuddered. The Grand Bell's lip kissed scaffolding as the carriage crept. Karsk looked up once and then looked away as men do when they are trying to remain furniture and part of them prefers carpentry.
Rift-Widow watched Karsk with a professional interest. "That one could have been mine," she said. "He understands edges. He could have spent his body resealing rooms if he had not been made into order."
"He will remember," Asgrim said, trusting now the way you trust a rope you've haunched in a doorway: not with hope; with work. "When sound comes back, he will hear what he used to love."
"You speak as if you are certain you can carry sound into a room made to eat it," she said.
"I'm not certain," he said. "I am willing."
"You are tiresome," she said, and set the second hook in her lap in a coil that read as waiting, not threat. "Promise me something and mean it."
"If it is work," he said.
"After you cut the right thing, and after your city is done insisting on its way, you will bring me the tool and admit the question you keep circling: whether worlds are better sealed or stitched. You will answer with your hands, not with a sermon." Her voice softened half a nail. "If you build me a day where I can close, I will leave your door with confidence. If you decide to continue living with a draft, you will do it without lying to the children who grow up under it."
He closed his hand on the hook and felt something under his skin go cold in a private corner he had been saving. He did not name it. Names like to be spent in the open, not hoarded in stairwells.
"I will bring it," he said. "And I won't lie to children."
She considered. The seam breathed. The bell below swallowed again, proud as a clean table. The quartered wind in the lanes pushed back like a decent apprentice.
"You are building a storm that will require a witness larger than yourself," she said. "Do not try to pay its price in privacy. Speak the cost first."
"I will," he said. "World-Storm oath. Price named up front."
Her eyes moved to his bead-cord, ugly wire and driftwood and tar. "You've stopped making jewels out of what you lose," she said. "Good."
"I'm not a god," he said. "I can't carry worship without falling through the floor."
She smiled properly for the first time—quick, involuntary, almost human. "Make the cut, carpenter," she said, rising to her feet with the particular gravity of someone who knows how to stand on small platforms and larger ideas. "Do not make art out of it."
"I will make work," he said.
She stepped backward and gravity negotiated with her in a language he didn't speak. The seam closed a finger. Her voice came slant, like wind inside a wall.
"You still owe me your answer," she said. "After."
"After," he said.
She was absent—not vanished, adjacent—and the city returned to pretending it was only stone under a lid.
Asgrim looked at the hook in his hand and did the obvious thing he hadn't wanted to—he threaded Skylaug through the eye so it would lie against the chain where the tar-knot bites. The hook didn't like being leashed; it tolerated being kept. He wrapped it in one turn of sailcloth so it wouldn't teach his skin any new tricks while he was busy surviving.
He set three waypoints in the air above the bell's mouth and did not draw them any closer than he could reach without reaching. He nested them—small triangle within larger—so he could choose which hand to be in when the day needed him fast. He planted his feet where the spire had taught him to earlier: not look down; not look up; look at work.
Below, Ash's tar burned honest under eaves and Fen moved a brace a finger and made a frame feel complicated. Choir voices squared and met a city that refused to be geometry. Karsk set his palm on the carriage and taught his men to lift when they wanted to drag.
Asgrim laid his hand on the porch inside his ribs—half hearth, half wind—and told the ledger what tools deserve to hear before they're asked to do something they will remember in winter.
"Spent: certainty. Quiet comfort. A corner of warmth I was hoarding. Refused: handing the tool away and letting a lid teach my friends how to be furniture. Gained: one cut. Owing: an answer about doors and stitches; a price named in public."
He did not speak the name he intended to pay. He would not try to cheat thunder by pretending surprise after. He would say it later with a city as witness.
He reached down to the spire's lintel, felt the stone that had learned the shape of men's hands over decades of little prayers nobody writes, and said the sentence that keeps him aligned even on roofs.
"By bread," he said. The wind under the dome remembered it.
"By wind we've taught into a good job." The rails carried it, shy but present.
"By work—ours— I'll spend before I ask you to."
Thunder did not answer. It wasn't owed.
The bell moved a hand. The seam held its breath. The hook on his chain lay cold as a decision he had accepted and not yet committed. He climbed down into the square where a city would have to be larger than a mouth and a man would have to make a storm with a price everyone understood before they sang it.