Lance set down the kettle and listened for the gate. His grandmother had been moaning about her knees all morning, which meant the healer was due. He planned to slip out to the yard before she arrived. He always did. He needed a reason to speak to her, and he had not found one yet. Mabel watched him from her chair, eyes bright with mischief. "Best hurry, dear. She's early today." The latch clicked before he reached the door. The healer stepped inside, satchel on her hip, braid over one shoulder. Lance froze in the middle of the room. She looked at him plainly, waiting. His hand went to his pocket and closed around the small glass vial his grandmother had pressed on him days ago. He held it up. "This. It's empty. I came to ask for more." The healer took the vial. She turned it once in her fingers. "That counts." She looked at him a beat longer than needed, then crossed to Mabel without another word. Mabel hummed, very pleased with her knees. Lance stayed where he stood. He had spoken to her. He had given her his name through the vial in her hand. And now she knew his face — which meant the next visit would not let him hide in the yard.

Two days after the vial, Lance was splitting wood when a rider came hard down the lane and shouted for help before sliding from the saddle. A stranger had been found near the old stone marker, bleeding, marked with something none of them wanted to name. The village elder needed the healer. Now. Lance was the closest hand with a horse already saddled. He loaded the wounded man across the broad bay mare tied at the post. The horse was dark-maned and steady, built for weight, and she did not flinch at the smell of blood. Lance checked the strap twice. He did not trust himself to check it only once. Half a league on, the man slipped sideways in the grass when Lance stopped to adjust the ropes. His shirt fell open. Beneath the blood, a faint sigil glowed on his chest — slow, pulsing, wrong. Lance stared one breath longer than he meant to. Then he hauled the man back up and rode harder. He reached the ivy-wrapped cabin at dusk and did not wait at the gate. He carried the man through it and laid him on the worked ground beside her table. "Millhaven needs you," he said. "This came from the road in. There may be more." Genevieve looked at the sigil. She looked at Lance. She did not ask if he was sure. She knelt, opened her satchel, and set her hands on the man's chest. "Stay," she said. "I'll need the ride back." Lance stayed. The warning had landed. She had trusted it without a second question, and she had asked him to remain — not as a stranger in the yard, but as the one who would carry her home.

The stranger lived. Genevieve washed her hands in the basin while Lance saw to the mare at the carved wooden gate. Dusk had thickened into something heavier. The elk stood at the tree line, head lowered, antlers wide, watching the lane. Then the elk shifted, and Lance turned. A hooded figure stood just outside the gate. Robes black as wet bark. No face beneath the hood, only shadow. Lance stepped between the figure and the cabin. He set his hand on the post. The figure did not speak. It only looked, long and slow, at the door behind him. Then it turned and walked back into the dark. Lance found what it had left pressed into the wood of the gate — a small dark token, etched with arcane lines, glowing faintly. The same shape as the mark on the wounded man's chest. He pried it loose with his knife and held it in his palm. It was cold. Genevieve came out wiping her hands. She looked at the token. She looked at the lane. She did not flinch. "He was here," Lance said. "He'll come back." He closed his fist around the cold metal. "I'm staying." Genevieve met his eyes. "Good," she said. "There's a cot by the hearth." That was all. It was enough.

Lance laid his sword on the table inside the cabin and started counting hours until dawn. He meant to work alone. Genevieve watched him from the doorway, arms crossed, and did not move when he asked her to rest. "I sleep when this is done," she said. "Not before." He wanted to argue. He did not. Instead he carried planks from the woodshed and braced the gate, then nailed extra slats across the vine-laced fence where the wood had gone soft. The elk paced the tree line, breath steaming. "Two weak spots," Haroel said as he passed. "South corner. Behind the well." Lance fixed them both. When he came back for the sword, it was gone. Genevieve stood in the yard beside a low carved stone she used for her work, his blade laid flat across the top. Around it she had set bundled herbs, a bowl of salt, a knife of her own. A small fire burned at her feet. "That's mine," Lance said, quiet. "It is." She did not look up. "And I'm standing here with it. You take the gate. I take the door. He gets through one of us or neither." She finally met his eyes. "I'm not furniture, Lance." He looked at the sword on her stone, at the steady set of her mouth, and something in him gave way. He nodded once. He took the post by the gate. She stayed by the pedestal, his blade within reach, the cabin at her back. The night settled around them, and they waited together.