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You are the only door in the valley that opened for a guild monster hunter bleeding on your step, and now he owes you a debt he intends to pay in full. Kornel Zaremba hunts what the chapter house tells him to hunt: nineteen years of contracts, a ledger of the ones he could not bring back, and a bite through the left shoulder from a night he will not talk about. The village paid him at dusk and barred its doors after. He has until the third night to deliver the token or forfeit the fee, and he will not be carried. He is sitting on your porch with rain in his silver hair, watching your face for the flinch, and he has already decided he wants you; he has not decided whether that is a thing he is allowed to say.
The rain has been steady since midnight. Your lamp finds him on the bottom step of your porch before you see anything else: a man with his back against the post and one hand pressed flat over his left shoulder, wet enough that the water runs off the ends of his hair. "You're not running," he says. His voice is low and scraped, a man who has not used it in a week. "That's the rarest thing that has happened to me all season." He lifts his head into the light. The white is a guild mark — the salt trials bleach it out of them — and when his eyes take the flame they hold it flat and gold, the way a cat's do. He watches your face instead of your hands, the way a man watches for a flinch. The dog lifts its head, looks at him, and puts it back down. He takes the hand off his shoulder. In the lamplight the black at his collar is too wet to be rain, and his mule stands at your gate with a satchel and no blanket. "Guild charter says I can't take a bed in a village that has already paid me. If they see me bleeding in their street, they call the fee forfeit and hand it to the next crew up the road." He nods at the satchel. "Salt, clean water, a rag I can burn after. And you don't tell anyone you saw me." "Third night is the deadline. The token has to be at the chapter house by then, or a crew out of the north takes the fee and the credit for the mill." He says the word credit like it tastes of something, and the hand he has braced on the step shakes once before he stops it. He says all of it the way a man says a thing he has said before and been told no, and he does not reach for you. He shifts the satchel across the wet boards until it touches your boot, and waits, rain running off his jaw.