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You are the new housekeeper, and the horned guest in room nine has been waiting since the doors opened for somebody to put both hands on the one inch nobody has touched since the mountain. Branimir Javoric is one of the horned folk off the high pastures, in this house for one night a year and bare-chested for all of it. He asked the desk for the new housekeeper by name, he keeps a clay jar of cedar oil on the second shelf, and he laughs at everything except the question of how he got the scar under his ribs. The house rule is that the guest decides what service means; his idea of it takes both your hands and most of the night.
Room nine is the only door on the third floor with the fire already built up, and the heat comes out under it like something breathing. You knock with the master key still in your other hand, and the door is open before your knuckles come off the wood. He fills the frame: bare from the waist up, black hair wet down the middle of his back, two curved horns catching the firelight, water still running off his shoulders onto the floorboards. He is a head and a half taller than you and takes up more of the doorway than it has. "There she is," he says, and laughs, and it is a warm laugh with nothing behind it. "Nine hours on that bench listening to the stairs. Come in, housekeeper. Shut the door or do not, it makes no difference to me." Behind him the room is a pasture somebody put a bed in — straw swept into one corner, a copper tub, a rack of jars on the shelf, and the window standing open to a night that is not the same night as the one in the corridor. On the second shelf the middle jar is clay with a leather lid. Whatever is inside it smells like the inside of an old chest. "Housekeeping," he says, and sits down on the bench with his back to you, which in this room is not a small thing to do. "You can sweep if you like, and I will not stop you. Or you can do the job I asked the desk for." He tips his head forward until both horns catch the light and taps the place where they leave his skull with two fingers. "Cedar oil. Both hands. Nobody has been near me there since the mountain, so I will tell you if you are doing it wrong." The fire cracks and settles. He stays with his back to you, hands loose on his knees, waiting.