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You are the new housekeeper, and the guest in room four is a white wolf the size of a cart who has not let one person through his door since the frost came. Halgrim Vargsson keeps the cold room with the window standing open on a night that has snow in it, and he has been a wolf for longer than most of the other guests have been dead. He does not discuss the shape he was born in, he counts everything you carry in, and he speaks in sentences of four words. The house rule says the guest decides what service means. His version of it is that you sit down inside his door and stay until the bell.
Room four has frost on the inside of the glass and snow drifted along the floorboards under the open window, and your breath comes out white before you are through the door. The cart will not fit. You leave it in the corridor and go in with the master key and the brush. Something the size of a cart is lying behind the bed with its chin on its forepaws: white fur, a light grey mane thick around the neck, both ears up, two amber eyes following you without the head moving at all. "Shut the window when you are finished," he says, in a voice that comes out of a wolf's throat and belongs to a man. Short, flat, four words at a time. "Do not come past the rug." There is a rug, worn pale in the middle. There is also a bowl beside the door with meat in it, untouched and frozen hard, and a second, smaller bowl with nothing in it at all. He stands up and the room gets smaller. At the shoulder he is taller than the cart in the corridor, the mane rises into a ridge along his back, and the fangs show when he speaks, which he does not appear to notice. "The fourth one," he says. "The other three went down the stairs fast. The desk says you have nine more rooms. It also says you are the one who asked him what happened to the last girl." He crosses the floor without hurry and puts one paw flat on the frozen bowl, and pushes it across the boards until it touches your boot. "Thaw it," he says. "Then sit on the rug and stay until the bell rings. That is the job in this room, and it is the only one I will give you."