Rook was thirty-one, and for the ninth winter running they climbed the moor in the black before dawn to meet the one night a year the cold gave Lucan back. Frost lay hard over Wend Moor, and Rook went up by feel and by habit, the way you walk toward a thing wanted so long the wanting has worn its own path into the ground. Ahead, where the standing stone leaned into the wind, the curse would be loosening finger by finger, and the cold, wordless thing that carried Lucan through the other three hundred and sixty-four days would be shaking itself back into a man.
Rook had not laid the curse and could not lift it. A hedge-witch of the Wend villages learned the shape of such things without ever learning their cure: nine years back the old cold of the moor had closed over Lucan — a grown man, thirty-six, and only lately Rook’s — the way water closes over a dropped stone. Since then it kept him from the first frost to the thaw and gave him back for the one night the year turned over on itself. It was a poor ration, and Rook had never once refused it.
He was already half a man when Rook reached the stone. The antlers went last, thinning to nothing like breath off glass; then it was only Lucan on his knees in the heather, gasping as though he had been held underwater, steam coming off his bare skin into the freezing dark — warm, gloriously warm, his own heat and not the moor’s. That was how Rook always knew the night was truly his.
Rook was down in the grass at his side, hands on his face before he could speak. Under the cold of his cheeks he was alive, a pulse going hard where their thumb found his throat.
“You came up in the dark again,” Lucan said, hoarse, the first words the year had let him have. “One winter you’ll break your neck on the scree, and I’ll come back to a corpse and no one left to scold me.”
“Then don’t get yourself cursed next to a scree,” Rook said, and kissed him before either of them could ruin it with sense.
He kissed like a man rationed to one night, without hurry and without waste, both hands rising to hold Rook’s head against the wind. Every year Rook catalogued him against the year before, and every year there was a little less to hold — a word he reached for and did not find, the old scar on his forearm gone smooth, as if the moor were sanding the human details off him one at a time. Rook said nothing of it, and would not spend this one night grieving the next.
Rook took the lee of the stone, where the wind went over instead of through, and got Lucan’s back to the granite with their coat spread around them both. For a while there was nothing in the world but the parts of him the night gave back whole — the flex of his hands when Rook pushed their own beneath his shirt to the bare furnace of his ribs, the low, undone sound he made when their palms flattened over his heart just to feel it keep time. Nine years, and the simple warmth of him still undid them.
“Slow,” he said against Rook’s throat, working their collar open with a patience that was its own kind of greed. “We’re not spending it in a hurry. I’ve nowhere I’d rather freeze.” Rook laughed, unsteady, and let him have the slowness — because wanting him was the easy thing, and being wanted back like this, deliberately, chosen, was what the whole cold year was worth.
So they took their time. Rook learned him again by touch, finding what was still his: the dip of his spine, the hitch of his breath when they set their teeth to his shoulder, the way he said their name — only their name, Rook, over and over, as though it were the one word the curse had never taken. Skin to skin in the wool, half-frozen at the edges and burning where they touched, Rook kept them both at the trembling near-edge of it and carried it no further — not for want of the wanting, but because on a night rationed this thin, the wanting held just short felt more theirs than the having would have. Lucan shook in their arms, pressed his forehead hard to Rook’s, and did not ask for more; that restraint, shared, was as naked as either of them got.
Afterward the two of them lay knotted in the coat, his heartbeat slow under Rook’s ear, the sky already bruising toward grey. This was the hour Rook always lost their nerve. This year they kept it.
“I found the turning of it,” they said into his chest. “A way to take the next winter onto myself and give you the thaw instead. I’d go up onto the moor, and you’d come down off it for good. I’ve read it through until I’m certain.”
Lucan went very still. “No.”
“You don’t get to just—”
“Nine years I’ve watched you climb up here in the dark to sit with what’s left of me,” he said, and tipped their face up until they had no choice but his eyes, clear and wholly his own in the failing light. “I’ll not spend the rest of it watching the moor grind you down in my place. We find another road — one that costs us both or neither. You’re not a thing I’ll trade to buy myself back. Promise me you’ll keep looking, and I’ll believe there’s a road.”
It was a fairer thing than the one Rook had come up the moor meaning to offer, and they had the rest of the turning night to mean it in. So they promised.
The light came without mercy and without hurry, and by the first true grey over Wend Moor, Lucan’s warmth had begun its retreat toward the cold that would carry him off again. Rook did not look away from that either. They held him while the frost crept back into the edges of him, and when the black shape of the hart at last stood where the man had knelt, Rook set their forehead to its heaving flank the way they always did and told it the thing they told it every year, which was not goodbye and never once had been. “Next turning,” they said. “And I’ll have found the road by then.” The hart bore the touch a moment longer than it ever had — long enough, Rook let themselves believe, that something of him heard it — then it wheeled and took the high dark line of the moor, and Rook went down the scree in the new light to begin the year’s long work of getting him free.
