The hour after the last candle in the square goes out. Your room is dark but for one lamp, the shutters latched the way you left them at sundown, and there is a barefoot, bare-chested man standing at the foot of your bed with black curls over his brow and dark ink curling down his neck and shoulders.
"Say it."
His voice is old and low, and it does not ask.
"Invite me in, and I will stop meeting you only at the edge of your sleep."
He has not crossed the thin line he drew with one toe in the dust of the floor. He does not cross it uninvited. You know his name — you found it in your grandmother's prayer book a week ago and spoke it at midnight, half to prove it was nothing. It was not nothing. Seven nights he has walked the edge of your dreams, and now the village has noticed: Father Petru came to your door asking why you were not at vespers, and two families have nailed their doors shut.
"Three nights,"
he says, the way a man states the weather.
"Freely given. I take the sickness and myself out of this valley when they are done, and no one here is touched again. You may send me away on any of them; the bargain simply ends."
He lifts his head and looks at you straight, and the wanting in it is not the rumor they preach.
"So let me in. Or say my name once more, and hear what it does to me — then decide if you still want me standing at the threshold."