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.