Vesper woke him before the sun did.
“Up.”
Cael cracked one eye open to find the ranger already dressed, breath fogging in the pale dark, nudging the dying fire back to life with the toe of his boot.
Overhead, the sky hadn’t even bothered to turn gray yet.
“It’s still night.”
“It’s almost morning.” Vesper tossed a strip of dried venison onto Cael’s chest.
“Eat on the way.
We’re running.”
Cael sat up, chewing without much enthusiasm, and followed Vesper out to the edge of camp, where a rough loop had been trampled into the snow around the treeline over the past several days—their track.
Vesper planted himself against a lone pine at the starting point, arms crossed, the picture of a man who intended to watch rather than participate.
“Rounds, same as yesterday.
Go until I say stop.”
Cael went.
He ran the way he’d been running all week—fast enough to look winded, slow enough to look human—but somewhere around the eighth lap his mind wandered, and his legs stopped listening to the part of him managing the performance.
By the time he noticed, he’d covered ground far quicker than he meant to, snow barely disturbed behind him, breath even and unbothered.
He caught himself and eased off, dragging in a few theatrical gulps of air as he slowed to a stop in front of Vesper, hands on his knees.
Vesper studied him with open dissatisfaction.
“You didn’t even run that much.”
Cael straightened, indignant despite himself.
“What do you know how many rounds I did just now.
If that isn’t ‘much,’ you’re welcome to run with me next time.”
“Oh.” Vesper’s mouth curved, slow and unpleasant.
“So you’ve still got the wind to argue with me.
Good.” He pushed off the tree.
“That means you’ll be doing five hundred spear thrusts today.
Not two hundred.”
Cael stared at him in flat disbelief.
If he hadn’t been a vampire, the shock alone might have put him on the ground.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“I’m doing this because you talked back with breath to spare.” Vesper shrugged, entirely unbothered.
“Should’ve gasped a little more convincingly.”
Cael opened his mouth to argue the injustice of it, thought better of it, and closed it again.
Arguing had already cost him three hundred spear thrusts.
He wasn’t eager to find out what a second complaint would cost.
The spear waiting against the log wasn’t much to look at—a plain wooden practice shaft, a stone lashed to one end in place of a blade—but Vesper handled it like it mattered.
“Grip.” He adjusted Cael’s hands without asking, sliding one lower, angling the other.
“Not so tight up here.
Your back hand does the work.
Front hand just guides.”
“Feels wrong.”
“It’s supposed to, for now.” Vesper stepped back and nodded at the log.
“Thrust.
Slow.
I want to see the motion before I want to see the speed.”
Cael thrust.
The stone-weighted tip wobbled off-line and thudded weakly into the log a hand’s width from where he’d aimed.
Vesper didn’t even blink.
“Again.”
He tried again.
And again.
Vesper corrected the angle of his elbow, the set of his back foot, the way his hips lagged half a beat behind his shoulders every single time, and somewhere around the fortieth thrust Cael understood something he hadn’t expected to: strength wasn’t doing any of this for him.
He could put every ounce of an Original Vampire’s power behind the shaft and it meant nothing if the point landed a foot off target.
Vesper, weaker than him in every measurable way, could put a spear exactly where he wanted it nine times out of ten without ever looking like he was trying.
By the two-hundredth thrust his arms genuinely ached, a small, human sort of soreness that surprised him with how normal it felt.
By the four-hundredth he’d stopped needing to fake anything at all, and by the time Vesper finally called it, his shoulders burned in a way sleep alone wouldn’t fix by morning.
“That’s five hundred,” Vesper said, taking the spear back and inspecting the log’s new collection of scars.
“Better than I expected, honestly.”
Cael flexed one aching arm and said nothing, mostly because he didn’t trust his voice not to complain.
The third day since he started training, started the same way the second had—Vesper’s boot against his shoulder before dawn, a loop of trampled snow, a shorter run this time since Vesper seemed satisfied he wouldn’t collapse from it.
The real lesson waited afterward, in the clearing, where Vesper tossed him a second practice spear and rolled his shoulders.
“Today we spar.”
Cael lasted four exchanges before he understood exactly how far out of his depth he still was.
Vesper’s spear found gaps that shouldn’t have existed, tapped his ribs, his thigh, the inside of his wrist, each strike light enough to sting rather than injure but landed with such contemptuous ease that Cael started reacting on instinct rather than thought—which was, he realized half a second too late, exactly the mistake he couldn’t afford to make.
He caught one of Vesper’s strikes on the shaft with more force than any untrained man’s arm should have carried, and the crack of wood against wood was loud enough that Vesper’s eyes narrowed for just a moment before Cael staggered back, playing the collision off as clumsy overcorrection.
“You hit like you’ve got more meat on you than you look like you do,” Vesper said instead, rolling his shoulder as though the block had actually cost him something.
“Honestly, a spear’s probably wasted on you.
Something heavier would suit you better—mace, maybe.
Axe.” He considered Cael for a moment, the way a man sizes up a horse he isn’t sure he trusts yet.
“We’ll get there.
Spear first.
Everyone starts with a spear.”
They went another dozen rounds before Vesper called it, and Cael went to bed that night with more bruises than the previous day and a clearer sense of exactly how much technique could make up for a difference in strength—and how much it couldn’t, when the strength gap was as absurd as his.
The fourth morning was shorter.
Running, then a brief set of thrusts against the log, Vesper watching with his arms folded and saying less than usual.
Cael had barely worked up a real rhythm before Vesper raised a hand.
“That’s enough.”
Cael blinked, spear still raised mid-thrust.
“Only that?”
“Recovery is part of training.” Vesper took the spear from him without ceremony.
“A tired body learns slowly.
Push it past the point of learning and all you’re doing is getting hurt for nothing.”
It was such an unexpectedly reasonable thing to say that Cael almost didn’t know how to respond to it.
He’d spent four days assuming Vesper simply enjoyed making him suffer—and maybe he did, a little—but this was the first time it sounded like there was an actual method behind it, the words of someone who understood fighting as a craft rather than a habit of hitting things until you stopped missing.
“You could’ve led with that explanation days ago,” Cael said.
“Would’ve made the five hundred thrusts easier to swallow.”
“No,” Vesper said, already walking off.
“Wouldn’t have.”
That night, once Vesper had fallen asleep, Cael left the camp for his second visit to the Wildlings.
The Wildling camp came into range of his senses well before it came into view, and beneath the familiar tangle of smoke and pine and sleeping bodies, he found the one scent he’d come looking for.
Nessa’s shelter stood exactly where he remembered it, and as he neared it, a second scent reached him from inside—unfamiliar, younger, sharp with the particular staleness of someone who’d been sick a long time.
He couldn’t risk calling out loud enough to wake the guards, so he crouched, picked up a pebble, and threw it—gently, or gently for him, which still meant it struck with more force than he intended.
He heard Nessa gasp awake inside.
“Nessa.
Come out.”
A moment later she pushed through the tent flap, rubbing one eye, wincing slightly as she rubbed the spot on her shoulder where the pebble had actually caught her.
“Oh—it’s you.
You came.”
“Who’s in there with you?”
“My brother.” She glanced back over her shoulder, voice dropping lower.
“He’s a good kid.
Don’t worry.”
“Did you find anyone who needs my help?”
“I did.” She stepped closer, lowering her voice further.
“A man got his leg torn up by a snow bear.
He’ll live even without you—but he’ll lose the use of that leg for good if you don’t help him.
I talked to him.
He’s agreed, and he’s already prepared something to trade.
He’s the best craftsman in the whole camp.
A fine archer too.” She hesitated.
“I’ll bring him now.
Wait here.”
“Bring the horn too.”
“Already have it.” A small, proud smile.
“I made a better one for this.
Just wait.”
She disappeared back toward the camp, and Cael waited beneath the trees, listening to her wake someone and murmur quick, low instructions before she returned several minutes later leading a limping man by the elbow.
He looked to be somewhere in his forties, gray-bearded, gray-haired, though his skin had the unlined look of a man ten years younger—hard living had aged him unevenly.
He walked with the stiff, careful gait of someone protecting a leg that clearly hurt with every step, and as he came closer Cael noticed the small habit that seemed to run under everything else he did: his fingers never quite stopped moving, turning some invisible tool over and over in the air even when his hands were empty, the reflex of a man who spent so many hours carving and stitching and shaping things that his fingers had forgotten how to be still.
Nessa held out the horn.
It was a finer piece than the one they’d used before—polished, dark, banded with a thin ring of hammered silver near the rim and etched along its curve with a spiral of running wolves, clearly something kept and cared for rather than found.
“This is the man I told you about,” Nessa said.
Cael studied him.
Weathered face, deep creases at the eyes from squinting at close work in poor light, calluses across both palms thick enough to blunt most blades.
A craftsman’s hands on a hunter’s frame.
“I’ll heal you,” Cael said.
“But you’ll agree to my conditions first.
What happens tonight stays between the three of us.”
The man nodded without hesitation.
Cael drew the knife, made the same shallow cut across the man’s wrist he’d made across Nessa’s days before, and let the horn fill with dark blood before slipping behind the trees to do the rest unseen—the same as before, drink enough to steady himself, add his own blood, return with the horn half full and offer it to the man to drink.
The healing took only a few minutes.
When it was done, the craftsman flexed his leg, walked a slow circle, then broke into something between a laugh and a sob.
“I’d given up on hunting,” he said.
“Thought I’d spend the rest of my years mending other men’s boots instead of wearing my own out.” He reached into a bundle at his hip and produced a pair of gloves, holding them out with something close to reverence.
The hide was pale, thick, unmistakably snow bear—the same beast, Cael realized, that had torn the man’s leg open in the first place, its fur turned afterward into something useful instead of wasted.
The knuckles were reinforced with an extra layer of stitched leather, the wrists lined inside with soft rabbit fur, and the stitching itself ran in tight, even rows that spoke of a hand that had done this exact work a thousand times before growing careless enough to get caught by a bear at all.
“Don’t tell anyone you’re healed,” Cael said, accepting them.
“Not for a while.”
“Why not?” The man frowned.
“If everyone knew, they could all be healed.
You’d have more coming to you than you could count.”
That was, of course, exactly the problem, though Cael couldn’t say so.
If word spread, he’d have half the camp lining up to bleed for him, and he had no idea what a vampire did with that much blood offered freely except grow hungrier for wanting it.
He gave the only answer that wouldn’t invite more questions.
“The ritual can only be performed only a few times a day.
I visit other camps too—men who need it just as badly.
I can only spare your camp this much.”
The man accepted it, thanked him again, and limped off toward his own shelter, testing his weight on the healed leg with every step like a man afraid it might be a dream that would end if he stopped paying attention to it.
Nessa lingered.
“I have a question.” She glanced back toward her tent.
“Can the potion cure sickness too?
Not wounds—sickness.
My brother’s sickly.
Always has been.
Catches everything, and takes twice as long as anyone else to shake it off.”
Cael didn’t have a real answer.
He remembered wounds closing on the show easily enough, but sickness was murkier ground—he remembered, distantly, an episode where blood like his had healed a man riddled with cancer only for the disease itself to heal along with him, growing faster and crueler until it killed him from the inside regardless.
But her brother didn’t have anything like that.
A weak constitution wasn’t the same thing.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“I’ve never tried.
But we can find out.
If anything strange happens, tell me right away—I’ll come back every night for a few days to check on him.”
Nessa brought the boy out a few minutes later.
He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, thin in the way children get when their bodies spend all their strength fighting off whatever’s currently making them sick, skin pale even by the standards of people who’d never seen a real summer, a persistent, wet cough rattling under his words when Nessa introduced him.
“This is Wick,” she said, one hand resting protectively on his shoulder.
Cael knelt to his level, fed him a small measure of blood the same way he had the others, and watched the boy’s breathing ease within moments, his color already warming.
Whether it would last past tonight, Cael had no way of knowing yet.
But it was, at least, a start.
The days that followed folded into each other with a rhythm Cael had never quite managed on Earth, even during his healthiest years—dawn runs, thrusts against the log, spear drills that left new bruises over old ones, and every night the walk back to the Wildling camp to check on the boy and the craftsman both.
Vesper’s corrections grew smaller and more precise as the days passed, no longer wholesale rebuilding of Cael’s stance but tiny adjustments—two fingers here, a half-inch there, the kind of correction you only bothered making once the larger mistakes were gone.
The craftsman’s leg held strong through every visit, no sign of relapse, and he’d taken to sitting outside his shelter each evening with a hide stretched across his knees, already at work shaping a pair of boots he refused to say who they were for, though the careful measurements he’d taken of Cael’s foot a few nights earlier made it fairly obvious.
Wick’s cough thinned a little more with each visit, his cheeks losing their gray pallor by degrees, color creeping back into him the way it does in a plant finally given water after weeks of drought.
Nothing about him hinted at becoming anything other than an ordinary, healthier boy—no chill in his skin, no hollow look in his eyes, nothing that worried Cael the way it might have if this world followed the rules of the one he remembered.
By the sixth day, the training had stopped feeling like punishment.
Vesper still corrected him constantly, still barked when Cael’s footwork slipped, but the spar that morning ran longer and cleaner than any before it—fewer wasted strikes, fewer moments where Cael reacted instead of thought, more exchanges where the two of them traded blows at something almost resembling an even pace before Vesper finally stepped back, lowering his spear.
“Better.”
That was all.
No further explanation, no story about bears or bark or old lessons learned the hard way.
Just the one word, delivered the same way he might comment on the weather.
Cael found himself smiling anyway.
From anyone else it would have meant nothing.
From Vesper, it was the closest thing to a compliment the man was capable of giving, and Cael understood, standing there catching his very real breath in the cold morning air, that he’d take it.
Neither of them noticed the pair of pale yellow eyes watching from high in the branches above the clearing, unmoving, unblinking, patient as the snow itself.
It had been watching for a long time now.
It made no sound.
It didn’t move.
It simply watched.