They left Hollow Hearth behind with blood on their boots and smoke in their hair.
Not aimless.
Not running.
Marching — slow, cold, battered — toward something.
At Father Bryn's urging, Branwen set the course:
a string of broken settlements further east, places where Thornhollow's hand tightened like a noose around the starving and the desperate.
Places where a blade raised in their name might mean new allies.
New strength.
Calder didn't care about the sermons Bryn whispered.
Didn't care about saving souls or easing suffering.
He cared about bodies.
Blades.
The ugly math of survival.
More swords meant better odds.
Better odds meant breathing longer.
Simple as that.
The Marches stretched endless ahead.
Cold.
Grey.
Silent.
The battered column crawled across it — a ragged thread of bodies wrapped in cloaks and desperation.
Slow.
Vulnerable.
Calder hated every step of it.
He walked at the rear, boots dragging trenches through frozen mud, Dog's Hunger loose across his shoulders.
Every turn of the road felt like a noose tightening.
The villagers stumbled and gasped, weighed down by rusted pots, broken tools, bundles of moldy bedding.
Scraps of lives too worthless for a grave robber.
Children whimpered.
Old men coughed into the cold.
A dozen times Calder's instincts screamed to cut the dead weight loose, leave them behind, move faster.
But survival wasn't a straight line anymore.
Not with Thornhollow's shadow stretching long across the Marches.
They needed bodies.
Even if half of them would die before they reached anything worth fighting for.
Vryce moved along the left flank, eyes sharp.
Not because Calder ordered it.
Because Vryce understood.
Because men like them didn't need orders to spot the wolves circling.
At noon, Calder called a halt near a splintered grove.
Branwen gathered with him over a broken map scrawled on a stretched scrap of hide.
The boy's face was lined with exhaustion.
Dark hollows under his eyes.
But he didn't falter.
Not yet.
"The road east is clearer," Branwen said, voice rough.
"Less chance of Thornhollow's patrols."
Calder grunted.
"Clear roads mean faster riders."
Branwen frowned.
"So we risk the marsh?"
Calder tapped a calloused finger against the map.
A thin line of black smudged through a twisted tangle of drawn trees.
"Harder to march," Calder said.
"Harder to chase."
Branwen hesitated.
Looked at the villagers — their hunched backs, their sagging packs, the way some barely stayed upright.
Calder saw the conflict flash through him.
Mercy clashing with survival.
"March them to death," Calder said flatly.
"Or watch Thornhollow's riders gut them on the open road."
Simple math.
Ugly math.
The only kind that mattered.
Branwen nodded once.
Sharp.
Hard.
A piece of him breaking inside and setting wrong.
Good.
Soft bones shattered on Marches stone.
They turned toward the marsh.
The land changed fast.
Soft ground sucking at boots.
Stunted trees clawing at the sky like broken fingers.
Cold mist slid across the bog, turning every shadow into a possible blade.
The column slowed even further.
Children cried.
Men cursed.
A wagon axle snapped with a crack like a shot, spilling half their meager supplies into the mud.
Calder barked sharp orders.
Vryce dragged the usable food from the muck.
The rest they left to drown.
No time.
No mercy.
An hour later, Calder spotted the first sign they weren't alone.
A broken branch.
A snapped trail through the reeds.
Too fresh to be a deer.
Too quiet to be a fleeing farmer.
He called a halt with a sharp gesture.
The villagers collapsed into wary circles, clutching weapons that barely deserved the name.
Calder moved through the ranks, checking every shield, every blade, every wounded man leaning too hard on a spear.
"We're not alone," he said, voice low, cutting through the cold mist.
Vryce didn't ask how he knew.
He just tightened the strap on his shield and checked the edge of his knife.
Branwen swallowed, setting his jaw tight.
No speeches now.
No wide-eyed hope.
Just the grim certainty that death walked close behind them.
The first arrow came soon after.
A sharp whisper through the mist.
It buried itself in the mud a foot from Branwen's boot.
No warning.
No parley.
Calder roared once, loud enough to shake the crows from the black trees.
"Shields up! Tighten the line!"
The warband — what little remained of it — surged to form a ragged shell around the civilians.
Makeshift shields locked.
Swords and axes ready.
The villagers crouched low, clutching their pitiful weapons.
Children whimpered.
Women wept.
The attackers moved through the mist — fast, silent.
Mercenaries maybe.
Marcher raiders.
Hard to tell.
It didn't matter.
Calder stepped forward into the thick of it.
Dog's Hunger a black flash in the afternoon light.
The first man came at him low — dagger flashing toward Calder's gut.
Calder caught the wrist, twisted hard enough to snap the bone, and drove his boot into the man's chest.
The attacker staggered back — right into Vryce's waiting spear.
Another rushed from the side —
Calder spun, blade low, cutting deep into the man's thigh.
Mud and blood sprayed.
The man screamed and fell, clutching his leg, trampled under the next surge.
The fighting dissolved into brutal chaos.
No lines.
No honor.
Just blades in the mire, men dying for nothing.
Branwen fought near the center — protecting the weakest —
swinging with desperate, ugly strength.
A woman with a hatchet cracked a raider's skull.
An old man drove a pitchfork into another's belly and was pulled down screaming for his trouble.
The line buckled.
Held.
Calder moved like a storm through it all.
No wasted breath.
No mercy.
Each swing of Dog's Hunger was another man broken.
Another heartbeat bought.
Another scrap of survival torn from the jaws of the Marches.
And then — as fast as it had started — it was over.
The mist swallowed the last of the attackers as they broke and fled.
Leaving only corpses and blood in their wake.
The villagers slumped to their knees.
Some sobbing.
Some silent.
All broken a little deeper than they'd been that morning.
Calder wiped his blade clean on a corpse's cloak.
Scanned the survivors.
Fewer now.
But enough.
Still breathing.
Still moving.
He caught Branwen's eye across the wreckage.
The boy stood tall, bloodied sword in hand, face grey with exhaustion.
But he was still standing.
Still fighting.
Calder nodded once.
A small thing.
But real.
They didn't waste time with fires.
The dead stayed where they fell —
faces down in the muck, weapons ripped from stiffening hands.
Steel was too precious to rot alongside broken ribs and spilled guts.
Calder's men — what little was left of them — stripped the fallen fast.
Knives. Belts. Boots.
Anything that could be used or bartered for half a loaf of bread later.
Then they moved.
The march was slow.
Too slow.
The old.
The wounded.
Children too young to carry blades but old enough to cry with every step.
Every mile dragged like chain over raw bone.
They should have reached the first settlement before midafternoon.
Instead, dusk was already bleeding across the sky when the ragged column crested a rise and saw it.
The place barely deserved the name.
A huddle of sagging huts scattered around a dry well.
Fences broken and re-mended with rotted wood and prayer.
No banners flew.
No torches burned.
Only wary eyes peering from doorways and shadows, weighing the armed men trudging into view.
Calder stood at the front now, Dog's Hunger resting across his shoulders.
His body ached with the deep, cold hurt of old wounds and fresh bruises.
He scanned the settlement with a soldier's eye.
No guards.
No gates.
No welcome.
Only fear.
And maybe something deeper — a hunger that went past the belly and gnawed at the bones.
The hunger for change.
Or the hunger to kill the next fool who promised it.
Hard to tell.
The battered column drifted to a halt at the edge of the settlement.
No shouts.
No drawn blades.
Only the scraping sound of worn boots on dry dust.
A handful of men stepped out to meet them.
Hard-eyed.
Ragged.
Farmers once, maybe.
Now just another kind of scavenger.
They clutched old axes, chipped swords, makeshift pikes scavenged from broken carts and dead neighbors.
Their faces were hollowed out by hunger and loss.
Men who'd seen too many winters claw away their lives one ragged breath at a time.
Father Bryn stepped forward, robes heavy with mud and cold.
Branwen moved beside him — young, blood-streaked, sword at his side.
No banners.
No parley horn.
Just two figures standing against the dying light.