The mist closed around them like a shroud.
Mud sucked at their boots.
The Marches, silent and endless, swallowed their tracks almost as fast as they made them.
Calder pushed Branwen ahead with a rough hand, not unkind but not gentle either.
The boy stumbled once, almost went down face-first into the muck.
Calder yanked him upright without slowing his own pace.
"Keep moving," Calder growled.
The words carried no anger.
Only fact.
They were bleeding, both of them.
The enemy wasn't dead — not all of them.
The Marches would finish what Thornhollow's butchers hadn't if they didn't move fast enough.
Survival first.
Always survival first.
The land broke into rough, stony highlands as they marched — slick with moss, treacherous underfoot.
Branwen stumbled again, catching himself against a half-rotted tree trunk.
Blood streaked his face and stained the ragged remnants of his cloak.
Calder paused long enough to scan the horizon.
No banners.
No horn calls.
But he felt it.
Felt the world tightening like a noose around their necks.
Hounds would be loosed soon.
Men with sharp steel and sharper orders.
Thornhollow would want his quarry back.
Dead or alive.
Preferably dead.
Calder spat into the mud and jerked his chin at the ridgeline ahead.
"Two more hills. Then we find cover."
Branwen nodded grimly, jaw tight, chest heaving with the effort of staying upright.
There was steel there.
Bent, bloodied, but unbroken.
For now.
They reached the first ridge by nightfall.
A shallow cave, barely big enough for two bodies and a fire no larger than a man's fist, opened among the stones.
It would have to do.
Calder dragged Branwen inside, set him down with all the gentleness of stacking firewood, and set to work.
No words.
No comfort.
Just the brutal math of survival.
He stripped Branwen's tunic away, inspecting the damage.
Bruises bloomed purple-black across the boy's ribs.
A shallow slash wept blood across one thigh.
Nothing immediately fatal — if they were smart, if they were careful.
Calder cleaned the wounds with whiskey poured straight from his flask.
Branwen hissed, teeth bared in pain.
"Good," Calder said.
"Means you're still worth fixing."
Calder moved with rough efficiency, binding Branwen's wounds with strips torn from his own ruined cloak.
No fancy stitching.
No clean cuts.
Just enough pressure to keep the boy breathing another day.
Branwen bore it in silence at first.
When Calder tied off the last bandage with a brutal tug, Branwen finally spoke — voice ragged, but steady.
"You're Calder Vane."
Not a question.
A grim statement.
Calder didn't answer immediately.
He pulled his dagger, nicked open the leather at his shoulder, and set to work stitching the torn flesh shut with gut twine and a hand that didn't shake, despite the pain.
"You know my name," he said finally, voice like gravel.
"You know enough."
Branwen pressed a hand against his side where the bruises flared darkest.
"You fought with my father once. Garran Veyne."
Calder grunted.
"A lifetime ago."
He drove the needle through another inch of his skin.
Winced.
Kept going.
Branwen leaned his head back against the cave wall, eyes closing for a breath.
Rain dripped in a slow, mournful cadence outside.
The Marches never stopped bleeding, even when men did.
"My father trusted you," Branwen said, his voice quieter now.
"As much as he trusted anyone."
Calder tied off the last suture with a savage pull.
Blood seeped through the makeshift bandage, but it would hold.
"Your father was a fool," Calder said flatly.
"But he was a stubborn fool. Same as me."
Branwen opened his eyes again.
There was anger there.
Not the hot, stupid kind.
The cold, hard anger that meant a man might still be dangerous, even half-dead.
"You're here because you owe him," Branwen said.
Another statement.
No illusions.
No gratitude.
Calder met the boy's gaze, steel on steel.
"I'm here because debts don't bury themselves," he said.
"And because killing's easier than remembering."
The words hung heavy between them, filling the small, stinking cave with something thicker than smoke.
Night deepened.
They ate in silence — dry, crumbling waybread Calder scavenged from the bodies back at the grainary, washed down with the last dregs of his whiskey.
Neither complained.
There was nothing to complain about that would change the taste.
The Marches gave only two choices: endure or die.
Sometime near dawn, Calder woke to a sound that didn't belong.
Not the rain.
Not the wind.
Footsteps.
Soft. Careful.
Wrong.
He rolled to his feet, Dog's Hunger already low and ready in his grip.
Branwen stirred groggily, hand fumbling for the broken dagger Calder had given him as a last resort.
Calder motioned him down with a curt flick of two fingers.
The footsteps grew louder — three, maybe four sets.
Hunting.
Tight formation.
Smarter than the last batch.
Thornhollow's hounds.
Come to finish what their butchered comrades could not.
Calder weighed options.
Fight here — back to the wall, injured, limited space.
Suicidal.
Flee.
Bleed more.
But maybe live to kill another day.
He nodded once to Branwen.
Silent command: move.
They slipped out the back of the cave into the mist-soaked rocks, moving slow at first, then faster once the shapes of the hunters crested the ridge.
A shout went up.
Steel flashed in the gray dawn.
Boots hammered behind them.
Crossbow bolts hissed past their ears.
Branwen stumbled once but caught himself.
Calder pushed him harder up the incline, ignoring the burning stitch in his own ribs, the dragging weight of exhaustion grinding at his spine.
They crested the next ridge — a sharp, broken shelf overlooking a narrow ravine thick with briar and fallen stone.
No cover.
No clean escape.
Only down.
Calder grabbed Branwen's arm and dragged him over the edge.
They tumbled into the ravine, crashing through thorns and mud, rocks tearing at skin and cloak alike.
Pain exploded along Calder's side where a stone split flesh.
Branwen cried out once, quickly muffled.
They lay tangled among the wreckage at the bottom, gasping.
Above, torches flickered as the hunters peered down, shouting to each other.
Calder clamped a hand over Branwen's mouth, his other hand resting lightly on the hilt of his blade.
Waiting.
Listening.
Boots crunched.
Curses hissed.
A stone clattered loose, rattling down the ravine.
But no descent.
Not yet.
Thornhollow's hounds weren't eager to follow prey into unknown ground without numbers.
Cowards when the odds weren't stacked.
Good.
Cowards could be outlasted.
Minutes stretched.
Then an hour.
The torches pulled back.
Reluctant.
Grudging.
Calder let out a slow breath and eased his hand away from Branwen's mouth.
The boy didn't speak.
Didn't move except to nod once, grim and sharp.
Learning.
Good.
Calder pushed himself upright, every joint screaming in protest, and scanned the ravine ahead.
Broken ground.
Treacherous footing.
But it would lead them east, deeper into the ruined heart of the Marches.
Exactly where no sane man would follow.
Exactly where they needed to go.
By the time they found a place to rest again, the sun was high and cruel above the mist.
A hollow between two shattered hills, shielded from above by the twisted arms of dead trees.
No fresh tracks.
No signs of other desperate souls.
Calder slumped against a stone, pulled the battered flask from his belt, and took a shallow drink.
Empty.
He grunted and tossed it aside.
No sense carrying dead weight.
Branwen crouched nearby, hands wrapped tight around his knees, eyes hollow but awake.
Calder eyed him for a long moment.
Saw the stubborn line of his jaw.
The way he breathed through pain without complaint.
Survival wasn't a gift.
It was a curse you had to want enough to bleed for.
Maybe, just maybe, the boy understood that now.
"We need a place to hole up," Calder said, voice scraping low.
"Long enough to heal. Long enough to plan."
Branwen licked his cracked lips.
"Where?"
Calder nodded eastward, where the hills bled into broken cliffs and ruined fortresses long since abandoned by men wiser than themselves.
"Greywatch," he said.
An old fort.
Crumbling.
Haunted, if you believed the fools who whispered about the old wars.
Perfect for the likes of them.
Branwen said nothing.
Just rose slowly, favoring his left leg, and fell into step beside Calder.
They moved into the dying light, two broken wolves chasing a blood debt across a land that had forgotten the meaning of mercy.