The land east of the ravine broke apart like rotted bone.
Gullies clawed into the stone.
Bridges fallen.
Paths turned to scars of black rock and ash.
Calder led Branwen along the crumbling ridgelines, boots slipping on gravel, every breath heavy with the stink of old fires.
The boy limped but said nothing.
Good.
Words wasted strength.
Above them, perched like a buzzard on a corpse, Greywatch Keep loomed.
Its jagged towers leaned drunkenly against the sky, shattered by some long-forgotten siege.
The walls, once proud and smooth, were pitted by centuries of rain and war.
Nothing lived there now but crows and bad memories.
Perfect.
Calder adjusted the strap of Dog's Hunger across his back and picked up the pace.
Night was coming again, and this place grew teeth after dark.
They reached the outer wall as the last light bled from the clouds.
The main gate had collapsed inward — a tangle of splintered beams and rusted iron.
Calder circled to a breach in the western curtain, where the stone had cracked wide enough to admit a man if he bent low.
He shoved Branwen ahead through the gap, following with Dog's Hunger drawn in case anything less friendly had taken up residence.
The inner courtyard was a ruin.
Weeds grew between shattered flagstones.
Broken siege engines moldered in the shadows — one trebuchet reduced to a skeleton of blackened wood.
The stench of bird shit and old decay hung thick in the still air.
Good.
The stink would keep most scavengers away.
Calder moved methodically through the yard, clearing corners, checking the collapsed barracks, the abandoned armory, the ruined chapel.
Nothing.
Just dust and the slow creak of stone settling into death.
They found shelter in what had once been the captain's tower.
The roof was half gone, but the lower floors were solid enough, the thick walls keeping out most of the wind.
Calder jammed a fallen beam across the broken doorway.
Not a proper defense.
But it would give them a few seconds' warning if anything tried to come in teeth-first.
He dropped heavily onto a stone bench, wincing as old bruises pulled and stitched wounds throbbed.
Branwen slumped nearby, breathing hard, one hand pressed against his ribs.
Still upright.
Still stubborn.
Calder respected that, in a grudging, feral way.
The night passed without incident.
The next morning, Calder set about making the place more defensible.
No speeches.
No plans drawn in the dirt.
Just work.
He showed Branwen how to stack rubble into crude choke points across the courtyard.
How to rig loose stones over doorframes to drop onto unwelcome guests.
How to dig shallow trenches at the gaps in the walls to slow attackers without trapping themselves inside.
Branwen listened.
Watched.
Learned.
He wasn't fast.
Wasn't strong.
But he was stubborn enough to keep moving even when his hands bled and his breath hitched from pain.
That counted for more than all the soft speeches in the world.
By the third day, Greywatch resembled something less like a tomb and more like a trap.
Crude defenses stood at every choke point.
Clear lines of retreat marked in Calder's mind.
Escape tunnels — half-collapsed servant passages — cleared just enough for a desperate man to wriggle through if the walls fell.
Good enough.
The Marches never offered perfect defenses.
Only better places to die.
Food was scarce.
Calder snared a pair of sickly rabbits on the second night, their flesh stringy and bitter from eating poisoned roots.
They roasted them over a fire no larger than a clenched fist, the smoke funneled through a cracked chimney to avoid detection.
They ate in silence, tearing at the meat with their teeth like wolves too tired to snarl.
Branwen broke the silence once.
Voice low.
Careful.
"Why help me?"
Calder didn't look up from the rabbit carcass he was picking clean.
"Don't mistake help for duty," he said.
"You're breathing because your father made me bleed once. I bleed back. Debt's paid. Nothing more."
Branwen nodded slowly.
Accepting the answer, even if he didn't like it.
Smart boy.
The fourth morning, Calder spotted the first scouts.
Shapes moving along the ridgelines.
Too careful for scavengers.
Too disciplined for wandering brigands.
Thornhollow's men.
Hunting.
Closing the noose.
Calder watched them through a crack in the tower wall, breath slow and steady.
No panic.
No fear.
Just grim arithmetic:
Too many to fight head-on.
Too soon to flee with Branwen still half-lame.
Not enough time to build better defenses.
Only one choice.
Bleed them slow.
Break their morale.
Make Greywatch too costly to take.
The Marches taught men one lesson above all:
You didn't have to outrun death.
You only had to convince it to eat someone else first.
That night, Calder laid traps beyond the walls.
Nooses made from salvaged rope, hidden under mud and moss.
Pitfalls dug where the grass grew thickest, lined with sharpened stakes hewn from broken furniture.
Rusty blades wedged into fallen masonry, ready to gut the careless.
A butcher's work.
A survivor's gospel.
Branwen helped without being told, his face grim, his hands blistered and raw.
He tied knots that wouldn't slip.
Sharpened stakes until his fingers bled.
Calder watched him out of the corner of his eye.
A boy yesterday.
A blade in the making today.
If he lived long enough to be hammered sharp.
On the fifth day, the enemy came.
A low, rattling horn called through the mist at dawn.
Boots trampled the dead grass.
Steel flashed.
Thornhollow's hunters.
Maybe two dozen.
Maybe more.
Spread wide, trying to encircle Greywatch and choke it to death.
Calder crouched behind a collapsed parapet, Dog's Hunger resting easy across his knees.
No grand speeches.
No shouted orders.
Only the low, steady drum of blood in his ears.
When the first man stumbled into a pit trap — the wet crack of a snapped leg echoing sharp and bright — Calder smiled grimly and rose.
Time to start the bleeding.
The trap snapped shut with a grim, wet sound.
The mercenary's scream tore across the broken courtyard — a sharp, panicked sound that rolled out into the mist.
Then the rest charged.
Ragged shapes rushed the outer breaches, swords high, faces snarling beneath battered helms.
Calder met them without a roar, without a cry — only a cold, brutal silence that bit deeper than any blade.
Dog's Hunger swung in a low, brutal arc.
The first man lost a leg at the knee.
The second caught a blade full across the face, splitting his helm like kindling.
Blood sprayed hot and sharp into the mist.
Branwen fought from the shadow of the tower door, wielding a scavenged spear with both hands.
Not graceful.
Not skilled.
But desperate enough to drive the point home when a wounded mercenary staggered too close.
The man gurgled and dropped.
Branwen wrenched the spear free with a grunt and stumbled backward, wide-eyed but still standing.
Calder planted his boots and made a wall of himself.
Every step back was taken with blood, every inch of ground paid for with split ribs and shattered bone.
The battle churned through the broken keep like a black tide.
Bodies piled up at the choke points Calder had rigged days before.
Men screamed as they stumbled into noose traps, as rocks and rubble crushed skulls and snapped spines.
For every two men who fell, one still forced his way inside.
But the pace slowed.
Their courage cracked.
The Marches did their part — slick ground betrayed footing, mist swallowed shouted orders, mud dragged at desperate feet.
Calder fought like a thing built from the wreckage around him:
Blades snapping from his parries.
Fists smashing teeth loose.
Boots driving men screaming back into the killing fields.
There was no glory here.
Only work.
Ugly, bloody work.
Hours later — or maybe minutes; time was a lie when blood drowned the world — the last mercenaries broke and fled.
Tattered survivors staggering into the mist, leaving their dead behind to rot with the rest.
Calder leaned on Dog's Hunger, breathing hard, blood dripping from a dozen shallow cuts.
Branwen sat slumped against the tower wall, spear across his knees, chest heaving.
His face was pale, smeared with blood and mud, but his eyes were clear.
He was alive.
Against all odds, against all logic, against every cruelty the Marches could conjure.
Alive.
And owing.
Calder turned his gaze eastward, where the low black hills rolled toward Thornhollow's heartland.
This was just the beginning.
Thornhollow would send more.
Bigger forces.
Angrier men.
The Marches would drown in blood before this debt was paid in full.
Calder grunted, wiped Dog's Hunger clean on a dead man's cloak, and rolled his stiff shoulder.
He looked down at Branwen, one corner of his mouth twitching in something that might once have been a smile, if you squinted through enough scars.
"Get up," he said.
"First fight's free. After that, you earn your keep."
Branwen wiped his face with a shaking hand, planted his spear, and rose to his feet.
Swayed once.
Set his jaw.
And stood.
Good enough.
For now.
Calder turned and started down the broken path eastward.
Branwen followed.
Behind them, Greywatch bled into the mist, its dead walls holding nothing but corpses and bad memories.
Ahead, the Marches waited.
Hungry.
Patient.
Endless.
Just like Calder.