The fires burned low in Thornhollow's war camp, guttering red and black under a sky swollen with storm clouds.
The men huddled close to the embers, speaking in hushed, broken tones.
They had reason.
At the center of the camp, under a battered pavilion of black silk, Thornhollow listened in silence as his captain stammered out the report.
"Dead, my lord. Nearly all of them. Greywatch… the keep's ruined. We lost... more than two dozen."
Silence.
The fire crackled and spat between them.
Thornhollow sat like a stone carving — massive, broad-shouldered, cloaked in wolf-fur gone ragged at the edges.
His face was brutal: a nose broken too many times, a mouth set in a permanent scowl, eyes like cold, iron nails.
He picked up a piece of bone from the firepit — a shard of something unrecognizable, charred black — and turned it slowly between thick fingers.
"Who?" he asked.
His voice low, ugly.
A weapon more than a question.
The captain swallowed hard.
"Stonewolf. Calder Vane."
The shard snapped between Thornhollow's fingers with a soft crack.
He rose to his feet, slow and deliberate.
The camp seemed to shrink around him.
Men flinched back from the fire like dogs beaten one time too many.
"Stonewolf," Thornhollow said, savoring the name like a bad taste he intended to spit out with blood.
"Should've gutted that bastard when we had the chance."
He strode across the pavilion, grabbed the captain by the jaw, and forced him to look up.
"Find him," Thornhollow growled.
"Bleed him. Burn him. I want his head on a fucking spear before the next new moon."
The captain nodded frantically, trying to speak.
Thornhollow shoved him backward into the mud.
Then he turned to the waiting mercenaries, voice rising like a storm wind:
"Double the bounty! Bring me the Stonewolf — dead, alive, broken, I don't care!"
The men roared their agreement, eager to chase blood and coin.
And the Marches, already a land of broken oaths and hungry graves, stirred at the scent of new slaughter.
The sun cracked the mist with pale, sickly light.
Greywatch stood half-shattered behind them, the stones still wet with the blood of the fallen.
Calder slung the last usable pack over his shoulder and turned toward Branwen.
"Time to move," he said.
"Greywatch's bled dry. We stay, we rot."
Branwen tightened the straps on his scavenged gear — half armor, half stitched rags — and nodded.
The bruises on his ribs had faded from black to yellow-green, but he still moved like a man carrying weights tied to his bones.
"You have a plan?" Branwen asked, voice hoarse from smoke and grit.
Calder grunted.
"Find killers. Find knives that haven't dulled yet.
Make something ugly enough that Thornhollow's men think twice before charging headlong."
Branwen's mouth tightened.
He didn't like it.
He still wanted something cleaner.
Better.
Calder didn't care.
Better men died first in the Marches.
Only the broken endured.
They moved east across the broken Marches, traveling by forgotten goat paths and through gullies where the mud stank of old blood.
No fires.
No banners.
Just the slow, brutal march of two men hunted by the whole godsforsaken world.
They found the first of the 'knives' three days later.
A deserter camp tucked under a half-collapsed viaduct, hidden by mist and careful neglect.
Maybe twenty men, all teeth and bone and rusted steel.
Outlaws.
Murderers.
Broken soldiers who had seen the dream of kingship rot and turned to survival instead.
Perfect.
Calder approached the camp openly, Dog's Hunger resting across his shoulder, Branwen trailing two steps behind.
The men stirred, reaching for blades and bows.
Ragged, half-drunk, mean-eyed.
The kind of men who killed for insults and died for nothing.
The leader, a brute of a man with a twisted lip and a chainmail coif stained black with old blood, stepped forward.
He hefted a war axe lazily, eyes gleaming.
"Lost, are you?" the brute sneered.
"Or just stupid?"
Calder smiled without humor.
"Neither."
He tossed a battered Thornhollow badge into the dirt at the brute's feet.
The men muttered.
Even outlaws knew Thornhollow's paychests were deep and bloody.
Turning on him wasn't a choice made lightly.
"You want to keep running from Thornhollow's butchers?" Calder said, voice cutting through the mist like steel through flesh.
"Or do you want to fight back and make them bleed instead?"
The brute spat.
"Fight a lord's army with what? Rusty knives and broken boots?"
Calder stepped closer, Dog's Hunger glinting darkly.
"You fight with hunger. You fight with hate. You fight because dying on your knees is slower and uglier."
The men shifted uneasily.
The seed of blood was already growing among them.
It only needed watering.
The brute grunted.
"What's your plan?"
Mocking, but wary now.
Calder shrugged.
"Bleed them. Break them. Drown them in their own gold and cowardice."
A pause.
"Or die fighting like men, instead of begging like dogs."
The decision hung there, heavy as a noose.
Finally, the brute laughed — short, bitter.
He stuck his axe into the mud and held out a scarred, broken-knuckled hand.
"You want dead men? You found 'em."
Calder shook his hand once, firm and final.
Warband.
First stones placed in a bloody foundation.
They moved fast after that.
No banners.
No marching songs.
Just a ragged procession of killers, thieves, and broken knights strung together by Calder's cold will and Branwen's stubborn, wounded hope.
By the seventh day, they numbered forty-three.
A dozen deserters from Thornhollow's own ranks.
A handful of exiled knights stripped of their crests and honor.
Scavengers.
Wolves in human skin.
A force no lord would ever call an army.
But Calder didn't need an army.
He needed a hammer.
One that swung wild and bloody and didn't care what walls it shattered.
Branwen struggled to hide his disgust.
He watched Calder recruit a one-eyed sellsword who'd once burned a village over a gambling debt.
Watched him offer food and steel to a band of raiders who bragged openly about their crimes.
Branwen confronted him the night they took shelter in a hollowed-out stone fort.
The walls were damp, the roof mostly collapsed, but the fire kept the worst of the cold at bay.
"You're building a butcher's guild, not an army," Branwen said, voice low, fierce.
Calder finished cleaning his sword, wiped the blade clean on a strip of ruined banner, and looked up with the slow, heavy gaze of a man who had outlived better dreams.
"I'm building survivors," Calder said.
"Men who know how to kill and how to keep breathing after. Honor's good for grave markers, boy. It doesn't stop a crossbow bolt."
Branwen's mouth tightened.
He had no answer.
Not yet.
Only the grinding weight of reality pressing down like the Marches' endless rain.
Their first test came sooner than expected.
A Thornhollow patrol — fifty men, mounted, armored — sweeping the highlands, hunting for the "Stonewolf."
Calder's warband watched from the rocks above, breathing shallow, weapons ready.
No orders shouted.
No horns blown.
Just a silent nod from Calder.
The first boulders crashed down onto the patrol's heads, scattering horses and riders in a spray of broken bone and splintered wood.
Then the archers opened up, firing jagged, rusty arrows down into the chaos.
Then the butchers charged.
Calder led the way, Dog's Hunger splitting shields and skulls alike, moving like a storm with bones for teeth.
Branwen followed — slower, less certain — but he drove his blade home when the moment came.
Not clean.
Not pretty.
But deadly.
By nightfall, the Thornhollow patrol was gone.
Blood soaked the stones.
Crows circled overhead.
Calder's warband feasted on stolen supplies, patched their wounds with scraps torn from the dead, and sharpened their blades in the firelight.
Broken blades.
Forged for a new, uglier purpose.
That night, Branwen sat beside the fire, staring into the coals.
His hands trembled slightly — not from fear, but from adrenaline and cold and something deeper.
Calder sat across from him, sharpening his throwing knives with slow, measured strokes.
"You fought," Calder said, voice low.
"No shame in blood on your hands. Only shame in dying with clean ones."
Branwen didn't answer.
Didn't need to.
The fire burned the answer into the silence between them.
Tomorrow they would bleed again.
Tomorrow they would gather more knives, more broken men desperate enough to follow a wolf into the jaws of death.
The Marches would drown in their own cruelty before this was done.
And Calder Vane would carve his debt free with steel and scars.