The camp moved before dawn.
No banners.
No songs.
Just the grinding of boots against mud and the brittle silence of men who no longer dreamed of anything but survival.
Grey mist blanketed the Marches, thick as old breath.
The crows followed overhead, black dots against a sickly sky.
Waiting.
Watching.
Hungry.
Calder stalked through the warband like a wolf.
They packed their stolen gear quickly, stripping every last usable scrap from the ruins of the ambushed caravan.
No prayers for the dead.
No mourners for the fallen.
The Marches didn't breed sentiment.
Only scars.
New blood had joined their ranks before the raid.
They moved differently from the old warband — not better, not worse.
Just hungrier.
Carrying the stink of desperation like a second skin.
Dren Malco was the first Calder noted.
A lean, snake-hipped man with a patchy beard and a knife that never quite left his hand.
The left side of his face was marred by an old burn, twisting his features into a permanent, half-mocking smirk.
His ruined ear twitched when he was angry — a tell Calder filed away.
Dren talked too much.
Quick words.
Quicker smiles.
The kind of man who asks about your scars while thinking how best to make new ones.
He carried three knives openly.
Gods knew how many more were hidden under the layers of torn leather he called armor.
A survivor.
A backstabber.
Both things Calder needed — for now.
Saelen Crow-Eater was another matter.
Broad-shouldered and dark-skinned, her black braids woven with shards of bone and broken bits of iron.
She moved slow, deliberate, as if every step had to be earned from the ground.
She rarely spoke.
When she did, her words were iron nails — short, sharp, and hammered deep.
Calder saw the scars on her arms — bite marks, blade cuts, burns.
A woman who had been caged, used, broken, and had survived by becoming the thing that broke others.
She sharpened her sword constantly, even when they should have been resting.
The blade was a chipped, heavy bastard sword, so battered it looked older than she was.
But it was sharp.
Merciless.
Like the woman who wielded it.
Calder trusted her more than most.
Fear, he could buy.
But hatred — hatred went farther.
Then there was Thann Veyr.
A boy, really.
No more than seventeen years.
Big eyes.
Quick hands.
The kind of face that hadn't yet hardened into something ugly enough to survive the Marches.
He carried a spear with a cracked shaft and a shield dented almost to uselessness.
Still polished the damned thing every night, as if the shine might save him when the blades started flying.
He watched Calder like a starving dog watches a butcher — half awe, half terror.
Eager to prove himself.
Eager to belong.
Too eager.
That kind of hunger turned quickly into betrayal when it wasn't fed fast enough.
Calder made a mental note:
Use him for the work that needed doing.
Expect the knife in the back when the reward didn't come soon enough.
Branwen moved differently now, too.
No longer limping.
No longer soft.
But something inside him sagged, like a sword that had been tempered too quickly, brittle at the core.
Calder caught him once, alone, staring down at a broken helm in the mud.
The blood was black with age, but the memory of slaughter clung to it like frost.
Branwen's jaw tightened.
His fingers flexed once at his side, as if reaching for something he couldn't name, then fell still.
He turned away without a word, boots dragging in the muck.
Calder watched him go.
No comment.
The Marches taught lessons in silence, in blood, in the long grind of survival.
By noon, they moved east — toward the ruins of Darnmouth.
The crossroads had once been a proud trading hub, a crown of stone and silver on the Marches' brow.
Now it was just another corpse city, eaten hollow by war and time.
Exactly the kind of place Thornhollow still fed supply lines through, hoping the rot would hide his weakness.
Perfect hunting ground.
They camped under a crumbling aqueduct that night.
The stones above were slick with moss and soot-stains older than memory.
Calder gathered his core around the remains of a fire: Dren, Saelen, Varrick, and a few others too brutal to trust but too useful to discard.
Branwen sat a little apart, nursing a bruised rib, cleaning the battered sword Calder had forced into his hands.
Not the way a knight cleaned a blade with pride.
The way a grave-digger wiped the dirt from a shovel after another long day's work.
Dren was the first to speak, flipping a dagger between his fingers with casual malice.
"So what's the next prize, Stonewolf? Another wagon full of broken boots and stale bread?"
The men chuckled low, the sound ugly and tired.
Calder glanced at him, voice cold as iron hammered flat:
"Thornhollow's blood. His pride. His teeth."
Saelen nodded once, slow and grave.
She understood.
Pride and survival were the same thing now.
Dren just grinned wider, the ruin of his face twisting like rotten cloth.
Calder didn't trust him.
Didn't need to.
You didn't trust hounds at the end of a leash.
You aimed them at someone else's throat before they remembered they still had teeth.
Later, by the low glow of a dying fire, Branwen finally spoke.
Voice low.
Raw.
"Does it ever stop feeling like murder?"
Calder didn't pause in sharpening Dog's Hunger.
The stone rasped over steel, slow and steady.
"No."
He let the word settle like a weight between them.
Branwen watched the flames for a long moment, his face empty of anything easy or soft.
"I thought... I thought it would be different. Fighting for something real."
Calder looked up, something like pity — old and worn and mean — flashing across his face.
"Different's what got your father killed," he said.
"And every man who ever mistook hope for armor."
Branwen said nothing more.
But Calder saw it.
The crack widening.
The slow corrosion eating into the boy's heart.
Tomorrow, Branwen would kill again.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
Until there was nothing left but steel and blood and hunger.
Same as the rest of them.
They broke camp before dawn.
Boots crunching in firm mud.
Weapons hidden under stolen cloaks and old lies.
The Marches swallowed them whole.
And Calder marched at their head, a blade no oath could bind, leading the damned to carve their debt into the marrow of the world.