They heard the column before they saw it.Not the sound of a march — no rhythm to it, no coordination. Just the shuffling, uneven noise of a large number of people moving slowly on a road they hadn't chosen, carrying what they'd managed to grab and not talking much. A child crying somewhere in the middle of it, high and exhausted, the kind of crying that had gone past distress into something more mechanical. The sound of a body doing what it did when the person inside it had run out of ways to cope.Cassian and Aldric came around a bend in the road and stopped.The column stretched back further than the road's curve allowed him to see. Fifty people at minimum, probably more. Families mostly — he could see that in the groupings, the way certain people stayed in tight clusters regardless of pace, children kept close and elderly pulled along by younger arms. They moved with the specific exhaustion of people who had been walking for more than one day and had not slept properly and were no

He woke up cold despite the fire.Not the sharp cold of the road — the slow, deep cold of a body that had been pushed past its limit for too many consecutive days and was now presenting a bill. His ribs ached where he'd taken a knock during the scramble out of Veldrath's back streets, something he'd been successfully ignoring until horizontal rest gave it his full attention. His left shoulder had a stiffness in it that hadn't been there a week ago. The floor of the woman's house was stone under a layer of rush matting, and the matting was thin.He lay still for a moment listening. Aldric's breathing from the other side of the dying fire, slow and even. Outside, wind. The goats were quiet. No hooves on the track, no footsteps, nothing the mark was flagging as wrong.He sat up carefully, favoring the ribs, and put more wood on the fire from the stack beside the hearth because the alternative was watching it die and that seemed like a poor use of watching.The woman — she'd given her nam

They reached Ashenveil on the fifth day in the Reach, two days later than planned and about three near-misses past what Cassian's ribs were willing to forgive.The direct route from Dessa's settlement would have been three days. Clean, straightforward, manageable. Then the mark had spiked twice in the space of an hour on the second morning and Aldric had pulled them east without discussion, then north, then looping west through terrain that grabbed at their boots and offered nothing resembling shelter. The detour added distance and consumed time and had probably kept them alive, though probably was doing a lot of work in that sentence and Cassian had stopped examining it too closely.Five days of sleeping badly on frozen ground. His ribs had graduated from a dull ache to a specific grinding complaint every time he turned wrong, which the ground ensured he did constantly. He'd eaten adequately — Aldric rationed with the precision of someone who'd learned the hard way that running out o