Mud sucked at Calder's boots with every dragging step.
The storm had thinned to a cold mist, but the ground was a battlefield grave turned inside out — flooded pits, broken blades, charred stumps where trees had tried and failed to outlive the wars.
Each mile eastward peeled another layer off a man's strength.
Calder moved anyway.
Head down.
Eyes sharp.
Dog's Hunger dragging a faint scar through the muck behind him.
Survival was simple arithmetic.
Keep moving.
Kill what needed killing.
Bury nothing but memories.
He found the trail late in the morning.
A scuffed gash along a gully wall, where too many boots had churned up the earth.
A broken horseshoe, bent and discarded.
The sour stink of sweat and iron hanging in the wet air like old smoke.
Thornhollow's men.
Still ahead.
Still bleeding their filth into the Marches.
Calder's mouth twisted into a humorless grimace.
Tracking was easy when your quarry thought they had already killed anyone worth fearing.
He stayed low, moving between the thicker patches of brush and the ruins of old farmsteads.
The mist helped — curling in thick bands around the lower ground, masking movement, swallowing sound.
Perfect for hunting.
Perfect for killing.
By midday, Calder spotted them.
A dozen men, camped rough under the broken ribs of a fallen watchtower.
No banners raised. No sentries posted.
Just men — laughing too loud, drinking too fast, thinking the blood price had already been paid.
Fools.
They wore patchwork armor, dented and dark with old gore. Their weapons lay scattered around their camp like children's toys — swords stuck in the mud, spears leaning forgotten against broken stones.
Calder watched them from the ridge, calculating angles, distances, patterns.
No unnecessary risks.
No mercy.
He waited.
Waited until the sun dipped behind the westward hills, turning the mist copper and red.
Waited until the cold thickened and the mist dragged itself lower, cloaking the world in Ghostlight.
Then he moved.
The first man died without ever seeing him.
A thrown knife — a short, brutal arc through the mist — buried itself in the man's throat.
He staggered, gasped, collapsed.
Before the body hit the ground, Calder was already charging the camp.
Dog's Hunger came off his back with a roar of torn air.
The second mercenary turned just in time to take the sword full across the ribs, splitting mail and meat alike.
He went down screaming, clutching his insides.
The third swung a rust-pitted axe.
Calder caught the haft with a snarl, yanked the man forward, and drove his forehead into the bridge of the man's nose.
Bone cracked.
The axe fell.
Calder finished him with a short, vicious thrust under the chin, the blade punching out the back of the man's skull.
Steel sang in the mist.
Boots scrambled.
Voices rose in panic.
Calder gave them no quarter.
No chance to rally.
No breath between strikes.
He hammered through them like a storm through dry wheat:
Elbow to a throat.
Knee to a gut.
Dog's Hunger shearing through arms and faces and brittle shields.
The camp became a butcher's yard in under two minutes.
Most never even drew their blades.
The last man — a boy, no older than fifteen, wild-eyed and shaking — dropped his sword and ran screaming into the mist.
Calder let him go.
Let the story travel faster than his boots ever could.
Breathing hard, Calder stalked the camp, kicking over bodies, checking for survivors.
One man whimpered, trying to crawl away with blood bubbling from a ragged slash across his belly.
Calder ended him with a single thrust.
Quick. Merciful, in the way a knife in the heart could be merciful.
He searched the corpses with a practiced hand.
Rotted coin purses.
Broken trinkets.
Half-eaten rations crawling with flies.
No Branholt blue and silver.
No signet rings.
No answers.
Just blood in the mud and old debts unpaid.
He found the tracks soon after — a deeper path cutting away from the camp to the east.
Heavy boots.
Wheel ruts.
Drag marks.
Prisoners.
Calder crouched at the trailhead, fingers trailing lightly over the churned muck.
There was weight here.
A body too stubborn or too broken to march properly.
Dragged instead like a sack of rotten meat.
Calder's jaw tightened.
The taste of old iron flooded his mouth.
He rose and followed the trail into the gathering dark.
Mist curled tighter around him.
The cold gnawed at his ribs.
But he moved forward, silent and relentless.
Hours later, Calder spotted them.
A small convoy moving slow and ragged across the lowlands.
Ten, maybe twelve men on foot, dragging wagons stacked with plunder — sacks, chests, battered armor stripped from corpses.
A handful of prisoners stumbled along behind them, bound at the wrists, driven like cattle by men wielding clubs and spears.
Calder knelt in the brush, breathing shallow, studying.
Counting.
Weighing.
Then his eyes locked on one figure among the prisoners.
Half-collapsed under a heavy cloak, barely upright.
Hair matted with blood.
Hands tied cruelly behind their back.
But even from a distance, even through the mist and filth, Calder recognized them.
Branwen Veyne.
Last of House Veyne.
Heir to a ruined name and a promise Calder hadn't yet learned how to forget.
Alive.
Barely.
For now.
Calder didn't move.
Didn't rush forward like some storybook hero charging for honor.
He crouched in the mud, weighing options like stones on a scale:
Risk:
Twelve armed men.
Prisoners slowing them, but still mobile.
Terrain rough but open — few places to ambush cleanly.
Reward:
Debt owed to a dead man.
One scrawny heir half-dead already.
Calder flexed his fingers slowly around the hilt of Dog's Hunger.
Steel rasped softly against his callused skin.
He didn't believe in honor.
He barely believed in survival anymore.
But debts...
Debts were different.
You could bury honor.
You could piss on a banner.
You couldn't outrun blood once it had your name stitched into its throat.
He rose slowly, a black shape against the mist.
Dog's Hunger rode light and eager in his hands.
The storm muttered overhead.
The Marches whispered in the bones of the earth.
Calder Vane moved forward without a sound, a ghost with nothing left to lose and a debt written in blood and iron.
By nightfall, the killing would start again.
And Branwen Veyne would breathe because Calder decided he would.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Calder stalked them as the mist thickened.
No rush. No wasted movement.
A broken ridge shielded him from sight, and the drizzle masked what little noise he made.
The convoy slowed by the hour, bogging down as the land grew worse — sinking patches of black mud, shattered gullies half-choked with rainwater, the endless sucking pull of the Marches clawing at their boots.
Perfect.
The Marches didn't kill fast.
It killed by inches.
Calder followed at a patient distance, scanning for opportunity.
A sharp bend in the trail.
A shallow ravine slick with old rockfall.
Places where chaos could breed in the dark.
Night finally strangled what little light the storm had offered.
The convoy made a miserable camp at the edge of a flooded ditch, ringed by stunted, leafless trees like blackened spears jutting from the earth.
No fires.
They knew better than to advertise.
Still sloppy, though — the guards huddled together, complaining in loud, stupid voices about the cold, about the mud, about everything but the man tracking them through the night.
Calder crouched in the brush above, invisible in the mist, watching.
Twelve guards.
Four prisoners.
Two wagons.
He counted it again.
Ran it through his mind like a blade across a whetstone.
Branwen was tied to the rear wheel of the second wagon, hunched against the cold, head bowed.
Still breathing.
Still bleeding.
Still his problem.
Calder exhaled slowly.
No drama.
No rage.
Just calculations.
He moved back into the trees, scanning the ground with a veteran's eye:
Loose rocks.
Deadfall branches.
Soft, churned earth that would turn treacherous under panicked boots.
He worked quickly, silently, setting a crude trapline — not to kill, but to scatter.
To sow panic.
To break their discipline.
No need to fight twelve men at once.
Just make them stumble.
Make them separate.
Make them easy to cut down, one by one.
By the time Calder finished, the mist had swallowed the world in thick, shifting tendrils.
Even the crows had fallen silent, sensing the blood about to come.
He settled into position on the flank of the camp, Dog's Hunger loose and low in his grip.
The world narrowed to the beat of his heart.
The burn of old scars tightening against the cold.
The endless, sullen hunger that had driven him this far and would not let him rest yet.
He waited.
A stone among stones.
A wolf among bones.
The first guard — a bored brute with a club slung over one shoulder — wandered too far from the circle.
Calder moved in the mist like a knife through cloth.
No sound.
No warning.
One brutal, crushing strike across the throat.
Cartilage caved inward.
The man hit the mud without a sound but for a soft, wet sigh.
Calder dragged the body into the shadows and moved again.
Silent. Relentless.
A second guard, shivering and grumbling, came next.
Dog's Hunger opened his spine from collar to waist in a single, heavy arc.
The mist swallowed the wet sound.
A third tripped Calder's trapline — a snapping branch that sent him sprawling into the deadfall.
He barely had time to scream before Calder was on him, a dagger punching into his kidney, twisting sharp and fast.
The camp stirred — murmured confusion.
Where were the patrols?
Why was it so quiet?
Calder circled the perimeter, carving holes in their guard ring.
Bleeding them without letting them know it.
Setting them up for slaughter.
And still Branwen huddled by the wagon, unmoving, unaware.
A broken thing, waiting for the world to finish the job.
Calder narrowed his eyes.
Not much left to save.
But a debt wasn't measured in worth.
Only in blood.
He moved into final position, hidden among the stunted trees, heart hammering slow and steady.
The storm picked up again, rattling the branches overhead.
Perfect cover for what came next.
One last breath.
One last moment of cold calculation.
Then Calder rose from the mist, Dog's Hunger gleaming black and wet in the stormlight — a ghost of bone and fury made flesh.
He charged the camp.