They left Havenmoor at first light, when the mist still lay low on the fields and the guards on the wall looked more bored than brave. No one spoke while the city slid behind them. Nyx kept her hood up. Pan padded close, silent as smoke. Ashwyn didn't look back once.
The road bent through hedges and thin birch. Farmland gave way to rough ground where stones pushed through the soil. Toren walked in the middle, jaw tight, eyes rimmed with a bad night's sleep. Brennar tried to limp, decided it annoyed him, and stomped instead. Ari moved like a drawn bow—quiet, ready. Lyra let Bounty carry packs that would have broken an ordinary mule. Tamsin checked Brennar's shoulder every mile until he waved her off. She checked again anyway.
They passed a hamlet before noon—four houses, shutters barred, a cat on a roof that didn't bother to run. A loaf sat on a doorstep with a knife stuck in it and a sprig of thyme tucked under the crust. Rowan stopped, pulled the knife free, left two coins, and kept walking. He tried not to think about the eyes behind those shutters.
"People are afraid," Lyra said softly.
"Good," Nyx answered. "Fear keeps them alive."
"And sells well," Ashwyn murmured, tapping his staff. "Men come with wagons to buy and sell fear by the cart."
They met the first of those men not long after. Oriel circled twice and held steady. Ari didn't break stride. "Riders ahead," she said.
Two appeared around a bend—mail shirts, spears upright, horses trained to ignore strangers. Ari's bowstring thrummed. The front rider fell like a sack. Brennar charged. Nyx blurred aside into the brush. The second rider lowered his spear and kicked hard. Rowan stepped into the track without thinking. The spear struck his harpoon and slid. The shock rattled his arms. Brennar's axe came down and the man screamed. It was fast and ugly; most fights were. When it was done, Tamsin checked Brennar's new scrape while he grumbled, and Lyra soothed the horse and sent it limping into the hedgerow.
"There'll be more," Ari said. No one argued.
By afternoon the road dropped to a ford where water slid over flat stones. Oriel tipped her wing twice. "Movement."
Four men with short spears splashed in. Rowan reached toward the stream, hunting that tug in his chest. A thin skin of water crawled over the rock—and fell back into his boots with a slap. Brennar laughed once, then bowled the first man into the shallows with the flat of his axe. Ari's arrows stitched two more into the mud. The last looked down, realized his shin was bleeding where he didn't remember being cut, and Nyx's hand was already on his mouth, pulling him beneath the reeds. The reeds went still.
They kept one alive. He was skinny, angry, and far too sure of himself. Brennar cuffed him when he spat, then cuffed him again when he laughed. Nyx tied him with rope; Ashwyn coaxed a low fence of living shoots from the bank and wove them through the knots like green hands.
"What caravan?" Brennar asked.
"The one you're going to die chasing," the boy said, grinning through blood.
Nyx crouched until her eyes were level with his. "Routes. How many wagons. How many blades."
He broke faster than Rowan expected. Maybe it was the way Nyx didn't blink. Wagons heading west by north, keeping to small villages, selling and buying along the way. Hire-swords. A few with "gifts."
When he said the word, his gaze flicked to Rowan for the smallest moment. It felt like being marked with a thumbprint no one else could see.
They walked on. The next village was half-burned, but not fresh. Ash had drifted into corners. The black on the stones had gone gray. There were no bodies. There were the marks where bodies had been. A child's doll lay face-down near a doorway. Chains were bolted into the square and grooves ran from them like claws scratched deep.
Rowan stared at the iron rings. "We're always too late."
"Not always," Ari said, but the words sounded thin.
Lyra left bundles of herbs on two doorsteps. Tamsin cleaned the well and tied a white strip to the bucket handle. Brennar sat at a righted table with his head in his hands for a count of ten, then stood and set his pack. Ashwyn rested his palm on a charred beam, eyes half-closed, as if listening to something the others could not hear.
They kept moving. Near dusk they baited a spot where the path narrowed between boulder and brush. Bounty's packs sat in a careless stack by a small fire. Ari climbed to a perch with a view. Nyx disappeared into the boulder's long shadow. Rowan lay in the weeds with his harpoon across his forearms, breath slow, trying not to think about his heartbeat.
Three raiders came quick and greedy. Pan's growl lifted the hair on Rowan's neck. Ari's first arrow pinned the leader's calf. Nyx's hand found a throat and the throat didn't make sound after that. Rowan thrust when the last man lunged, short and straight the way Ari had drilled him. The iron bit. The man folded. A fourth, who had hung back, turned to run. Brennar didn't chase. He threw. The axe spun once, twice, and the runner went down like a cut rope.
"More ahead," Ashwyn murmured, palm on bark, eyes shut. "The wood remembers their feet."
They made camp by a river bend where alder leaned over the water and the bank fell away to a dark, slow pool. Ashwyn shaped another pen of green for the captive and tied him inside with wrist to ankle to living wood. The boy glared and muttered prayers or curses. Rowan couldn't tell which.
They ate bread and a thin stew that tasted better than it looked. Brennar tried to tell a story about a market brawl in a town none of them had seen; Toren laughed at the right parts and then went off a little way to swing his branch-sword through slow cuts until Brennar grunted, which meant keep going. Ari fletched three arrows and examined the fourth for so long Rowan thought she would throw it away; she didn't. Lyra sorted bandages into Bounty's side packs. The mule flicked an ear and looked pleased with himself. Nyx took first watch with Pan. Tamsin checked rope burns on Toren's wrists and said they looked worse than they were. Toren said he was fine. He didn't look fine.
Rowan carried the pot to the river to clean it, then stayed. He sat on a flat stone with his boots off and his toes in the cold. The water moved like it had its own thoughts. His reflection shook in it, longer and thinner with each ripple. In the firelight, his eyes looked a little bright.
A stick clicked on stone behind him. Rowan turned. Ashwyn stood in the reeds like an old tree that had decided to walk.
"Don't jump," the Warden said, amused. "You would fall in and I am not pulling you out."
"I didn't hear you," Rowan said.
"You weren't meant to." Ashwyn's eyes moved to the water, then to Rowan's hands. "You glow tonight."
Rowan looked at his fingers. "I don't feel—"
"Not with your eyes," Ashwyn said. His mouth curved, half kindness, half secret. "It isn't flame. It is a thread through the water. The strings tug. You are close to hearing them."
Rowan swallowed. The last time the river had answered him he'd been scared and almost dead. This felt… open. He nodded once.
"Not tonight," Ashwyn said, reading the nod anyway. "You're spent. Tomorrow, we try in daylight. Lift what you can see. Learn its weight in your hands. Hot and cold come later."
"Hot and cold," Rowan repeated, tasting the idea.
Ashwyn's gaze softened. "One day you'll feel the water that hides—earth, leaf, air, breath. Not today."
Rowan smiled despite himself. "Not today," he agreed.
They walked back to the fire. Brennar and Toren were arguing about stance in low voices. Ari had dozed with her bow across her knees. Lyra tucked one last bundle into Bounty's side pocket and patted his neck. Tamsin was already making a list aloud to herself—"more clean cloth, comfrey if we can find it, salt"—and no one told her to stop. Nyx stood at the edge of the light, still as a post. Pan's eyes were small lamps in the dark.
Ashwyn lowered himself to a log with a small noise that might have been a sigh. "Sleep," he said. "We walk early."
They doused the fire to coals. The river talked to itself in a low voice. Bramble lay down and vanished into the ground, only his eyes giving him away. Eldros breathed steam through reeds and went still. Oriel shifted once in the dark snag and became a darker shape. The captive in his green pen stared up at the thin slice of sky and didn't blink for a long time.
Rowan lay back with his hands behind his head and watched the birch tops arguing with the night breeze. He felt tired in a good way, bones heavy, mind brighter than it had been in days. Tomorrow, he thought, and the thought was a small flame that didn't burn.
Somewhere past midnight, when the road was only a line in a dream and even Brennar had stopped snoring, a soft creak sounded from the living pen. A rope rasped once. A green shoot bent just so. Then the river went on whispering, the coals breathed, and nothing else broke the quiet.
Morning would show rope ends cut clean, prints that vanished too quickly on wet ground, and a gap where a hard-eyed boy had been.
But for now there was only the sound of water, and the slow, even breath of tired people who did not yet know what the day would ask of them.