They left at first light.
The old cages were gone. Brenner and a handful of smiths had cut them loose and hammered the bars flat into spearheads and braces. The wagons that once hauled prisoners now carried the wounded and those who could not walk. Two guards rode beside the last wagon at all times. The raiders they had spared were chained to the bed by iron rings, hands bound to keep them from trouble. No one spoke to them. No one needed to. Lyra's warning from the trial still hung in the air like a blade.
They moved in a long, ragged line that tightened a little more each mile. Ari and Oriel took the sky. Nyx and Pan kept to the shade of the trees, left and right, silent shadows. Brenner and Toren walked at the front with ten steady men, clearing fallen branches and choosing the safest bends. Tamsin rode in the middle wagon, hands never still, checking bandages, cooling fevers, making the weak sip water. Lyra set the pace with her mule, steady and tireless. Ashwyn rode when he had to, walked when he could, Bramble at his heel and Eldros a tall shape behind him, both soulkin watchful and calm.
Nothing came for them. No horns. No riders. No wolves at a gate. Only the quiet rhythm of feet and wheels, the creak of leather, the lift and fall of breath. It was the first gift the road had given them in a long time.
---
Day One
The path bent through low hills, ochre and green. Children started to talk again, not loud, but in real voices. A girl chased her brother around a wagon wheel and dared to tug Artán's ear before sprinting away. The bear's rumble rolled through his chest like distant thunder. Brenner scratched him behind the jaw.
"He bites less than I do," Brenner called, and for the first time in days a few people laughed.
They passed a burned farmstead near noon. The stones of the house still stood, black scars licking up the walls. A broken bucket lay on its side in the yard, full of rain and ash. No one spoke for a while after that. Even Oriel's cry sounded thin.
They camped by a narrow stream where alder leaned over the bank. Rowan helped fill the barrels. He cupped water in his hands and watched it bead and run like quick silver. It listened when he asked it to rise, just a little, a thin ribbon climbing his fingers before he let it go. No show. No heroics. Just a promise between him and the river that there would be time to learn.
Ari sat with the two young archers and a handful of others, teaching fletching with patient hands. "Feathers forward, not backward," she said. "If you want your arrow to fly straight, don't argue with the wind."
Nyx returned with Pan at dusk carrying rabbits she'd taken with thrown blades. She said nothing; she never needed to. Lyra's mule stood while people took turns tying up bundles, his ears flicking, his breath slow. Tamsin tucked blankets around a sleeping boy and closed her eyes for the first time that day.
Rowan took the first watch with Toren. They sat on a low ridge and looked at the dark. Toren's white-gold aura glimmered faintly, like something remembering how to burn.
"How do you hold your fear down?" Toren asked at last.
Rowan thought about the river's thin ribbon and the way it had climbed his fingers because he asked it to. "I don't," he said. "I hold on to something else until the fear has nowhere to sit."
Toren nodded. "That will do."
---
Day Two
A wheel split mid-morning. The wagon sagged and the whole column bunched up behind it. Brenner knelt in the dust and ran a hand along the crack.
"Dry," he said. "Old wood."
Rowan wetted the rim and the spokes until the grain swelled. Brenner wrapped a flat bar from the old cages around the rim and hammered it tight while two men lifted. The ring sang. The wheel held. They moved again.
At mid-day they stopped under beeches where the ground was soft with last year's leaves. Lyra cut blisters and cleaned them, face calm, hands sure. "You're not weak," she told an old man who hissed when she lanced a pocket of water on his heel. "You're walking toward a wall. That's what this pain is for."
A small argument started near the grain sacks when a boy cut to the front of the line. It died before it grew teeth. The freedmen stepped in themselves, quiet but firm. "We measured," one said. "We'll measure again. There's enough if we're not fools."
That, too, was new. Order. Not just from Rowan's mouth. From their own.
They lit a low fire that night and kept it small. Oriel slept on a beam above them, head tucked under wing. Pan patrolled the dark edge of the camp like a moving shadow. Bramble lay where children could reach his fur without fear. Eldros stood like a post, eyes bright in the starlight.
Rowan slept with his hand on the haft of his harpoon and woke to the sound of waves inside his dreams.
---
Day Three
They felt the sea before they saw it. The air turned sharp and clean. Gulls called from somewhere ahead, cries that sounded like laughter until you heard the hunger inside them. The wind blew stronger, and in it salt, and a promise.
"Smell that?" Brenner said, grinning at no one and everyone. "That's a wall that can't be burned."
The hills lifted into shoulders of stone. The path narrowed and grew steeper, cut by old hands long gone. Ashwyn touched the rock with his fingertips as he passed. "Good bones," he murmured. "Hold us."
They found a spring and filled the skins again. Rowan let his palm hover over the small pool and felt the water push toward him like a heartbeat answering a heartbeat. He drew a thin line from it, spun it into a ball, and set it back without a splash. It was nothing anyone would sing about. It was enough for him.
In the afternoon Toren drilled a dozen new blades in a clearing by the road. "Feet first," he told them. "If your feet are wrong, your sword is wrong." They stumbled. He corrected them. They stumbled again. He corrected them again. He did not raise his voice. When they finally managed the pattern once through, he let a hint of pride show, and they stood taller for it.
Nyx and Pan brought back a deer at dusk and laid it near the fire without a word. Ari showed the two young archers how to gut it clean and not waste fat. "Use everything," she said. "Think ahead. You eat today, but you also eat next week."
They slept on stone that night, close to the road, the sound of waves now a low roar under the dark. Rowan dreamed of a river running through walls.
---
Day Four
The path became a shelf carved into the cliff. The world fell away on their right, blue and white and endless. Children squealed when spray carried high enough to wet their cheeks. Lyra laughed, surprised by the sound of it, and the mule flattened his ears and pulled harder as if he wanted to be there first.
Ari came back from a long sweep ahead and pointed with her chin. "Ridge," she said. "You'll want to climb it yourself."
They did.
The wind met them hard at the top and tugged at their clothes. The sea lay below in sheets of hammered light, gulls riding it like fallen feathers. And there, stitched into the cliff face like something the mountain itself had grown, was the town.
Stone houses stacked in terraces. Lanes cut narrow to keep wind from tearing through. A high wall built into the rock, not against it. The river poured from a mouth in the mountain, clear and fast, split by a low stone island where old hands had trained it long ago. Two bridges still stood. A third had fallen into the water like a broken rib. A great gate closed the main road, iron black against wood darkened by time and weather. Above it all, half-shattered towers reached for the sky with stubborn fingers.
They stopped as one. People cried out. A few dropped to their knees. A boy ran ahead until his mother caught him and held him fast, not to stop him from running to danger but because she was shaking too hard to stand otherwise.
The sound of the sea filled the spaces between their breaths.
Rowan stood with the others at the ridge line and let his eyes take in every line and shadow. He didn't see ruin. He saw work. He saw shelter. He saw a river that would answer him and a gate that would answer Brenner and high places that would answer Ari. He saw shadows where Nyx could vanish and paths where Pan could hunt. He saw a place where Lyra could set out herbs to dry and Tamsin could treat the hurt without dust in her eyes. He saw Ashwyn's hand on new-turned earth.
"This is it," he said, not loud, but the wind took it anyway.
They made the last stretch slowly. The road entered a cut where it turned under the cliff and rose again toward the gate. Brenner and Toren went first. They leaned into the wood and iron and felt the give of old hinges. Rowan ran his palm along the seam where stone met wood and found a line worn smooth by many hands. He did not ask the river for strength. He did not need to. Ten men, then twenty, then the weight of the mule's shoulder and the brace of a bar pried against stone—together they did what one could not. The gate moved. It groaned like an old man with stiff knees, then opened enough to let them through.
The square inside was wide and sun-washed. Grass grew between stones, but the stones were there. A dry fountain sat at the center, its bowl carved with fish and leaves, the work fine even under moss. To one side a long building lay with its roof fallen in; to the other, a row of small houses stood with shutters hanging like tired eyelids. Everything was broken and everything was waiting.
A girl let go of her mother's hand and ran to the nearest wall. She laid her palm flat against the stone as if it might be warm. "It's real," she said, voice breathless with wonder. "It's really real."
People spread out in slow circles. Some touched walls. Some sank down and cried because they had nothing left but tears. Some laughed, loud and sudden, the sound bouncing off stone in a way that made it bigger than it was.
Nyx walked the edges, eyes counting doors and windows and places where a man could climb. Pan slipped ahead down a narrow lane and came back with dust on his whiskers, pleased with his own shadow.
Ari climbed a half-broken stair to a low roof and stood with the wind in her hair. Oriel drifted down to land on the rim of the dry fountain and tilted his head as if considering his reflection in old stone.
Lyra led the mule to the square and began to unload: rope, cloth, pots, sacks. She set a small pile aside with calm hands. "This is for the wounded," she told anyone near enough to hear. "No one touches it unless Tamsin says."
Tamsin picked a house near the river with whole walls and a doorway that faced the sun. "Here," she said. "Beds near the light. Clean water close. Carry them careful."
Brenner stood under the nearest arch and pressed his palm to the stone. Artán lifted his head and tasted the wind. The bear's breath steamed and vanished. "This will do," Brenner said. "This will more than do."
Ashwyn walked to the terrace above the square, bent, and pressed his fingers into the soil. His shoulders loosened for the first time since the battle. "Good," he whispered. "Heavy with old life. It will answer a spade."
Rowan left them for a moment and stepped down the worn steps to the river. It ran clear and cold over stone polished by years. He knelt and put his hand into it. The water gathered around his fingers without being asked. It held there a heartbeat longer than it should have and then slid away.
"Hello," he said, and it felt right to say it, even if water did not care for words.
He stood and looked back up at the square. People had already begun to claim corners—not with shouts, but with simple things: a blanket spread, a bundle set down, a name whispered to a doorframe. It wasn't order yet, but it was the first shape of it.
Rowan climbed back to the square and lifted his voice.
"First things," he said. "We set watch on the gate and the pass. Two on, two off. No one goes alone. Water comes from the river and nowhere else until we say so. Tamsin's house is the healing house. Lyra's pile is for the hurt and for food—no hands in it unless she or Tamsin tell you. Fires off the ground until we check the beams. If you sleep tonight, you sleep under a roof. If there isn't a roof, you sleep under a wall. We count at dusk and at dawn. We keep the law."
He let that last part sit until the murmur died.
"We keep the law," people said back to him, not loud, but sure.
Ari shaded her eyes and pointed to the broken bridge. "I can cover both banks from that roof at first light," she called. "If anything comes up the river, I'll see it."
"Nyx?" Rowan asked.
Nyx tipped her chin toward a narrow stair cut between two houses. "I'll learn the back ways. If someone does get in, they won't get out again."
"Brenner. Toren."
"We'll brace the gate before dark," Brenner said. Toren was already dragging one of the iron bars from the wagon toward the hinges.
"Good," Rowan said. It came out too soft for a command and too firm to be anything else.
The sun slid lower. Shadows clung to the east walls. Someone found a bell on a beam and rang it once. The sound carried down lanes and up stairs and came back to them gentled and new, as if the city itself had been holding its breath and finally let it go.
A mother set a pot on a flat stone and fed a child from its steam. A boy scraped moss from a step with a stick to make the place clean enough for his father to sit. The two young archers climbed to a short wall and sat with their backs against it, their faces turned toward the sea, their bows across their knees. They did not speak. They did not need to. Their eyes said enough.
Rowan walked to the dry fountain and set his palm on its rim, tracing the carved fish, the leaves, the old makers' marks that time had not erased. He thought of Verdant Hollow and of the river that had saved him there. He thought of the boy in the ruined town they had been too late to save. He thought of the caravan and the field full of spirits. He thought of the law they had made and the rope that had taught it.
He looked up at the faces around him—tired, guarded, hopeful—and felt something settle. Not the end of fear. Not the end of danger. Just the end of running with no place to run to.
Ashwyn's staff tapped once on stone. His voice was thin, but when it carried, it carried to every ear.
"Here," he said. "This is where we build. This is where we stand."
No one cheered. It was better than that. A low hum rose, part prayer and part promise. People said the name as if it would root them in the earth. They whispered it to walls and to the river and into the open hands of their children.
"Wraithborn."
Rowan whispered it too. The word fit in his mouth and in his chest. He let it sit there and warm him from the inside.
Night gathered. They lit small lamps and hung them along the square, one by one, little islands of light. Oriel settled on a high beam and shut his eyes. Pan disappeared into the dark with the soft pad of a hunter who knows new ground. Artán curled himself beside the gate like a fallen boulder with breath. Bramble took his post where he could see both the wagons and the pass. Eldros stood watch on the terrace, antlers a crown of black against the last blue of the sky.
Rowan took the first turn on the nearest bridge. The river talked below him, simple and steady. Out past the cliff, the sea answered in long, slow words. The air smelled like salt and stone and the faint smoke of their lamps.
He breathed it in and let his shoulders drop for the first time in days.
"Home," he said, not to anyone, not even to himself. Just to the stone and the water and the dark.
The word stayed.
Wraithborn was theirs to lose or keep. And for the first time since he had woken by a fence with no memory and more questions than breath, Rowan believed they might keep it.