The fires in Hollow Hearth guttered low, coughing black smoke into a sky the color of old iron.
The dead lay thick across the square.
Enforcers. Villagers. Warband.
It didn't matter much now.
Just different kinds of carrion for the crows.
Calder stood near the broken well, Dog's Hunger slung across his back.
He watched the others move through the wreckage — scavenging what could be carried, piling the rest for the flames.
Jast was gone.
Eddric too.
Only Vryce and a handful of half-wrecked men still stood.
Calder didn't bother counting them yet.
The number wasn't going to be good.
The cold bit deeper now, gnawing through seams in the leather and wool.
Sleet hissed against broken stones.
Calder rolled his shoulder, feeling the fresh bruises blooming there from Volner's last swing.
It didn't matter.
Pain was just another thing you carried.
The villagers moved carefully around the warband.
Some out of fear.
Some out of hope.
Most because Father Bryn told them to.
The priest whispered low to every ear that would listen.
Spoke of Branwen, the sword raised when no one else dared.
Spoke of change.
Not bloodlines.
Not crowns.
Just a blade.
A chance.
Calder heard the words carried on the cold wind.
Didn't bother stopping them.
Branwen stood awkwardly near the well, surrounded by survivors.
Mud caked his boots. Blood stained his tunic.
They looked at him like he was already something more than a boy.
Like he was already something worth following.
Calder shifted his weight, arms crossed over his chest, Dog's Hunger resting easy across his back.
He didn't like it.
Didn't trust it.
Hope got men killed faster than steel ever could.
But he could see the truth of it.
After what they'd lost — after Varrick's betrayal, after the trackers, after Volner — they needed numbers.
Steel.
Boots.
Voices loud enough to drown out Thornhollow's hounds when they came sniffing again.
And they would.
Since saving Branwen, Calder had a target drawn between his shoulders big enough for the whole Marches to aim at.
He glanced at the few remaining warband fighters.
Vryce leaned on his spear, jaw clenched tight against the cold and pain.
Two others he barely knew by name, blood-crusted and hollow-eyed.
That was it.
The proud force he'd built, broken down to bones and bloody cloth.
Ragged.
Spent.
They could fight.
For a time.
But they wouldn't last the winter alone.
Not against Thornhollow's riders.
Not against conscripted blades and hired killers.
They needed bodies.
Steel.
A hammer big enough to crack Thornhollow's skull wide open.
Calder hated the thought.
A formal force meant attention.
Meant alliances and betrayals.
Meant keeping men fed, housed, pointed in the right direction.
It meant politics.
And politics rotted men faster than any wound.
But survival wasn't a thing you argued with.
Not in the Marches.
You either sharpened your teeth, or you bled out in the mud.
Simple as that.
Father Bryn approached cautiously, robes dark with soot and sleet.
"Your men," Bryn said quietly, glancing at the scattered warband. "They'll follow you still."
Calder said nothing.
Bryn shifted, glancing toward Branwen.
"But the people," he continued. "They'll follow him. They need someone to believe in."
Calder's mouth twisted into something too tired to be a smile.
"Belief doesn't sharpen steel," he said.
Bryn shrugged.
"It sharpens will," he said.
"And sometimes, that's all the blade needs."
Calder stared out at the ruins.
The villagers picking through the dead.
The warband binding wounds with scraps of cloth and hope.
He hated every part of it.
But he hated dying more.
And Thornhollow wasn't going to wait politely for them to get stronger.
"Gather them," Calder said finally.
Bryn nodded once and moved without hesitation.
The villagers were called together at the center of Hollow Hearth.
Calder stood off to the side, arms crossed, silent.
Letting Branwen speak.
The boy wasn't much with words — too stiff, too young — but the villagers didn't care.
They didn't hear the cracks in his voice.
They heard the steel behind it.
"We stand together," Branwen said, voice low but steady.
"Or we fall alone."
Simple words.
Ugly ones.
But true.
The villagers stared at him — at the battered boy with the sword strapped across his back — and then at each other.
Doubt flickered in their hollow faces. Fear tightened their hands into fists.
But fear of Thornhollow tightened them harder.
They all knew what would happen the next time a taxman or an enforcer rode through Hollow Hearth and found Volner's men rotting in the mud.
There would be no talks. No second chances.
Only fire and rope.
So they stepped forward — one by one, grudging and grim.
They scraped together what they could.
Axes, pitchforks, hunting spears.
One or two salvaged swords from the dead enforcers.
Armor was a patchwork of boiled leather, rusted chain, and hope.
They had no standards.
No sigils.
Just anger.
And the faint, bitter taste of something that might have once been called faith.
Calder watched the new recruits — gaunt villagers, old mercenaries, young boys with dirt still under their nails — hammer crude nails into broken shields, lash makeshift armor together with rope and leather scraps.
It wasn't an army.
Not yet.
But it was better than a handful of half-dead men waiting for Thornhollow's noose.
At dusk, they burned the bodies.
Enforcer and villager alike.
No songs.
No prayers.
Just the hiss of fat and flesh turning to smoke, rising into the dying sky.
Calder stood watch as the fires ate away the last evidence of Hollow Hearth's old life.
Burned it clean.
They moved at first light.
Not as a warband.
But as something worse — a shuffling, broken line of bodies wrapped in rags and desperation.
The old leaned on splintered staffs.
Women carried children bundled in patched cloaks.
The wounded dragged themselves forward with blood-soaked bandages and stubborn will.
They carried what little they could.
Rusted pots. Tattered bedding. A few battered coins hidden in boots.
Trinkets, tools, scraps of lives too stubborn to leave behind.
Hollow Hearth had never been rich.
Now it was just empty bones picked clean by the crows.
Calder kept pace at the rear, Dog's Hunger loose in his hand, every step grinding a new curse into the back of his teeth.
This wasn't a march.
It was an invitation.
An open wound dragging itself across the Marches, daring every wolf and scavenger left breathing to come take their shot.
Calder didn't like it.
But he believed in the math.
More bodies.
More blades.
Better odds.
The Marches stretched out before them — grey and endless.
Cold winds snapping at their cloaks.
Death waiting at the edge of every step.
Calder tightened the straps on his armor, feeling the weight settle into his bones.
He didn't have to like it.
He just had to survive it.
And carve Thornhollow's heart out with whatever rotten hands he could find willing to hold a blade.