The snow had turned gray with soot and old blood.
Every step Calder Vane took across the Marches felt like walking across the ribs of a dying world.
Behind him, the warband moved like a wounded animal — snarling, bleeding, hungry.
They had survived the siege at the river garrison, but survival had stripped them down to something uglier than even Calder expected.
Now every glance was edged.
Every laugh too sharp, too brittle.
The Marches hadn't united them.
It had simply starved everything else out.
Good.
Unity was a lie told to men who hadn't yet bled enough to know better.
Word of their latest slaughter had moved faster than their boots.
Thornhollow's vassals tightened their grip on their holdings, doubling the guards, setting traps along the old trading roads.
And the bounty...
The bounty had tripled.
Calder heard it whispered from the few dying tongues they left breathing:
The Stonewolf's head would fetch a king's ransom in coin and absolution.
It was almost flattering.
Almost.
They needed food.
Shelter.
New ground to break.
Calder's eyes lingered on the jagged outline of Caer Morlan, visible in the distance — an old fortified estate once belonging to House Veyne before betrayal tore it from their hands.
Fitting.
Bleed a little more history into the mud.
Branwen recognized it too.
Calder caught the boy's stare locked on those distant towers, his knuckles whitening around the hilt of his battered sword.
Another memory too heavy to carry.
Another stone tied around the throat of hope.
"Forget it," Calder said, voice flat as the frozen earth.
"There's nothing left in those walls but ghosts and graves."
Branwen didn't answer.
But he didn't look away either.
They veered south, cutting through a dead valley where old battlefields rotted under the snow.
Rusting helmets poked from drifts like broken bones.
Banners, long since stripped of color, fluttered limply from blackened trees.
The Marches didn't bury their dead.
It simply forgot where they fell.
At dusk, they found a ruined waystation — a skeleton of charred beams and broken stone.
It stank of old ash and newer blood.
Bandits had tried to shelter there recently.
The wolves had done the rest.
Perfect.
Calder ordered them to set camp.
Silent gestures.
No barking orders.
Those who understood survived.
Those who didn't would be left for the crows.
The warband obeyed — grudging, bitter — but they obeyed.
For now.
Around a dwindling fire, Calder sharpened his blades while listening to the low mutters between men too exhausted to fight and too afraid to sleep deeply.
Dren Malco leaned against a scorched pillar, flipping a stolen ring over his knuckles and casting sly glances around the camp.
Always measuring.
Always scheming.
Saelen Crow-Eater sat cross-legged near the edge of the ruins, slowly sewing a new patch onto her cloak — a piece of a torn banner she had ripped from the garrison captain's body.
Claiming trophies.
Marking deaths.
Thann Veyr hunched close to the fire, muttering prayers under his breath again, shield clutched so tight to his chest that his knuckles looked bone-white in the weak light.
Branwen sat apart.
Polishing his blade.
Polishing it not with pride, but with grim, mechanical purpose.
He didn't look at the others.
Not anymore.
The Marches had done their work.
Calder could see it in the way Branwen's shoulders sagged now, not from wounds but from the crushing, endless weight of compromise.
Later, while the camp dozed in uneasy half-sleep, Branwen approached him.
His boots made no sound in the ash.
"You can't build anything out of this," Branwen said.
A statement, not an accusation.
Not even anger.
Just... defeat.
Calder didn't answer at first.
He finished honing the last edge onto a throwing knife, tested the balance, and slid it back into its sheath.
Only then did he speak.
"I'm not trying to build anything," he said.
"I'm trying to tear down a sickness and survive what's left."
Branwen sat heavily across from him, the fire dying to embers between them.
"And when there's nothing left to tear?"
Calder shrugged.
"The worms'll have good meat. Better than most get."
The silence after that stretched long and raw.
The kind of silence only blood and failure can carve.
Dawn broke gray and cold.
The snow still fell, but softer now — a dusting that did nothing to hide the ugliness underneath.
They marched east toward Caer Morlan anyway.
Not because it was wise.
Not because they believed it could be held.
Because it was there.
Because somewhere inside Branwen's battered pride, there was still a spark that wouldn't gutter out.
And because Calder knew — if they didn't give the men something to bleed for soon, they'd start carving blood from each other.
Better to storm a ruin than be torn apart slowly by hunger and betrayal.
The closer they drew to Caer Morlan, the heavier the air became.
Old walls loomed, black with soot and age, jagged like a broken jaw against the sky.
The gates stood ajar, hanging off rusted hinges.
The banners were long gone — only the stone wolf of House Veyne carved above the threshold remained, worn almost faceless by rain and time.
Fitting.
Calder led them inside without ceremony.
No scouts sent forward.
No cautious probing.
There was no one left to fear but the dead.
The halls were hollowed out, the tapestries long stripped away, the stone floors cracked by fire and frost.
Every step echoed like a ghost's last breath.
They found the old throne room at the heart of the keep.
A crumbling seat of black marble, half-collapsed under fallen beams.
Branwen stood before it a long moment, face unreadable, shoulders stiff.
Calder watched silently from the shadows.
He could almost hear the thoughts gnawing at the boy:
This was supposed to be mine.
This was supposed to mean something.
Calder understood.
He had once thought survival would mean something too.
It didn't.
Not really.
Survival was just the absence of death.
Nothing more.
They spent three days fortifying Caer Morlan, turning shattered furniture into barricades, setting traps along the breached walls, stockpiling whatever supplies they could salvage.
The warband grew meaner.
Quieter.
A wolfpack waiting for a larger beast to charge the den so it could tear it apart from the belly outward.
Calder watched Dren Malco laugh with a few of the others by the well, trading boasts about what they'd do once Thornhollow fell.
He saw the way Varrick weighed the odds of fighting now versus later.
He caught Saelen Crow-Eater sharpening two blades now instead of one.
Insurance.
Not hope.
The bonds of survival were thinning.
Sooner or later, they'd snap.
But not yet.
Not while Calder Vane still breathed.
Not while debts still needed to be paid in full.
That night, as the fires burned low and the cold seeped deeper into the cracked bones of the keep, Calder stood atop the broken parapet, staring east.
Somewhere beyond the fog and ruin, Thornhollow plotted.
Somewhere, richer men traded coin for death warrants.
And somewhere, the Marches whispered of a Stonewolf who refused to die — a monster made of blood, scars, and stubborn, bitter survival.
Calder bared his teeth to the dark.
Not a smile.
Not a snarl.
Just readiness.
Just hunger.
The wolves were gathering.
Let them come.
He was ready.