They left before the red had cleared the eastern woods.
The air in the lane was thick with mountain mist, the torches sputtering with a wet hiss as the eight men checked their harness. Harold led the line, followed by Ayden, Marcus, Bain, and Torin—four of the sturdiest spears in the vale. Bren walked in the middle with his shoulder bound, while Kaelen and Aether brought up the rear. It wasn't the full strength of Ashvale, for the hearths down below still required protection, but it was the best iron the village could spare.
"Move out," Harold said, and the line stepped into the high path.
Aether looked back once from the first ridge. Ashvale lay small and gray in the belly of the mist, the river a faint, curved line of silver between the willow plots. It looked exactly as it had every morning of his life, and for the first time in his life, the boundary stone was behind him.
The march was dull. The older men moved with a long, rhythmic stride that ate the gravel without noise. There was no talk, no stories about old wars; there was only the steady crunch of boots, the sigh of the wind through the pines, and the occasional call of a mountain crow. Aether quickly learned that a true march had nothing to do with the songs Rowan sang. It was simply a matter of putting one dry boot in front of a wet one, hour after hour, under a sun that didn't care about your shins.
At noon, they cleared the high shoulder of the ridge, and the world opened.
A great river—three times wider than the stream in the vale—cut through the lower basin, its surface flashing like a polished broadsword in the sun. Aether stopped in the middle of the track, his breath catching at the sheer width of the water.
"Keep the pace, Aether!" Kaelen called from twenty paces ahead.
Aether scrambled over the shale to catch up. "Ashvale has nothing like that current."
"It's one of the ridge rivers," Kaelen said, his eyes on the trail. "Harold brought me down the lower gap two winters back."
Aether felt a sudden prick of envy, looking back at the great silver ribbon before the timber swallowed it.
By mid-afternoon, they passed an old homestead. The roof-tree had split, the birch-stick fences rotted into the weeds, and wild nettles grew thick through the hearth-stone.
"Who cleared this plot?" Aether asked Bren.
"A wool-man," the hunter muttered. "Ten years back."
"Where did they go?"
Bren didn't look back. "South. Or into the dirt. The ridge doesn't keep names."
Before dusk, they skirted the boundary of a small hamlet. It was a cluster of six turf longhouses, a few sheep grazing in the scrub, and two children chasing a red dog along the ditch. A man on the roof was patch-stitching his thatch with hazel thongs.
Aether watched them until the trees blocked the view. "I thought the people outside would look different," he said to Kaelen.
"They have the same dirt on their knees," Kaelen replied. "Why should they look like stories?"
They made camp under the lee of a pine grove. The older hunters worked with that silent, terrifying efficiency Aether had seen his whole life—one man clearing the fire-pit, two heading into the brush for dry larch wood, another checking the down-wind trail for sign. Bren sat by the first sparks, his face looking hollowed out by the day's haul, but his shoulders were less rigid. He knew the spears were finally moving toward his people.
Late into the night, Aether lay on his cloak, his eyes fixed on the stars. They were the same white dots that sat over the forge in Ashvale, but the earth beneath his hips felt cold and foreign.
Across the embers, Harold sat on a log, his iron spear resting between his knees, his broad face still as carved stone as he watched the dark trees. Above him, the same stars burned over Ashvale. Beneath him, the earth was strange.