Nyx waited where the fog was darkest and the ground swallowed sound.
Pan's breath was a soft rasp beside her thigh, the panther's ribs lifting and falling without hurry. The cat's eyes were twin embers in the mist, then gone when he blinked. Beyond, the camp was noise and broken light—men shouting, wolves howling, metal striking metal, torches smearing orange through grey. The cages creaked. Chains rattled. Somewhere to their left, Ari's voice snapped orders; somewhere behind, Lyra's light had flared like dawn and then guttered to a glow as she staggered on with her cart.
Nyx rolled the bone of a dagger hilt under her thumb and listened for the shape of the fight.
There. A clutch of raiders slipping along the wagons, heads low, blades drawn. Not rushing the choke where Brennar roared, not wading the river toward Rowan—no. They were angling to the cages, to the quiet, to the easy kills.
Nyx touched Pan's shoulder. The muscles under his fur tightened.
"Take the back two," she breathed. "I'll take the talker."
They moved like a thought. The talker never finished his warning. Nyx came up behind him, a dark seam opening in the fog, and pushed a shadow blade through the gap in his gorget. He made a sound like someone trying to remember a word, then folded in silence. One of his men turned just in time to see yellow eyes and teeth. Pan dragged him into the mist the way the river drags a leaf. The last managed a half-step and then—nothing. Nyx let the blade fade and caught his body so it didn't fall loud.
Three gone. No call raised. The cages behind her breathed out.
"Keep low," she said without turning. "Hold hands. Move when I tell you."
A man reached through the bars, eyes wide and wet. "Are you—"
"Yes," she said. "Alive because you're quiet."
He nodded so fast his teeth clicked.
They ran the edge like that, killing the ones who hunted the back ways: a pair with rope and hooks; a boy with a torch and a grin that didn't fit his face; a man with a horn who never got it to his lips. Pan worked without sound. Nyx worked with less. Twice she dragged a body behind a barrel with one hand while shoving a freed woman toward the trees with the other. Twice she felt the graze of steel at her ribs and ignored it; the cut would bleed later. Now it was only warm, and being warm meant she was still alive.
By the time the last cages at this row hung open, men and women were fanning into the birches—some on their feet, some crawling, some carried—eyes round, breaths short, hands shaking on borrowed blades. The fog hid them and hid their fear. It hid Nyx too, but that had always been the point.
"Over here!" a voice hissed from the dark.
Nyx's hand lifted before she meant it to. Three figures stepped out of the mist: a scarred veteran with a square jaw and a bent nose; a middle-aged woman with cropped hair and a bow; a younger man whose leather was too clean and whose voice carried like a bell. She recognized the older two from the cages Lyra had opened—their eyes clear even then. They had no orders, only purpose.
The young man leaned close, voice low and urgent. "We've got sixty—maybe more—who can hold a blade. The rest are away with the healer. We can run and hope they don't chase. Or we can break their back and run with our heads high."
The woman's mouth was set like a line cut in iron. "If we run, they'll hunt us. They know the woods better than most from these parts; they've been raiding for months."
The veteran studied Nyx, measuring her in one slow pass from hood to boots to the shadow that clung to her hands. "You're not one of theirs," he said. It wasn't a question. "And you're not one of ours. But you're killing the right men." He shrugged one shoulder. "Name's Gerrit. Once a captain in a town that doesn't stand anymore."
Nyx didn't offer hers. "What do you need?"
Gerrit's lips twitched. "I like you."
He angled his chin toward the heart of the camp. Through the fog, the enemy's rear pulse was a dark knot. Not ordered. Not clean. But tight—men gathered around a few strong shapes and the constant glow of brands. Wolves prowled between wagons, leashes clinking when handlers jerked them to heel. If the rear held, the front could keep grinding forward. If the rear snapped—
Gerrit looked at the freed fighters, at the faces pinched blue with fear and alight with anger. He raised his voice just enough to carry to the edges.
"Listen."
The word struck like a hand on a drum. Heads turned. Feet shifted.
"If we lose tonight," Gerrit said, low and clear, "we die. Not just we—those who escaped these cages by courage or luck—but our families, our friends, the ones with no one to speak for them." He pointed back the way Lyra had sent the weakest. "You know where the children went. If we fall, the raiders will follow the blood into the trees. You know what they'll do when they find them."
He didn't dress it prettier. He didn't need to.
The woman with the cropped hair set an arrow to her string and spoke without looking away from the fog. "You want to see them again? We cut the head off this snake from the tail, right now."
The younger man's voice shook, then sharpened. "We are not soldiers," he said. "We are not trained. It doesn't matter. We have more to lose than they do. That's enough."
He looked at Nyx. "Will you lead us?"
The question made her jaw tighten. Lead. She had always been a knife, not a banner.
Pan pressed his shoulder against her leg, heavy and warm. In the roar beyond, she could hear Brennar's laugh, ragged and defiant. She could hear a hawk scream—Oriel, somewhere above—and the deep, aching groan of wood that meant Ashwyn was moving the ground like a net. Under that: the smack of water, the hiss of ice. Rowan. Alone in the river.
If the rear broke, all of that weight would ease. If the rear held, the line would drown them.
Nyx stepped forward where they could see her face.
"Then you'll have me," she said. "And the shadows. And Pan."
The freed fighters looked at the panther and flinched, then squared their shoulders.
"Keep your line ragged," Nyx said, voice flat. "We'll come on like we're more than we are. Noise at first—then quiet when we're in among them. Aim for rope hands, horn hands, the ones who shout. Leave the strong ones for the Soulkin."
"The what?" someone asked.
"The beasts," Gerrit said. "If you see a stag with a crown of bone, do not stand in front of it."
"Or a wolf," the woman muttered. "Trust me."
Nyx raised two fingers and traced a quick shape in the air. A whisper of dark slid over the nearest raider in the knot, then vanished. She could feel him now—where he moved, how fast he turned his head. Marked. He wouldn't get away from her.
"On my word," she said.
They formed without forming, more a surge than a line: sixty, perhaps eighty, blades of all lengths, a dozen bows with more hands than arrows, faces set hard. The fog hid their gaps. It made them feel like a wall.
Nyx glanced at the sky. Oriel cut through the mist, a sharper shadow inside grey, circled once, twice, then dipped. A signal.
She bared her teeth. "Now."
They went like a storm breaking in reverse—quiet to loud, shadow to roar. The freed fighters screamed to put stone in their own hearts, and the sound rolled through the wagons and shattered the rear's calm. Men who had thought themselves watchers found themselves prey.
Nyx did not run straight. She slipped. One step on mud, then none; one heartbeat in air, then a blade at a throat that never thought to be cut from behind. Her daggers were black lines in thicker black, and when they met armor they passed like smoke and bit the blood beneath. Pan went low and silent, a heavy shadow that snapped tendons and crushed knees. Men fell forward, faces breaking in the dirt.
Gerrit and the cropped-hair archer took the center—Gerrit's sword like a cleaver, her arrows two at a time into men who tried to rally. The younger man found his shout and kept shouting, voice cracking on the names of those the raiders had taken.
A handler saw Pan and lifted a horn. Nyx was there before breath filled his chest, blade kissing his wrist. The horn dropped. She drove the second dagger under his chin and shoved him aside.
"Push!" Gerrit roared. "Don't think—MOVE!"
They pushed. The rear knot bent, howls and curses skidding across the mud.
And then the Soulkin came.
Out of the mist thundered Eldros, antlers wide as branches, hooves cracking the mud. He swept a wolf aside with one toss and scattered three raiders like dolls.
Bramble burst from the treeline in the same breath, fur bristling, his snarl splitting the air. He hit the flank like a hammer, dragging down a man before the others even realized a wolf had joined the fight. Men who had sneered at cages balked at eyes that glowed in the dark.
Overhead, Oriel screamed and plunged, talons raking across a handler's face. The man staggered back clutching ruined eyes, his torch spinning away into the mud.
And through it all moved Pan, black on black, tearing through the rear line with Nyx at his side. Where she cut, he broke; where he leapt, she followed. Together they carved a hole wide enough for the freed fighters to pour through.
For a heartbeat, the rear didn't look like a knot anymore. It looked like prey.