The woods closed behind them like they had never opened.
Gray's voice thinned into distance. The last bolt stopped thumping into wood. The last shouted order became only another sound the trees could swallow, and then even that was gone.
They did not slow because it went quiet.
They kept moving because quiet could be a lure.
Mist still hung in strips between trunks. Dew glazed bark and leaf and rope. The road stayed narrow enough that a man could brush both sides if he wanted to remind himself how little space the world was offering.
Eryk held Wagon Two's front corner.
Not because he wanted it.
Because Brann had put him there, and because he had learned that place mattered. The wheel line began at his feet. The ground spoke first where weight pressed it.
His ankle burned under the wrap. Not a clean spike anymore. A constant pressure, stubborn and hot, like the joint was being held in a fist. Every wrong step tightened it. Every careful step simply kept it from getting worse.
He kept pace anyway, jaw set, eyes down.
Behind Wagon One, the Company rider breathed too loud for a man trying to look composed. He still sat a horse. He still held reins. He did it like a clerk holding a knife he'd never used, fingers shifting as if leather could be rearranged into safety.
Inside the moving curve, the captain walked with her knife out. Her eyes moved from ridge to brush to the spaces between trunks. She did not look like she expected a fight.
She looked like she had already accepted one and intended to choose where it landed.
Brann drifted between the lead team and the center, adjusting spacing as if the convoy was rope and he was keeping it from fraying. He spoke twice in ten minutes.
"Keep."
"Space."
The band obeyed without answering, because noise in a corridor came back at you like gossip.
Eryk caught the first reminder of what they had left behind when the wind shifted.
A sharp bite rode the damp air, thin as a blade edge. It cut through leaf mold and wet bark and sat at the back of his throat.
The spill.
Only one crate. Only a corner split. Only clear wetness that hissed at dirt and made leaves curl like they were trying to hide. And still the smell followed them, stubborn as smoke in hair.
Harl walked near Wagon Two's side with his pot lid still in hand, as if he'd forgotten it was not actually armor. He drew a cautious breath through his nose and regretted it immediately.
"Whatever that was," he muttered, "it wanted to pick a fight with the ground."
Fenn didn't look at him. His palm touched the axle housing, lifted, touched again. A habit that said he trusted metal more than men.
"Don't breathe it," Fenn said.
Harl held his breath for half a second in exaggerated offense, then exhaled anyway, quieter, like the joke had cost too much air.
They moved on.
The road dipped toward a shallow run where water crossed under roots. Not a creek you could hear from far off. Just a wet place that made mud, then pretended it had always been there.
Eryk watched the ground change.
Dry leaf became black paste. Wheel ruts deepened. Hoof prints filled with water and shivered when the oxen stepped.
This was the kind of place a line could vanish under muck and the road would do the hiding for you.
His pace stayed steady, but his focus narrowed until he could feel it in his teeth.
Pressed strip. Cord shadow. Peg hole.
Anything.
He found none.
That should have eased him.
It didn't.
The absence felt shaped, like someone had stopped laying traps under their feet because they were laying them ahead.
They crossed the wet run without stopping. The wagons groaned. The oxen leaned. Mud sucked. The wheels did not stall.
Fenn's shoulders loosened a fraction, then tightened again as soon as they hit firmer ground.
Eryk's boot slid once in the muck and he had to catch himself with a fast shift of weight. Pain flared bright through his ankle. He kept his face still anyway. He shortened his steps and paid for every one.
Useful.
That was the only language that mattered here.
As the day climbed, the corridor loosened a little. The trunks spaced wider. Light fell in pale slats that made the road look barred.
They made time.
Not good time.
Time you bought with attention and pain.
The rider's impatience returned in small twitches. He leaned forward, then pulled back, as if he kept catching himself about to speak.
At last he did.
"How far," he asked, and the question carried more fear than anger.
The captain didn't answer him.
Brann did, without turning his head.
"Farther than you want."
"That's not an answer."
"It is," Harl murmured, and then stopped talking because Brann's hand lifted without looking. A correction, small and sharp.
The rider swallowed whatever he'd been building and went quiet again. His horse's ears flicked back and forth, unsettled by the constant press of trees.
Eryk noticed the horse kept glancing to the right.
Not at shadows.
At gaps.
As if the animal could smell where brush would open into a path a man could run.
Eryk kept his gaze down. He let the urge to look up crawl under his skin and die there.
The ground punished him the moment his mind tried to soften.
A pale streak crossed the road where the earth should have been uniform. At first it looked like fungus. Then he saw the way it sat on top of damp soil, too bright to belong.
Powder.
Not scattered like before.
Dragged.
A thin smear drawn across the wheel line like a finger marking a page.
Eryk's throat tightened.
He didn't stop. Stopping in a corridor was how you got measured by other men's angles.
He tapped the wagon bed twice, soft and close. A sound that could have been wood settling.
Fenn drifted nearer without looking like he drifted. His fingers brushed the smear with the edge of his sleeve. He didn't touch it bare. He didn't drag it onto the wheel. He let the cloth fall away like it had become something dirty.
Fenn leaned closer, mouth near wood.
"Trail," Eryk breathed.
"Marking," Fenn murmured back. His eyes flicked once toward the brush, then returned to the road.
The captain's hand rose, palm down.
The line bled speed without fully stopping.
Brann moved up to her, close enough to hear a breath. She didn't speak. Two fingers pointed toward the right side of the road.
Garr slid outward. Not fast. Not slow. He became another piece of the woods' shadow and disappeared into undergrowth with the kind of quiet that made Eryk feel loud just for swallowing.
Sella didn't show herself.
She didn't need to. The spaces above them kept feeling occupied, as if the canopy had learned to hold a watchful shape.
They followed the powder smear for twenty paces.
Then thirty.
Then it ended.
The road bent left and the ground ahead turned wrong.
Not trapped.
Arranged.
Brush on the right had been cut back recently, just enough to open sight. Clean, too clean for weather. On the left, a fallen tree lay parallel to the road, not blocking it, but making that side feel narrower.
A funnel.
A place meant to keep wagons centered while hands worked from cover.
Brann lifted his hand.
Stop.
This time they halted fully, because the road in front of them had already been made into a decision.
The Company rider opened his mouth.
The captain looked at him.
He closed it again.
Brann crouched and touched the ground once, fingertips on wet dirt. He lifted his hand and smelled it. He didn't taste it. He wasn't stupid.
His gaze went to the cut brush. Then the fallen tree. Then the center line.
"Someone wants our wheels in reach," Brann said.
"They made the right easy," the captain replied. "Easy is where hands wait."
Eryk kept his eyes down and found the smallest thing that made his stomach go cold.
A peg hole.
Not fresh.
Older. The edges were settled. The dirt had healed around it. The kind of hole that meant this had been done here before, again and again, because it worked.
Practice. Not hunger.
He swallowed.
"There," he said, low, and hated how his voice sounded in the corridor.
Brann's gaze dropped to where Eryk's toe pointed.
He didn't praise. He didn't question. He just moved.
The line moved with him.
Brann walked to the right edge and stared into the cut brush, eyes narrowing like he was trying to see the hands that had been there.
"Garr," he called, voice still low.
No answer.
A beat later, Garr appeared from the right undergrowth behind them, not from the front. He had looped wide the way you did when you expected eyes.
He stepped in beside Wagon Two, face blank.
"Men up ahead," Garr said.
"How many," the captain asked.
Garr's mouth twitched as if numbers were boring.
"Enough," he said. "And they're waiting in places that aren't hungry."
Sella's voice came from above and left, distant but clear.
"Crossbows," she said. "Two nests. Not close. Watching the road."
Brann nodded once.
"They want us to commit."
The rider made a small noise of outrage, as if the road had offended him personally.
"We can't stop," he hissed.
"We aren't stopping," the captain said. "We're choosing."
"Choose faster."
Brann turned his head just enough to include him.
"We are," Brann said. "You're just impatient."
It wasn't kindness.
It was as much as Brann spent on men who hadn't earned anything else.
Brann looked at the fallen tree on the left. Then at the opened right. Then at the center line.
Two fingers curled.
The shape changed.
Wagon One edged left, close to the fallen trunk, wheel line tightening until bark scraped lightly against a spoke. Wagon Two held center but left more space behind the lead team, room to correct if the front lurched.
"Why left," Harl whispered, as if asking the woods not to overhear.
"Because they made the right easy," the captain said again. "Easy is where hands are."
Harl nodded like he hated that it made sense.
Brann flicked his hand forward.
Go.
The oxen leaned.
The wagons rolled into the funnel.
Eryk's heart beat too hard, but his eyes stayed where weight told truth.
No cord.
No wire.
That was the point.
The trap was hands.
A bolt came first, high and far. It struck Wagon One's upper board and lodged deep. The sound was a hammer on a coffin.
The Company guards ducked. The rider swore, low and wet.
Brann didn't flinch. His hand moved and men folded down behind wood like they'd been pulled by strings.
They kept rolling.
Then the real move.
From the right, a rope loop swung out low and fast, aiming for Wagon Two's front wheel. Someone had practiced. The loop came in flat like a fisherman casting.
Eryk saw it because he was looking where it would land.
"Rope!" he shouted.
Garr moved first. One step outward. One downward chop. The rope snapped, fibers spitting.
A hand jerked back into brush.
The next loop came from the left, not at Wagon Two. At Wagon One's rear wheel, trying to force the lead wagon to lurch and break spacing.
Fenn did not leave the axle line. He did not chase the hand. He grabbed the wheel's outer spoke with both hands and took the wagon's jolt into his arms, holding motion steady as the loop caught and pulled.
Brann's voice cut once through the damp air.
"Cut."
Sella's bowstring whispered.
A short cry answered from the left and the rope went slack. The loop fell away like a dead snake.
They kept moving.
A net flew from the right, weighted and ugly, aimed at ox legs.
Eryk saw its arc and felt the old memory of nearly getting eaten by a wheel. His ankle screamed before he even moved.
He didn't drop.
He did his job.
"Net!"
Brann's hand snapped. The lead team angled half a step. The net slapped wet earth instead of legs and lay there useless.
Harl made a sound that almost became laughter and strangled it before it could grow teeth.
Bolts kept coming. They weren't trying to kill.
They were trying to make panic do the work.
A bolt hit Wagon Two's sideboard and stuck. Another buried itself in the road and quivered like a warning post.
Then the ground tried to betray them the old way.
A cord lay half-buried at ankle height across the center line, meant to put a man under a wheel.
Eryk saw the unnatural straightness in leaf.
"Line!"
Brann didn't stop. He stepped in and cut as he walked. One clean motion. The cord snapped and vanished into muck.
They cleared the funnel and the road widened by half a wagon.
The bolts stopped.
Not because they'd run out.
Because they hadn't gotten what they wanted and they were saving hands for the next fixed place.
The woods went quiet again. It felt like a man taking a breath after missing a strike.
The rider let out a harsh exhale like he'd been holding it since the first bolt.
"That was—"
The captain turned her head a fraction.
He shut up.
Brann walked as if nothing had happened, and that was the most unnerving part. When men acted like that, it meant they were already counting the next problem.
Eryk's ankle burned hotter now. Swelling pushed back against cloth. He kept pace anyway, steps shorter, more controlled, each one paid for.
They made another mile.
Then the road dropped into a shallow hollow where the trees thinned enough that you could see farther than ten paces. Not open. Just less claustrophobic.
The air changed. Damp rot loosened. The sharp bite from the spilled crate drifted into something cleaner, like wet stone.
Eryk saw why.
Charcoal pits, collapsed and mossed over. Blackened soil in circular scars. Broken timbers that looked like they'd been baked once and left to rot.
Old work.
That meant paths.
That meant history.
That meant a place men could read and reuse.
The captain slowed them with her body.
Brann mirrored.
The line bled speed.
Eryk kept his gaze down, but he felt the captain's attention shift outward. This hollow had angles. Old cuts. Places a man could hide and still see.
A sound came.
Not a bolt.
A low crack like wood under strain.
Eryk's stomach tightened.
Deadfall.
He scanned hard enough his eyes stung.
Then he saw it.
Not a cord.
A fresh scrape where something heavy had been dragged across leaf. A groove leading into brush. A place where a log had been parked and held up by bent saplings tied tight.
A side strike, timed to hit a wheel and tip a wagon.
He didn't tap the bed this time.
He spoke, loud enough to matter.
"Log," he called. "Right side. Stored."
Brann's hand snapped up.
Hold.
The wagons slowed to near stop without fully halting. The oxen breathed white, confused.
Garr shifted toward the right brush, knife out.
Sella appeared at the left edge of the hollow, just visible now, bow already up.
The rider drew breath to complain.
A bolt hit the ground near his horse's front hoof. The horse flinched, half-reared. The rider grabbed reins and went pale.
He decided complaining could wait.
Garr went into the brush with the calm of a man walking into rain. He didn't rush. Rushing made noise. Noise made targets.
He vanished.
The hollow held its breath.
Eryk felt his own breath go shallow and forced it slow.
The crack came again, closer, and the log moved.
It slid out of brush like a beast's back breaking water, aimed for Wagon Two's front wheel.
Garr burst out behind it, not pushing the log, cutting the tie at its source. His knife flashed once. The sapling snapped upright with a sharp whip and the log lost its stored force.
It still rolled.
But slower.
Enough slower.
Fenn's hand shot down and grabbed the rim. He pulled the wagon's nose half a foot left, a tiny correction that kept weight from committing.
The log struck the road instead of the wheel.
Wet thud. Harmless.
A bolt flew and struck Garr's shoulder. It tore cloth and bit flesh. Not deep enough to pin him. Deep enough to remind him he was still meat.
Garr didn't fall.
He turned his head toward the brush like the bolt had been an insect.
Sella's bowstring whispered.
A distant cry answered.
Garr reached up, snapped the bolt shaft off, and let the broken piece drop. He walked back to the line like he'd gone to check a strap.
The captain's eyes touched his shoulder.
Garr shook his head once.
Not deep.
She accepted it and lifted her hand.
Go.
They moved again.
The hollow didn't give them another strike.
Instead it gave them a lesson.
This wasn't random road crime. It was spacing. Timing. Reuse.
Gray's men weren't starving boys with knives.
They were working.
Working meant someone paid them, or promised them something better than food.
Eryk heard the Company rider whisper to his guard, low and urgent. The guard answered once, and Eryk caught a fragment.
"…gate… if we miss…"
The rider's voice tightened. "We won't."
Brann's head turned a fraction, like a man hearing a coin drop in another room.
He didn't interrupt.
Not yet.
They pushed on until the light turned less pale and more honest. The mist burned off in patches. Dew stopped looking like milk and started looking like sweat.
Eryk's ankle felt full of hot sand.
He kept walking anyway.
They reached a junction where the inland cut crossed an older road, wider and harder packed. The sort of track that had once carried carts daily. It ran left and right through woods that looked slightly less wild, slightly more used.
A marker stone sat half sunk at the crossing, old chisel work worn smooth by rain.
The captain stopped.
So did the line.
Brann stepped to the stone and looked down as if time hadn't erased everything. Sella came in close, hood up, bow lowered but not slung.
"This road goes to people," she said.
Brann glanced at her.
"People who cut trees," Sella added. "And sell information."
The rider leaned forward, impatience clawing back.
"We take the main," he said. "Faster."
The captain looked at him.
He held her gaze for a heartbeat, then looked away first.
Brann's eyes stayed on the crossing.
"Main road means more eyes."
"More eyes means more paper," the captain said.
Fenn's palm stayed on the axle. He didn't care about politics. He cared about what road broke a wheel.
"This one's firmer," Fenn said, nodding at the older track. "Less mud."
Harl exhaled. "And more people to watch us bleed."
Brann made the decision with his body.
He stepped onto the older road.
That was the vote.
They turned.
The corridor changed.
The trees were still close, but the road had been cut wider. Underbrush was trampled back in places. Old wheel grooves ran parallel, carved into the earth like scars.
It should have felt safer.
It didn't.
It felt like walking into a room where someone had already arranged the furniture for you.
They'd gone maybe two hundred paces when the first sign appeared.
Not a trap.
A man.
He stood at the roadside near a stump cut low and clean. No weapon in his hands. Posture loose. Face blank.
Waiting. Expecting.
The rider inhaled sharply.
The man lifted one hand in greeting.
"Company," he called, mild, like a clerk asking for a signature.
Brann didn't answer.
The captain didn't answer.
Sella's bow came up, smooth and quiet.
The man's eyes flicked to it and his blankness became careful.
"I'm not here to fight," he said.
Harl's voice drifted, too soft to be safe. "That's what I say at every funeral."
Brann lifted a hand and Harl stopped.
The messenger took a slow half step back from the stump, careful not to tighten Sella's line.
"There's a toll," he said.
The word hit Eryk's stomach like a stone.
Brann's voice stayed level.
"Paid already."
The messenger's mouth twitched. "You dropped a crate."
Brann's gaze didn't move.
"You didn't pick it up," the messenger went on. "Smart. Gray didn't like that."
The name landed. The rider stiffened like a dog hearing a whistle.
Brann spoke.
"Where is Gray."
The messenger shrugged like shrugging was his trade. "Not here."
"Then who are you," the captain asked.
The messenger's eyes slid to her. They held a fraction longer than polite.
"A messenger."
"For Gray," Sella said, flat.
The messenger's smile showed briefly, quick as a knife flash. "For whoever pays."
He let his hand hover near his hip as he talked. Not drawing, not threatening. Showing that he could.
Eryk saw the pouch there, the tie cord smeared with blue wax stains. Three marks, ugly and careless, like fingerprints.
Company wax.
The rider saw it too. His breath caught.
The captain saw the rider see it.
Her eyes sharpened.
The messenger kept talking like the pouch didn't exist.
"Two choices," he said, holding up two fingers. "Gray says you give up Wagon Two and walk away with the other cart. Or you keep both and lose both."
Brann didn't respond.
The messenger watched his face like a man reading weather.
"You're not listening."
"I heard you," Brann said. "I'm deciding what you leave with."
The messenger's smile died.
Sella's arrow sat steady.
Garr shifted his weight, casual until you noticed how it lined him up with the messenger's throat.
The messenger swallowed.
He reached into the pouch and pulled out a folded slip of paper, holding it between two fingers. He didn't offer it forward. He let them see the stamp.
Company mark.
The rider's face drained of color.
"Gray also says," the messenger continued, voice careful now, "your route times are wrong today."
The rider jerked like someone had pulled a string inside him.
Brann's eyes flicked to him, quick and sharp.
The rider's mouth opened.
The captain's gaze cut him.
He closed it again, too late. His flinch had already spoken.
Brann kept his eyes on the messenger.
"What's on the paper."
The messenger hesitated, then read, slow, like he enjoyed each word.
"Stonebridge Gate," he said. "Last entry moved earlier. Third bell after noon becomes second. Signed for receipt at handoff."
He didn't read the name.
He didn't have to.
Harl exhaled like he'd been punched by irony. "Paper."
The captain's voice stayed flat. "Who gave that to Gray."
The messenger spread his hands. "Paper gets read."
Brann's voice stayed level.
"Finish your message."
The messenger licked his lips.
"He says the next stop is a place you can't swing wagons into a wall," he said. "He says you'll reach it before mid-afternoon if you keep pace. He says he'll take what he wants there."
A place they couldn't form a curve.
A bridge. A causeway. A cut between stone shoulders.
Something fixed.
Eryk felt the words settle heavy in his gut.
Brann nodded once, as if the messenger had only confirmed what he already suspected.
The messenger mistook the nod for weakness and tried to press it.
"You're smart," he said quickly. "You can still walk away. Wagon Two is the cost."
"I'm paid to keep moving," Brann said. "Not to feed Gray."
The messenger's eyes flicked to Sella's arrow. Then Garr. Then the captain's knife.
The road had filled with teeth.
The captain spoke once.
"You've delivered. Now you leave."
The messenger hesitated like he was trying to decide if his pay covered dying.
Sella didn't move.
Garr didn't move.
That was the answer.
He backed away in slow steps, careful not to turn his back, careful not to run, because running made men shoot.
When he reached the trees, he slipped sideways into brush and vanished.
Silence returned.
Not peace.
Space to decide.
Brann turned to the Company rider.
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The road was listening and the men around the rider were already small with fear.
"You told me you were hauling medicines."
The rider's jaw tightened.
"That's what they are," he said, and even now he tried to sound offended instead of afraid.
Brann's eyes went to the guard's thick gloves. Then to the rider's bare hands.
"That crate eats dirt," Brann said. "Gray knows which seals matter. Gray knows your gate times. Gray has a receipt."
The rider's throat moved.
He didn't answer.
The captain spoke, not to accuse, to measure.
"Either your Company is bleeding information," she said, "or you are."
The rider shook his head too fast. "I don't."
Brann cut him off with one quiet sentence.
"If you lie again, you ride alone."
The rider stared at him.
Then he looked past Brann into the woods. He looked at the wagons. He looked at the mercenaries, at the discipline that was the only reason he still had breath.
His shoulders sagged a fraction.
"They moved the schedule," he said. "This morning. Last handoff. Gate closes earlier. They said it was security."
The captain's eyes narrowed. "Who said."
The rider swallowed. "A letter."
Harl let out a tired breath. "Paper."
Brann's gaze sharpened.
"Who brought it."
The rider's lips pressed tight.
His guard leaned in, gloved hand hovering like he wanted to stop the words from leaving.
Brann's eyes flicked to that glove.
The guard froze.
The rider's face tightened, then cracked in a small way.
"A courier," he said. "Not one of ours. A hand hired to run between posts. He had the stamp. He had a witness mark." His voice thinned. "Gray doesn't need my mouth. He needs my route."
The captain nodded once, as if that had been the answer all along.
Sella's voice came low, from near the brush. "And he needs our shape."
Brann looked down the road they'd joined, the wider track that felt like a room arranged.
Then he looked at Eryk.
"Front corner," Brann said. "You see powder, you call it. You see a peg hole, you call it. You see a line, you call it."
Eryk swallowed.
"Yes."
Brann turned to the band.
"We don't reach the place he wants on his timing," Brann said. "We change it."
Harl blinked. "How."
Brann's mouth twitched, humor without warmth.
"We slow," he said. "But we slow where it helps us."
The captain lifted her eyes to the trees.
"We make them show their hands where the ground favors ours," she said.
Garr's voice was flat. "We pick where we bleed."
Brann nodded once. Agreement.
They moved again.
The older road stretched ahead and the day settled into a new tension.
Not the sharp panic of bolts.
The long pull of being herded.
Eryk's ankle burned. His breath stayed even. He watched the ground until his eyes felt raw.
Powder didn't appear again for a time.
Peg holes did.
Old ones, half healed. Marks of repeated work.
This road had been used as a trap before. That meant it would be used again.
Ahead, the track dipped between two low stone shoulders. Not cliffs. Walls built by time and runoff, damp and slick, rising just enough to steal space. Brush grew thick. The road narrowed in a way that would not allow wagons to swing into a curve.
The messenger's warning sat heavy in Eryk's gut.
He tapped the wagon bed once, then twice.
Fenn's head tilted.
Eryk leaned closer, mouth near wood.
"Stone shoulders," he breathed. "Narrow ahead."
Fenn's fingers tightened on axle metal.
The captain's hand rose.
Brann's hand answered.
Hold.
The wagons slowed before committing, keeping momentum without stepping fully into the pinch.
Eryk's eyes stayed down.
And there it was.
A fresh dusting of pale powder at the edge of the road, bright against damp.
A promise.
He saw, too, the faint straightness of leaf, the kind that meant something thin lay just under it, waiting for a boot or a wheel to make it speak.
Eryk swallowed, then raised his voice.
"Powder," he called. "Line set."
The word echoed off stone and came back.
Brann didn't curse.
The captain didn't flinch.
They adjusted like men who had learned that this road did not forgive.
Somewhere ahead, Gray had chosen his place.
Now Brann would choose his.
Eryk kept his eyes down until the ground told him which of them had picked better.