They left Lars and Petra's family at the overnight position.

  It was a decision Nora made quietly, before dawn, while the children were still sleeping. She woke Lars and Petra and spoke to them in low tones that Eli was close enough to hear.

  The position they'd sheltered in—a collapsed bunker with three walls still standing and enough overhead cover to block wind—sat at a junction of two old trench lines. The southern branch ran east for roughly eight miles before reaching the edge of the Marches on the Luminari side. It was a straight route. Sheltered from sight. A child could follow it without a guide.

  "Keep to the trench," Nora told them. "Don't leave it unless you have to. At the end you'll come out near a crossroads village called Halfen—it's in Luminari territory, technically, though the army doesn't garrison it. Find the inn. Tell the innkeeper Severin sent you."

  "Severin," Petra repeated.

  "He'll know what to do." Nora looked at the three children, still sleeping. Bess was curled against Tom's side. "The trench route is safer for them than where we're going. We're bearing north—there's more patrol activity there, but it's the faster crossing and I need to stay on schedule."

  Lars put out his hand. Nora looked at it for a moment, then shook it.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Tell Severin the network needs resupply at the southern relay. He'll know what that means."

  She turned away and began packing up.

  Eli looked at the children one more time. Tom was awake—had been awake, he realized, listening. The boy met his eyes across the dim space of the bunker.

  Eli gave him a small nod. Tom gave one back.

  Then Eli shouldered his pack and followed Nora out into the grey pre-dawn of the Marches.

  * * *

  The second day of crossing was harder.

  The terrain shifted as they moved north—the flat ash-plain gave way to more broken ground, old shell craters that had partially filled with rain and then dried into hard-edged bowls, the lips of each one crumbling if you stepped too near. Between the craters, ridges of compacted debris ran at irregular angles—material pushed up by repeated explosions and then left to set in place. It made the route less direct. More vertical. Harder to read.

  Nora navigated it steadily but Eli could see it cost her more effort than the flat ground had. She consulted her compass more often. Twice she stopped, read the terrain, and chose a different line than she'd initially taken.

  "This section changes," she said during one of those pauses. "Winter flooding moves the crater lips. Something I marked last time might not be accurate."

  "How long ago were you last through here?"

  "Four months."

  "Does it change that much in four months?"

  "The ground does. The patrols don't." She started moving again. "Patrols are the bigger problem today. We're entering the part of the Marches where both sides run active reconnaissance. Toren from the west, Luminari from the east. They're not supposed to engage each other here—there's an informal understanding about this corridor—but they watch it."

  "What do we do if we're spotted?"

  "Depends who spots us. Luminari patrol, we have a better chance of talking our way through. Toren—" She paused. "We don't let Toren spot us."

  They moved in silence after that, and Eli paid attention in the way that the last two days had started to teach him—not just looking, but listening to the quality of silence, noticing when birds were absent, reading the way the wind moved across the broken ground and what it carried.

  He caught the smell before he heard anything.

  Cook smoke. Cold and old—a fire that had burned overnight and been carefully extinguished at dawn. Someone had camped within a quarter mile of their current position.

  He touched Nora's shoulder.

  She stopped immediately. He pointed north, angled his hand toward the smell. She lifted her chin and held still, reading the air.

  Then she moved them left, away from the smell, working around a crater ridge and down into a shallow channel that ran roughly parallel to their route. It was lower than the surrounding ground—harder to see from a distance, easier to move through quietly.

  They went a hundred yards before Nora stopped again.

  "Good catch," she said.

  "Cook smoke."

  "Yes." She scanned the terrain ahead. "Toren reconnaissance, most likely. They've been running two-man teams through this corridor for the past six months. Rest overnight, observe by day."

  "They didn't pick us up?"

  "Not yet." She started moving again, keeping low. "Stay in the channel."

  * * *

  They were two hours from the far edge of the Marches when the patrol found them.

  Not through any mistake they made. Not because they'd been noisy or careless. The patrol simply came from a direction that the channel didn't shield—from the east, not the west, moving against the usual flow, and they came around a broken section of old earthwork and walked straight into Nora and Eli before any of them had time to react.

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  Two soldiers. Kingdom of Toren uniforms. Young—barely older than Eli. They looked as surprised as he felt.

  For half a second, nothing happened. Everyone stood and looked at everyone else.

  Then one of the soldiers reached for his signal horn.

  Nora moved faster than Eli had ever seen a person move. She was into the space between them before the horn cleared its belt loop, her hand catching the soldier's wrist, twisting, the horn dropping to the ground. The soldier grabbed for his sword. She stepped inside his reach and the fight became close and fast and very quiet in the way that real fights were quiet—no shouting, just the sounds of impact and breath and effort.

  The second soldier came at Eli.

  Eli sidestepped—the reflex of years of navigating the slums—and the soldier's momentum carried him past. Eli shoved, both hands, not magic, just his weight behind his palms, and the soldier stumbled into the earthwork and caught his footing and turned.

  He was bigger than Eli. Better fed. Better trained. He came back controlled and deliberate, his sword now clear of its scabbard.

  Eli ran.

  Not away—there was nowhere useful to run in the channel, it was too narrow. He ran toward the soldier, inside the arc of the sword before it could be leveled, and shoved again, this time with a fraction of magic behind it. Not much. A concentrated push from both palms, the same thing he'd done in Lord Harwick's study, and the soldier went backward into the earthwork harder than physics explained and stayed down.

  He turned.

  Nora was on one knee.

  The first soldier was unconscious—she'd managed that much. But her left hand was pressed against her side, below the ribs, and the look on her face was the look of someone working very hard not to let what they were feeling show.

  "Nora—"

  "I'm fine."

  "You're not fine."

  "I will be." She made herself stand all the way up. Her face went white with the effort, then came back. "He had a knife I didn't account for. It's shallow." She lifted her hand slightly—there was blood, too much of it to be entirely convincing about shallow—then pressed it back. "We need to move before the rest of the patrol comes looking."

  "How many in a patrol?"

  "Standard unit is four." She looked at the two unconscious soldiers. "We have to go."

  "You need—"

  "I know what I need." Her voice was sharp with the effort of keeping it steady. "I need to not be standing here when two more Toren soldiers find their teammates. So let's go."

  * * *

  They went.

  Nora moved and Eli stayed close and watched her without making it obvious he was watching her. The bleeding had slowed or she'd found a way to manage it—she kept her left arm pressed to her side at an angle that would maintain pressure on the wound without making the movement visible from a distance.

  But her pace had changed. It was still steady. Still deliberate. But there was calculation in it now that hadn't been there before. Each step chosen more carefully. Each incline approached with slightly more attention.

  She was managing.

  Eli matched her and said nothing and watched the terrain ahead of them and thought.

  He had no medical training. He had some rough idea of what a serious wound looked like versus a non-serious one—in the slums, injuries happened, and the ones that killed people looked different from the ones that didn't. The amount of blood Nora was managing through pressure seemed like the kind that was dangerous if untreated but not immediately fatal if treated.

  If treated was doing a lot of work in that thought.

  "Tell me what I need to do when we stop," he said.

  "I have a kit in my pack," she said. "Left outer pocket. When we reach cover, there's a cleaning solution, needle and thread, bandages. You're going to have to do it."

  "I've never—"

  "I'll talk you through it." A pause. "It's not complicated. Clean the wound, close it, bind it. You follow instructions?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you can do it." She glanced at him sidelong. "The harder part is finding cover before the patrol regroups. After that it's just needlework."

  The channel they'd been following ended at a point where an old wall of compacted debris ran east to west, too high to see over and too unstable to climb. Nora turned east along its base, moving with it, until she found a gap where the material had settled and eroded into a low passage.

  On the other side was the closest thing to shelter the Marches offered—a depression in the ground about six feet deep, oval, with the earthwork debris forming walls on three sides. Not invisible from above, but invisible from the sides, and the remaining patrol would be working the area they'd come from rather than ahead.

  She lowered herself into it and sat with her back against the debris wall.

  Eli came in after her and opened her pack and found the medical kit.

  "Left side," she said. "Lift the shirt."

  He did. The wound was in the lower left, just above the hip—a cut three inches long, cleaner than he expected, but deep enough that the edges needed closing. It had bled a lot against the fabric of her shirt. When the pressure came off it started again, slowly.

  "Clean it first," she said. "The small brown bottle. It will sting."

  He cleaned it. She didn't make a sound.

  "Now close it. The needle is pre-threaded—it's the one wrapped in the wax paper. Pull the edges together and take small stitches. Closer than you think you need."

  His hands were unsteady. He knew they were. She could see it.

  "Steady them," she said. Not unkindly. Just a fact.

  He thought about every small steady thing he knew. Picking a lock in the dark. Moving a cup across a surface without spilling. The tiny careful acts that he'd done a thousand times, where the result depended on not rushing. He applied that feeling to his hands.

  They steadied.

  He stitched. Seven stitches, small and even, the edges holding together. Not beautiful work, but solid. When it was done he looked at it for a moment, checking, then looked at her.

  "Good," she said. "Bind it now. Tight."

  He bound it.

  When he sat back she tested the binding with careful fingers and nodded.

  "Thank you," she said. And then, after a pause: "You did that well."

  "You talked me through it."

  "I talked you through the steps. The steadiness was yours." She leaned her head back against the debris wall and closed her eyes briefly. "We're three hours from the far edge. Maybe four at my pace now."

  "We rest here first."

  "We—"

  "We rest here first," he said again. "The patrol will be working backward from where they found their people. We're ahead of that. An hour isn't going to lose us anything we can't make up."

  She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  "Since when do you give instructions?" she said.

  "Since you got stabbed."

  A pause. Then something in her face shifted—not quite a smile, but the shape that came before one.

  "One hour," she said.

  "One hour," he agreed.

  He moved to the opening of the depression and sat where he could see out without being seen and kept watch while she rested, and the Marches lay flat and silent around them under a sky that was beginning, finally, to show a faint suggestion of warmth in its grey.

  * * *

  They reached the far edge as the sun was setting.

  It came on them gradually—the black soil lightening to grey, the grey giving way to pale clay, the clay giving way to something that might eventually become grass. The transition back from the Marches to living ground was slower than the entry had been. No surgical line here. Just a gradual bleeding of death into something that still had the potential for life.

  Then they were through it and the ground was unburned and the air smelled different and ahead, on a low ridge, three lights were burning in the windows of a building that Nora said was a waystation.

  "Luminari controlled," she said. Her voice was steady, but the hour of rest and the three hours of careful walking since had cost her. She was pale in the evening light. "There's a contact there. He'll take you forward."

  "He'll take us forward."

  She looked at him.

  "I'm not leaving you at the door," he said.

  She looked like she was going to argue. Then she looked at the waystation lights, and at the ground between here and there, and she said: "Alright. Us."

  They walked toward the lights together, and the Marches were behind them, and the Kingdom of Toren was behind them, and Eli didn't look back.

  * * *