Chapter 3: The March to the Ashen Peaks

They came out of the Deadmarsh on the morning of the fourth day, which was earlier than anyone had expected and later than it felt.

Calder had navigated by starlight and by something else, something he did not name aloud, and the stake-line they eventually rejoined was thirty yards north of where Wren remembered it being. She did not ask how he had known. She noted the discrepancy and filed it in the part of her mind that was accumulating such things without yet understanding what they added up to.

The Covenant camp materialized from the tree line the way Covenant things always seemed to materialize around Calder Voss — suddenly, and as if it had been waiting. Forty riders. Supply wagons. Three pavilions erected in the efficient, graceless style of men who have camped a thousand times and stopped caring how it looked. A banner snapping sharp and pale in the morning wind.