Chapter 16: The Ashenveld Borderlands and the Missing Hour

The borderlands announced themselves not with a wall or a marker but with an absence. The birch groves thinned first, replaced by scrub oak and then by nothing in particular — a gradual erasure of the familiar, the way an accent fades when someone has been away long enough. By midmorning of the tenth day east of the Verath gorge, the soil had changed colour beneath our boots from the red-brown of the Cael lowlands to a grey-ash grit that made every footfall sound slightly wrong, as though the ground itself were reluctant to confirm our presence.

Cassian called it the contested terrain without elaboration. Seraphine called it the shadow margin, in the way of someone who had crossed it before and found the name accurate. Breck said it looked like the back end of a quarry he'd worked in his twenties, which was not poetic but was, I thought, probably more useful than either of the other descriptions.

The land was flat in a way that felt deliberate — no cover for miles in any direction, the sky enormous and colourless above us, the kind of country that offers nowhere to hide and therefore nowhere to ambush. This was, Cassian explained in his economical fashion, both the good news and the bad news: we would see anyone coming, and anyone could see us.