Chapter 30: What Dunhollow Looks Like to Someone Leaving Intact

The cart was already there when they came down.

Marsh stood beside it in the grey before sunrise, her coat the color of February, her boots muddy in the way they had always been muddy — a permanent condition, as if she tracked something with her wherever she went that the world kept supplying. She did not look surprised to see them. She looked like a woman who had been waiting for a specific thing for a very long time and had developed, around that waiting, the particular stillness of someone who has stopped checking whether it will arrive.

Callum registered all of this from the castle steps before he registered anything else. The cold was considerable. His socks were thin against the stone and the frost had come in the night, laying itself over the courtyard cobbles in a white that was almost blue in the early light. His breath made a small cloud and dissolved. He had not slept after finding them — after Fletcher, pale and bewildered and wearing the wrong day's clothes, had sat on the dormitory floor with his back against the bed and said, with the wondering blankness of someone reading a foreign language: *six weeks* — and the not-sleeping had left him with the particular clarity of exhaustion, where the edges of things were sharper and more forgiving at once.