The burned ground began where the grass did.

  One step there was scrubby grass and pale clay soil. The next step there was nothing—just a flat grey-black expanse that stretched ahead of them like a world that had given up. The line between them was almost surgical. As if someone had drawn it with a ruler and then set everything on one side of it on fire.

  Nora stopped at the edge and looked across.

  "Welcome to the Ashen Marches," she said.

  The ground was still black even though the burning was years old. Nothing had grown back. In some places the soil had cracked into hard dark plates, each one slightly tilted, like a field of broken pottery scattered and never collected. In other places it was almost flat, dusted with a grey-white ash that lifted slightly in the breeze and resettled without urgency.

  Old trenches ran at angles across the ground—dug once and then abandoned, their edges collapsed inward, their floors collecting rainwater that sat dark and still. Broken equipment lay here and there. A wagon wheel half-buried in ash. A pike snapped at the haft, its blade rusted to brown. Things that had once been wooden and were now just shapes that charcoal made.

  It smelled of nothing at all. Eli had expected fire, smoke, decay. But the Marches smelled only of cold air and old ash. Everything that could decompose had gone. What remained was just—mineral. Earth stripped of any quality that made it recognizable as earth.

  "Stay close to me," Nora said. "The ground is stable in most places but there are sinkholes where old trenches have caved underground. If you feel the soil shift, step back immediately." She looked north and south along the edge. "We cross at an angle, bearing northeast. The narrowest point with the least patrol activity. It's still roughly twenty-two miles."

  "Two days."

  "One and a half if the conditions hold. We'll sleep in the Marches tonight—there are sheltered places, old positions that still have cover. We'll come out on the far side tomorrow evening if we're moving well."

  She stepped forward onto the black ground. Eli followed.

  The soil under his boots was dense and slightly brittle—it didn't give the way ordinary earth gave, it cracked into small plates with each footstep, the sound of it absorbed quickly by the flat landscape. No echo here. Sound died before it could travel.

  They walked.

  * * *

  For the first hour there was nothing to see except the Marches themselves—the broken ground, the old trenches, the occasional shape half-buried in ash that had once been something else. Eli walked and looked and said nothing and tried to absorb what he was seeing.

  He'd known the war had a geography. He'd heard the names—the Marches, the border, the front line. But knowing and standing inside it were different things. This was twenty-two miles of what happened when two kingdoms decided a piece of ground was worth fighting over for twenty-five years.

  Nothing grew here. Nothing could. The war had burned the soil past recovery.

  "Does anyone know why it started?" Eli asked.

  Nora glanced back at him. "The war?"

  "Yes."

  "There are official reasons. The Toren histories say Luminari mages destroyed a border village. The Luminari histories say Toren soldiers massacred a delegation under a flag of truce." She stepped around a sinkhole he hadn't noticed, the soil at its edge crumbling slightly. "Both are probably true. Both are probably not why it started."

  "Then why?"

  "Because Toren was afraid of what Luminari was building. A kingdom where magic was the governing power—what did that mean for a kingdom that had banned magic? Because Luminari was afraid of what Toren was building—a military machine that didn't need magic and couldn't be stopped by it." She kept walking. "Fear mostly. With specific incidents providing the excuse."

  "And twenty-five years later—"

  "And twenty-five years later, the people who started it are dead. Their children are dead. But the reasons that came out of the fighting—the hatreds, the losses, the need to justify everything already paid—those don't end when the original cause does." She paused. "You can't tell a man his son died for a mistake. So you tell him his son died for the cause. And then the cause has to be worth his son, so it grows. And more sons die for it."

  Eli thought about the boys from the slums who'd gone east. Who'd come back changed, or not come back at all. Who'd been recruited by men in uniform standing outside the employment office with promises of regular pay and meals.

  He thought about the silence in the Marches. The complete, dead silence of a place that had been made into nothing.

  "Toren burns people like me," he said. "Does Luminari?"

  Nora was quiet for a moment. "No. But Luminari has its own cruelties. I told you last night." She looked at him over her shoulder. "You're going somewhere better, not somewhere perfect. Remember that."

  He filed it away.

  * * *

  They reached the first sheltered position by mid-afternoon.

  It had been a fortified line once—a series of earthworks running east to west, with reinforced firing positions cut into the forward face. The timber framing had long since burned or rotted, but the earthworks themselves were still intact, the compacted soil holding its shape long after everything else had given way. There was a stretch of trench that ran for maybe fifty yards, deep enough to stand in, angled so that neither direction gave a clean line of sight from outside.

  Nora stopped at the trench entrance.

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  "Listen first," she said.

  Eli listened. The Marches were quiet—they'd been quiet all day. But here, near the earthworks, there was something else. A faint sound, intermittent. It took him a moment to identify it.

  People. Somewhere below ground level, in the trench, people were trying to be quiet and not quite succeeding.

  Nora met his eyes. "I hear it too."

  She moved forward to the trench edge and looked down. Eli came beside her.

  Below, pressed into the forward face of the trench in a shallow recess that had once been a storage alcove, were five people. A man and a woman, both roughly thirty. Two older children—a boy and a girl, maybe twelve and ten. And between the adults, a smaller child who had one fist pressed into her mouth and was staring up at them with enormous eyes.

  The adults had the look of people who'd been terrified for so long that terror had become their resting state. Their clothes were wrong for the Marches—ordinary civilian clothes, not travelling gear. They'd come as they were. Fled as they were.

  The man had a kitchen knife in his hand. His arm didn't shake, which told Eli something about him.

  "We're not soldiers," Nora said. She kept her hands visible. "We're going east. You can lower the knife."

  A long pause. The man looked at the knife, then at Nora, then at Eli.

  "Who sent you?" the woman asked. Her voice was controlled. She'd been crying recently—Eli could see it—but she wasn't crying now.

  "No one sent us. We came through on a route from the west and found you." Nora crouched at the trench edge. "How long have you been here?"

  "Since yesterday morning." The man finally lowered the knife. "We came in from the south. There was a patrol—we had to move off the path we were following."

  "You're from the border villages?"

  "Crossfield. The Toren army burned it nine days ago." The woman said it the way people said things they'd said too many times, the words going flat from repetition. "They said there were Luminari sympathizers. There weren't. There was just a village."

  Nora looked at them for a moment. Then she stood up and walked to the trench entrance and climbed down.

  "Come on," she said to Eli, in a tone that meant this wasn't a question.

  He climbed down.

  In the recess, the smaller child had taken her fist out of her mouth. She looked at Eli with the directness that very young children had before they learned to be guarded. He couldn't place her age. Seven, maybe. Or small for eight.

  "Hello," he said.

  She stared at him.

  "Can you walk?" Nora was asking the adults. "All of you—the children included?"

  "Yes," the woman said. "We've been walking. We're tired but we can walk."

  "Then you're coming with us to the far side. The route I'm using will support seven." She pulled out her pack and found dried meat and water. "Eat first. All of you. Then we move."

  * * *

  They moved through the rest of the afternoon as a larger group.

  The family's names were Lars and Petra, and their children were Tom, Elsa, and the small one, who was called Bess. Lars had been a carpenter. Petra had kept the village's accounts—she was the one who'd recognized the army wasn't looking for sympathizers, wasn't looking for anything specific, was just burning. She'd grabbed the children and pulled Lars away from the window where he'd been standing watching, unable to believe it.

  Bess had been asleep when they left. Petra had carried her for the first five miles.

  They moved more slowly than Eli and Nora had been moving, but not by much. The children were solid—Tom especially, watching the ground ahead of him and stepping carefully around the sinkholes, his face set with the kind of determined quiet that children developed when adults around them were afraid.

  Eli dropped back to walk with Tom as the afternoon wore on.

  "You've been in the Marches before?" Tom asked him.

  "No. First time."

  "Me neither." Tom looked at the ground. "It doesn't look like it used to be anything."

  "It used to be farmland. Villages."

  "Like Crossfield."

  "Yes."

  Tom was quiet for a while. "Do you think Crossfield will look like this someday?"

  Eli looked at the black, flat, silent ground around them. He thought about the honest answer. He thought about what it would do to a twelve-year-old boy who'd watched his village burn nine days ago.

  "I don't know," he said. "Maybe it doesn't have to."

  Tom looked at him. Not convinced, but noting that Eli hadn't lied to him. Kids always knew when you lied to them.

  "Where are you going?" Tom asked.

  "Luminari. To—" Eli paused, deciding how much of the truth to use. "To find someone. To deliver something."

  "Are you a mage?"

  Eli met the boy's eyes. Thought about all the years of hiding. Thought about the burned village. The family in this trench. The silence of the Marches.

  "Yes," he said.

  Tom considered that. "Toren says mages are evil."

  "I know."

  "Are you?"

  "I don't think so," Eli said. "But I suppose that's what an evil person would say too."

  Tom almost smiled. The closest he'd come to it since they'd found them.

  * * *

  Trouble came at dusk.

  They heard it before they saw it—movement to the south, not military-precise but not random either. Nora stopped the group with a raised hand and they all went still. The Marches were flat enough that sound carried oddly, bouncing off hard soil and trench edges and scattered debris.

  "Three," Nora said quietly. "Maybe four."

  Eli listened harder. She was right. He could pick out three distinct sets of footsteps. Close together but not coordinated. Not soldiers. Soldiers moved with discipline. These moved with the particular loose wariness of people who were also trying not to be heard, while watching for opportunity.

  "Scavengers," Nora said. Her voice had gone flat. "They work the Marches after skirmishes, mostly. Sometimes they take from refugees."

  Lars had his kitchen knife out again. Petra had moved the children close.

  The figures appeared out of the dusk—three men, rough-dressed, carrying clubs and one short blade between them. They were reading the group quickly, doing the same calculation that any predator did: numbers, weapons, likelihood of resistance.

  They saw a woman and a young man, two adults who looked exhausted, three children.

  They spread out slightly.

  "No trouble," one of them said—the one with the blade, which put him as the leader. He held it low, casual, like he wasn't using it yet. "Just share what you've got and we'll let you pass."

  Nora said nothing.

  Lars started to step forward. Petra caught his arm.

  Eli looked at the three men. Looked at the space between them. Thought about Marcus's instructions — talk first, fighting is the last option. He thought about what they would do if talking didn't work. He thought about Bess, standing behind Petra with her fist back in her mouth.

  "There's nothing worth taking," Eli said. He kept his voice steady. "We're refugees from the border villages. We've got food for two more days, and if we don't have it, the children don't eat. Whatever you were imagining we're carrying, we're not."

  The leader looked at him. Assessing. "The bag," he said, nodding toward the satchel.

  "Documents," Eli said. "Identification papers. No use to you."

  "I'll decide that."

  Eli felt the cylinder through the leather of the satchel. Cold against his side. Don't use your magic near it, Marcus had said.

  He stepped slightly away from the bag and let the magic come.

  Not much. Not an explosion. He thought of what Nora had said about using it as a last option, and this wasn't quite that yet—so he kept it small. Just enough pressure in the air around them, just enough shift in the quality of the light, just enough sense that something was gathering.

  The leader felt it. He'd been in the Marches long enough to have learned what that feeling meant.

  His eyes changed.

  "Move on," Eli said. "We're not what you're looking for."

  A long moment. The pressure built slightly more.

  The three men looked at each other. The calculation had changed. The leader made a small motion with his head—barely a movement at all—and the three of them drew back, stepped away, and were gone into the dusk in under a minute.

  The tension in the group released all at once. Lars let out a long breath. Petra pulled the children closer.

  Nora looked at Eli. Not surprised exactly, but measuring him in a new way.

  "Controlled," she said.

  "Barely," he said honestly.

  "Barely controlled is still controlled." She turned back to the route. "Come on. We need to reach the overnight position before it's fully dark."

  Bess tugged at Eli's sleeve as they started walking.

  He looked down at her.

  She held his gaze for a moment. Then she took his hand and held it, and kept walking, and didn't let go until they reached the overnight position an hour later and her mother lifted her up.

  Eli stood in the dark and looked at his hand.

  Then he shouldered the satchel and followed Nora into cover.

  * * *