The Marker looked larger in the morning.
Darion had expected distance to make it smaller. Night had a habit of enlarging things, especially things men did not understand. Firelight made stones into watchmen and tree stumps into crouched soldiers. Darkness gave old stories room to stretch their legs.
Morning should have corrected it.
It did not.
The great crimson pillar stood beyond the camp as if the hill had grown a spine in the night. Sunlight touched its upper edge first, finding red inside the stone where ordinary rock would have held grey. The color was not bright. It did not shine. It waited under the surface, deep and old and stubborn, like blood darkened on iron.
No birds perched on it. No moss climbed it. No lichen softened its sides. The years had worn the hill, bent the grasses, broken the old road into patches of stone and mud and frost-heaved gravel, but the Marker looked less weathered than endured.
Darion stood with his cloak drawn close and watched the camp pretend not to be watching it.
That was how people handled thresholds. They made breakfast. They checked straps. They argued over feed. They kept their hands busy until the world gave them no more room to avoid the thing waiting ahead.
Corin moved among the horses with a hard efficiency, testing buckles that had already been tested, tightening girths that did not need tightening. No one stopped him. Talia stood beside the light cart with a tablet in one hand and a charcoal stub in the other, making neat marks beside an inventory list. Her hair had been tied back severely against the wind, but several copper strands had escaped and moved against her cheek whenever she lowered her head.
She looked calm.
Darion had seen enough officers before marches to know the difference between calm and arithmetic.
Kellan sat on an overturned crate with his notebook open on his knee. He had not written a word since Darion woke. The boy kept looking up at the Marker, then down at the blank page, as if he feared that putting anything in ink would make him responsible for being wrong.
Maeron stood apart from them all.
That was unusual.
The old scholar had opinions about breakfast, boots, weather, bad rope, worse roads, young men with notebooks, old men with pride, and nearly every other subject the world had been foolish enough to provide. Since dawn he had offered none of them.
He faced the stone with both hands folded over the top of his walking staff. The morning had put more age into him. Or perhaps the Marker had. His eyes did not move over it the way Kellan’s did, hungry for pattern. He looked at it the way a man looked at a door behind which someone had once spoken his name.
Darion almost asked what he saw.
Instead he crouched beside his pack and checked the same three knots he had checked before sleeping.
“Road’s worse beyond the hollow,” one of the outriders said.
The man’s name was Pell, though Darion had mostly thought of him as the one who chewed mint and distrusted downhill slopes. He had gone ahead before dawn with the other outrider, Ness, and now stood near Talia with mud on his boots and a look that said he would rather report to anyone else.
“How much worse?” Talia asked.
Pell glanced at Corin.
Talia did not.
The outrider swallowed. “Too narrow for both wagons. Too broken for the rear one at all, unless we want to spend the day unloading it by hand each time a wheel drops. There’s a hollow south of the Marker. Sheltered. Dry enough. We could leave weight there.”
Corin’s hand stilled on a harness buckle.
“How much weight?” Talia asked.
Pell looked more miserable. “The second wagon. Two barrels of oats. Spare axle. Tent canvas. The heavier tools. Half the trade crates, if we’re still pretending those matter.”
“They matter,” Corin said.
Pell shut his mouth.
Talia made another mark on the tablet. “They matter less than moving.”
Corin turned fully then. “We don’t know what the road is beyond the Marker.”
“No,” Talia said. “We know what it is here.”
“And you want to cut our margin before crossing?”
“I want to avoid breaking a wagon under a thousand-year-old stone while every frightened hand in this company decides that is an omen.”
One of the hired men made a sign against his chest. Another pretended not to.
Corin’s jaw tightened. “Leave the supplies with whom?”
“Baret and Lorn,” Talia said. “Both teamsters. One hired hand. The rear wagon. Four horses. They stay south of the Marker until we return or send word.”
“If we don’t return?”