They made camp an hour east of the pass.
Far enough from the road that the trees swallowed the firelight before it reached anything worth seeing. Close enough that Marcus could still hear the road if something moved on it in the night.
Corvin sat across the fire with Liz's water skin in both hands. He drank slowly, like a man who had learned not to rush anything that could be taken away. The torn clothing. The hollowed look around his eyes. The careful way he held himself like his ribs were still deciding whether they were broken.
He'd been with the Ashfang a while.
"How long," Marcus said.
Corvin looked up. "Three weeks."
"They kept you alive."
"I know every supply road in the eastern corridor. Paths that don't appear on any official map." He set the water skin down. "When they'd gotten everything useful from me I was going to be a problem they couldn't afford to have walking around."
"Smart enough to post the notice before they grabbed you though," Liz said.
Something crossed his face. Not quite a smile. "Six days before. I saw what they were loading through the pass." He paused. "It wasn't just supplies.
There were crates sealed differently from the rest. Wrong kind of sealed. Like whatever was inside had been sitting somewhere a long time and the sealing was less about keeping things out and more about keeping something in."
Marcus said nothing. He was already thinking about the name Soul Reading had flagged on the notice board. The pull that had been sitting at the back of his perception since Redmere, low and steady, like a compass needle that had finally found something worth pointing at.
"Tell me about the garrison," he said.
Corvin looked at him. Then at Liz. The look of a man doing the math on how much trust he had left and whether these two were worth spending it on.
He spent it.
"It's not a raiding base," he said. "I've mapped enough of those. The layout is wrong for raiding.
Too permanent. Too much storage, too many reinforced walls, too many soldiers who look like they plan to be there for years rather than months." He picked up a stick and drew lines in the dirt near his boots without looking down. "Three levels. The top two are soldiers and supplies. The bottom level is sealed off completely. Different guards, different locks, different everything. Nobody who worked the upper levels went down there and nobody who came up from the lower level talked to anyone."
"The crates," Liz said quietly. "Where did they go in the garrison."
Corvin pointed at the ground.
The fire crackled. Outside the camp the forest had gone into its night sounds, low and steady, things moving in the middle distance that weren't threats.
"Varak Duskhollow," Marcus said.
Corvin's hands stopped moving.
"You know the name," Marcus said.
"By what it used to mean." He stared at the lines he'd drawn. "Eight years ago that name belonged to a minor noble who lost everything when Crestmere absorbed his territory. Not through war. Through paperwork. His house dissolved, his lands redistributed, his soldiers disbanded. He fought it through every legal channel available and lost every single one." He was quiet for a moment.
"Then he disappeared. And two years later a garrison started appearing in the eastern corridor where no garrison had any business being."
"He built it himself," Liz said.
"Brick by brick. Year by year. With funding and resources that a dissolved noble house shouldn't have access to." Corvin looked up. "That's the part I could never fully trace. Where the money comes from. Where the soldiers come from. Someone is backing him and whoever it is doesn't want to be found."
Marcus watched the fire. He understood Varak's motivation better than Corvin knew and that understanding didn't make him sympathetic. It made him more careful. Men who wanted specific things back were more dangerous than men who just wanted chaos. Specific wants meant specific plans. Specific plans meant patience.
Eight years of patience.
"The lower level," Marcus said. "Did you ever see inside it."
Corvin's jaw tightened. "Once. By accident." His voice dropped without him seeming to notice.
"Wrong corridor. Door was open." He stopped there for a moment like he was deciding how to describe something his brain had been trying to file away since it happened. "There was something inside. I can't tell you what it was because I don't have a word for it. Not a creature. Not an object. Just a thing sitting in the dark in the middle of the room."
He looked at the fire. "It knew I was there before I pushed the door open. I could feel it waiting. Not for me specifically. For anyone who would eventually come and look at it." He paused. "I closed the door and I never went back to that corridor."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Liz was looking at Marcus. Marcus was looking at the fire with the particular stillness of someone turning something over very carefully.
"How many soldiers did you count," he said.
"Two hundred. More coming from the northern outpost within the week."
"Where's the outpost."
"Half day north of the pass. Old watchtower.
They've been expanding it for months." He looked between them. "Why does that matter."
"Because they know someone came through their caravan today and took you," Marcus said. "Which means the outpost knows too by now. Which means the garrison will know before morning."
Corvin went quiet.
Liz leaned forward and fed a branch to the fire and the light shifted warm across the camp. "You should eat something," she said to Corvin. "I have dried provisions. Not good but better than nothing."
"I've been eating Ashfang rations for three weeks," he said. "Anything is better than nothing."
She almost smiled at that and dug into her pack.
Marcus watched Corvin for a moment with the quiet half-attention he used when Soul Reading was running underneath a conversation. He wasn't doing it deliberately.
The ability had been going on its own since the cave, picking up shapes and textures from people without being asked. What it picked up from Corvin was grief. Old and heavy and poorly stored, the kind that came from losing something specific that had never been properly mourned.
He said nothing about it. Just stored it away.
"Get some sleep," Marcus said. "Both of you."
Corvin looked at him. "What are you going to do."
"Think," Marcus said.
He looked east into the dark where the garrison sat two days away with its sealed lower level and whatever Varak had been feeding down there in the quiet.
The thing in the room that had been waiting to be looked at.
Marcus looked at it in his mind for a long moment.
Then he put more wood on the fire and let the camp settle into silence around him.