"She will have sent a note already," Kael said, breathing hard. "Not with paper. With the air. We have less than nine days now. Maybe five. Maybe three."
"Then we don't wait here to be found," Mara said. The decision surprised her with its clarity. "We go where the Bond wants to finish. You said time must be survived. Surviving isn't hiding in a cottage while the Hollow King counts our footsteps."
Kael looked at her as if seeing her properly for the first time—not as a terrified mother, not as a prophecy's convenient vessel, but as a person who had already lost too much to lose the rest by standing still.
"There is a place," he said. "The Stall itself. Ruined. In the Ash Ranges. If we reach the old stone and hold the Bond through the thirteenth dawn, the Binding cracks for every seam-keeper still breathing. The Hollow King will come there. He will have to. That is also where we can end him—or be ended."
"How far?"
"Four days hard. Five with a child. Six if we are hunted."
Mara looked at her cottage. At the garden. At the life that had already been half-empty and was about to become a road.
"I need an hour," she said. "Food. Cloth. The midwife's tonic. And I need to leave word with Tannen's wife that I've gone to my sister in Millford, so the reeve doesn't raise a hunt for a kidnapped widow."
"You have a sister in Millford?"
"No," Mara said. "But the lie will buy us a day."
The morning they left Briarholt, mist lay in the lanes like spilled milk. Mara fastened the cottage shutters and stood a moment with her palm on the door, saying goodbye without words to the rooms that had held both her children, the living and the lost. She left the midwife a wrapped cheese and a note. She left the reeve a lie. She left the shrine a coin she could not spare, not for forgiveness, but for luck—the ordinary kind farmers believed in when magic was too large a word.