She slept, eventually, to the sound of rain and the low thunder of his breathing, and dreamed not of monsters but of a man in a blue coat walking a road that glowed faintly gold under his feet, repairing something invisible with every step.
On the second day they found the first of the Hollow King's marks: a standing stone beside a stream, its face scraped clean of the old keeper-glyphs and carved over with a single open eye. The eye wept a thin black sap. Kael smashed the stone with a blow that sent birds exploding from the canopy. The sap hissed on the moss and died.
"He knows our road," Kael said.
"Then we leave the road," Mara answered.
They did. The way became steeper, wilder. Mara's boots rubbed blisters. Her shoulders ached from the sling. At night they camped in hollows Kael chose, and he slept lightly, if at all, while she slept in fragments between Elias's needs. Once she woke to find Kael standing over them both, facing the dark, and for a heartbeat the old fear rose—monster, horns, claws—before she saw the way he held himself: not looming. Guarding.
"Go back to sleep," he murmured without turning. "The night is only night."
She almost believed him.
The third day on the road taught Mara the weight of being hunted in a different register—not the sharp terror of the seekers' charge, but the grinding kind: wet boots, scarce sleep, the constant arithmetic of sound. Was that a branch or a bow? Was that crow a crow?
They crossed a high meadow where the wind tore clean and cold. Kael paused, nostrils working. "East-wind," he said. "Carries metal and old blood. Hunters again, but farther. We go to ground until dusk."
They sheltered in a limestone cleft. Mara nursed Elias while Kael blocked the entrance with his body, a door of fur and resolve. In the dimness she asked, "Do you regret coming to my fence?"
"No."