The northeastern road out of Ironhaven was a logging track.
Not a maintained route — a path cut by timber operations decades ago and then abandoned when the timber ran out, grown back to something between road and forest with the particular ambiguity of places that had been used and then forgotten. Calder knew it precisely. Six weeks of preparation expressed in the confidence of someone who had walked this route in his mind so many times that the physical walking felt like confirmation rather than discovery.
He set a good pace for Level 44 with a staff.
Kael matched it.
