The Open Plain

It lies between the Luminglade forest and Luna, on Crowbrook's army road. Past the forest "the trees ended". Then:

Before Luna the road narrows to a timber bridge "narrow enough for two carts", beside a mercenary river settlement.

From the books

Crowbrook's army reaches the Open Plain at noon, where the trees end, and the column halts. People raised beneath smoke, bridges and red lamps mistrust distance with nothing in it: district children expect walls to answer sound, canal workers look for water to steer by, and Penitents lose the landmarks that break up their formation rhythm. The plain offers nowhere to hide and too much room for a single command to carry, and the army's widened and narrowed orders leave it looking broken from the hills before any battle.

The traces of other peoples on the plain are treated with care. The army leaves the Fae stones undisturbed, uses the Highlander wells only after testing them, and pulls Luna's gold nails only where they interfere with demon wards, recording each removal. Cassian's ward iron reacts to all three marks and belongs to none of them. Crowbrook learns here that its own way of naming places is merely local.

Wards without walls

Crowbrook's wards lean on architecture: salt under thresholds, iron in lintels, names written where walls meet. On the plain there are no thresholds but the ones bodies make. Ward nails will not take hold because the ground has no names, wind lifts the salt, rain erases written names, and iron stakes draw lightning from an empty sky; the camp is rebuilt three times before its first dusk. The Witness Mothers find a workaround, naming what happened in a place (who cooked, who bled, who kept first watch) instead of claiming territory, and the ward nails then recognise the camp. The method must be rebuilt at every halt. A storm tears the hospital tents loose before dawn, and the carts are drawn into a broken circle with three gaps rather than a closed ring.

The dead in the grass

The storm uncovers bones: a road crew buried where an older army abandoned its sick, every skull facing south and tagged only by number. An old man from the nearest settlement supplies three family names, and the army marks the site before moving on. Soldiers then probe every square of ground before pitching tents. When command cancels the probing on the fourth night, that very ground proves to hold the plague trench, whose released air spreads fever through one witness cell before the site is burned.

Under the Light

Luna's Lightspire stands beyond the horizon, too distant to see as a tower, but its glow fills half the sky. Merchants price distance by it, priests time their rites by its intensity, and Fae refugees use it to judge how far Luna's custody reaches. It is on the plain that Crowbrook watches the gold fail at sunset, turning purple, then black, then veined with red. Further on, the army crosses the timber bridge only after propping its rotten northern support with six beams, traded from the river settlement for two cases of saintweed, and beyond it meets refugees fleeing Luna.