Walk the Ashmarch

Solerne sits at the heart of Aurelais, a walled city of gold-tiled roofs and quiet, well-guarded streets. It is where the crown’s justice is written — and where it is most often forgotten by the time it reaches the border towns it claims to protect.

Wealthy enough to rival the crown itself, the Lucent Order’s monastery rises just beyond Solerne’s walls — orchards, vineyards, and tithe-villages spreading in its shadow. It answers to no one but its own hierarchy, and its reach extends far past its garden walls.

Home of the Crown’s spymasters, and the place every watcher’s report eventually reaches. Spymaster Carlion works here among rooms of bound ledgers, a book for every ten years of what the Crown knows about the Order and its clans. New watchers are trained three floors down, and every class still hears old Hallam’s fool’s gold story.

Small farming settlements that owe a share of everything they grow to the Lucent Order. Hard work, low roofs and plenty of hands nobody counts too closely, which makes them a good place to disappear as a labourer if you can stand the labour. Some of them brew a decent ale, for those who know whom to ask.

An ancient forest of great oaks and pines, a week’s walk end to end. It feeds anyone who knows where to look for berries, nettles and grubs, and it falls silent when strangers enter. Some say an old man keeps it and decides who may pass.

A river town with a mill at its heart and a magistrate who lives in the finest house in it. Clan traders have dealt here for years, and its poor quarter is where people go missing without anyone noticing. Under Commander Vey it learned to shutter its windows early.

The place outside Grist where the clans trade with the Crown’s people, and where coin, goods and worse change hands. The Vhelt tolerate most things there, though not cheating. Anyone who walks past the cages without looking is doing what most people do.

A merchant town with markets, stalls and the sort of shawls worth borrowing a few jats for. One house there has stood boarded up for eleven years, since a merchant and his wife were found dead inside it. The locals say it is haunted and give it a wide berth.

Reed beds, standing water and mosquitoes that go for the eyes, spreading out beyond Brackwater’s walls. The old culvert empties into it, and anyone fleeing the city that way arrives filthy. It hides tracks well, though not from a soldier who knows which way the wind bends the reeds.

A dark seam in a rocky hillside, wide enough to walk into upright, with dry passages running further back than anyone has explored. A poor place to hide from people who are hunting you and a good place to heal. Some of what happened there is worth remembering, and some of it is buried there.

A quiet farmhouse with a chimney, an old oak in the yard and a war crossbow that always leaned by the door. Bricce built it as a home for the children nobody else wanted, and later Brina kept it. The graves beneath the oak have names on them now.

An unremarkable farm on a low ridge south of the river, with a barn and fields gone half to seed. It once paid well for girls to work its fields, until the girls stopped coming back. Behind the barn stands a windowless, barred building that was never meant for grain.

A working town on the roads between three small townships, loud with the blacksmith’s hammer from dawn to dusk. Moneylenders work the farms around it and collect the hard way when the soft way fails. Riders leave it in every direction when someone is being hunted.

A walled market city where the Crown’s guard and the town watch both keep order, after a fashion. Its poor quarter is a warren of mud-plaster houses where nobody remembers a face past their next meal. Everything begins in its market square.

South of the Ashmarch’s own reach lie the lands of three clans who answer to none of it — the Vhelt, wanderers and trackers; the Karshul, traders and pragmatists; and the Twonga, builders whose work outlasts the men who commission it.