The Foldfast Steading

A fortified hill-steading abandoned when the silver failed — its hall caved, its sheepfolds gone to nettle, and a Broken Lances squad quietly camped here to watch the castle road.

When the silver thinned, the family that held Foldfast paid their tithe late twice and then simply walked away, taking the livestock and leaving the furniture. They cut their children's height into the hall doorframe for years and then, the season the assays came back thin, stopped and went to a 'new place' the steading only remembers as a promise; a sealed letter that came for them after still sits unopened in the cold cellar, and where the Foldfasts are now is the one question the ruin will not answer. The hall roof fell in the second winter. The guard-dogs, left with an apology and a last meal, went feral on the Spur; ash-hounds out of the cold country smelled the empty larder and denned in the cellar behind a barred door. Over all of it now squats a Broken Lances squad. They did not come for the steading — there is no toll here, nothing worth a garrison — they came for the wall's high line of sight over the fork where the Vale gives way toward the castle road, and they keep a watch-log of every soul, cart, and courier that crosses it. Their captain is Vesna Coldhand, sister to the Bron Coldhand who holds Hewngate below, posted forward on orders sealed with a hand almost but not quite House Vandahl's own: hold the watch, log the fork, and do a thing at the sixth hour when a certain traveller finally crosses east. What the Broken are watching for is the road out of the Vale, and who is paying them to watch it is a question that opens onto the Sered Spur and does not close. It is a good hard delve for someone who has cleared the Vale: the dangers are animal and human, not wight — but the deepest danger is discovering how carefully you, specifically, have already been written down.

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