GAZETTEER · THE VALE

Oswin's Furrow

aka the ring-seal farm

The smallholding west of the Highbridge span where Oswin's plough turned up an Imperium ring-seal — and where a Highbridge scholar and a Highbridge scrap-buyer have been quietly outbidding each other for it ever since, with Oswin caught in the middle wondering if honesty was worth the trouble.

It's a small, tired farm — half the field Oswin's grandfather worked, the spring lower every year the way every spring on this stretch is — and it would be entirely unremarkable except for the ring-seal. Oswin's plough caught it in the topsoil of the west field two months back: an intact Imperium signet, bronze gone the deep green temple-patina, engraved with a mark nobody local can read. He did the thing his father would have done and the thing half the corridor now says was a mistake: he told the truth about it at the Sowers' Rest instead of quietly selling it to the first scrap-buyer through, and the story reached Highbridge before he'd even decided what he wanted for it. Now there are two letters waiting for him at the Rest whenever he goes for grain — one from a Far College scholar offering a fair price and a lot of questions about exactly where in the field it turned up, one from a Kilns scrap-buyer offering better coin and no questions at all — and Oswin, plough still in his hands most days, hasn't answered either. He isn't holding out for a better price. He genuinely can't decide whether the honest thing is to sell it to the man who'll study it or the man who'll pay his daughter's way through a bad winter, and he'll say so to anyone who asks, which has made him something of a minor fixture of corridor gossip: the farmer too honest to know what to do with his own luck.

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