The Windcut House

The High Moot's chartered house on Charterhouse Row: a low, snow-shedding hall of grey stone and undressed timber where a rotating Korl factor keeps the fjord-crossing tolls current, bonds guides for the Wind-Cut Pass, and reminds every outlander that the real Windcut is a fjord-hold on the Rimeward, a great deal colder and a great deal further than this room.

The Windcut House keeps no fires banked high and no doors thrown wide, for the Korl who staff it were not raised to trust either, but it keeps its charter current and its ledger honest, which is the only welcome the High Moot ever promised the lower world. A single factor holds the post at a time, rotated up from the holds every few years so no one grows too fond of Highbridge's soft winters, and their work is unglamorous: certify a bonded guide before they take a party over the Wind-Cut Pass, settle a toll dispute between a Korl trader and a Vale one, and write the letters of introduction that are the only thing standing between a stranger and a shut gate at Windcut Hold itself. The hall's one indulgence is the hearth-stone set into the floor by the door, carried down from the Rimeward and never lit. Visitors are told, correctly, that a Korl hearth burns for ancestors kept, and no ancestor of this house is buried in Highbridge.