The Redhook Hideaway

The bolt-hole cave in the western cliffs where the Redhook crew cache the real takings — while their tents on the east road draw the eye. Vera keeps the best of it here, behind a crew split down the middle.

Everyone in Valenfeld knows the Redhook camp: hide tents pitched on the east road in plain sight, smoke where the watch can see it, Vera Redhook daring anyone to come collect. That camp is the decoy. The real Redhook is a dry smugglers' hold in the western cliffs — an old bolt-hole the crew took over and stuffed with the salvage they lift off the Vale road: bronze that never reached a boat, House goods off a robbed cart, salt-barrels come up one short. Vera keeps the best of it in the deepest chamber and calls it hers.

The crew that fills the hold is not made of villains but of the Lean Years' leavings — failed farmers, played-out miners, a debt-jumper or two, people who did the arithmetic and decided other people's carts were easier than a dead field. They came for a cut and a roof, and lately they have started counting what the others take.

Because the hold is split. A recent quarrel opened a crack straight down the crew: Vera's loyalists on one side, her quartermaster Orin Pell and his cheap-market crew on the other, each convinced the other is skimming. They have trapped the passages between their territories and hidden shares from each other, and the walls now carry as many accusations as they do soot. What still binds them is the fence-road out: the take moves on through Hewngate for the Broken Lances' cut, an arrangement older than the quarrel and the only thing both halves still agree is worth keeping. Cut down Vera and the hold is a rabble squabbling over hidden coin — which is the whole shape of the Redhook problem, and the whole of its solution.