Inside the slate-roofed customs house of Brackenford, the air smelled of seasoned oak sawdust, dried ink, pipe tobacco, and beeswax. A broad hearth of dressed limestone warmed the vaulted common office. There, two clerks sat at high slant-top desks scratching ledgers with goose quills.
At the head of a massive walnut council table sat Bailiff Garek, an austere canton judge of sixty winters with silver-streaked hair, ink-stained cuffs, and a heavy brass seal-ring upon his thumb. Standing beside him, leaning against the stone mantelpiece with her thumbs hooked behind her sword-belt, was Captain Talia, the commander of the local canton watch. Talia was a compact, sharp-eyed woman in her late thirties, clad in supple boiled leather beneath the dark green-and-gray wool tabard of the Northern Free Cantons.
Kezra and Yseld sat on the opposite bench, their muddy gaiters resting on the scrubbed pine floorboards. On the table between them lay Joric Thane’s formal commercial credentials, stamped with the seal of the Alderfast Basin Merchant League, alongside Kezra’s first route map showing the Station IV mountain road.
“You ask an unusual question for a commercial land-mapper, Mistress Venn,” Court guard Garek said, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses as he leaned over the map. “You have measured our under-road drains, inspected our bridges, and paid our well-ward to test our drinking water. And now you ask what our canton statutes provide if a large body of armed soldiers—three to four hundred men under foreign military commission—marches down the mountain road into our valley.”
