The town of Dry-Wells sat two miles west of the refugee encampment, set on a low shelf of limestone where the bitter salt flats met the gravel foothills.
It wasn’t a large town, but it was prosperous. It was built with the cold, imposing symmetry of a royal office post. Wide streets of crushed pale limestone were lined with deep drainage under-road drains of cut limestone. The buildings had thick walls of mortared fieldstone and steep roofs of dark slate imported from the northern quarries. Unlike the tent city, where water was measured by the half-quart, Dry-Wells was green with irrigated Lombardy poplars and vegetable gardens fed by stone water chutes leading down from the Trade group’s private canal feeder.
Tomas Reed and Sile Rook walked through the town gate at mid-morning. Tomas wore his faded charcoal cart driver’s coat, the elbows heavy with dark sailcloth, his lead-lined ledger case slung over his shoulder by its broad hemp strap. Beside him, Sile walked with the rhythmic, measured tread of a veteran soldier, his tall body-shield resting across his back, his iron-wood hooked pruning blade balanced cleanly in his right hand.
The townspeople—clerks in starched linen collars, shopkeepers sweeping pale limestone dust from their doorsteps, and wagon drivers driving fat mule teams hitched to grain wagons—stepped back onto the raised wooden footpaths as the two men passed. They didn’t stare at Tomas’s plain wool coat. They stared at the scarred, grim face of Sile Rook and the heavy iron hardware at…
