Dawn over the Grand Estuary of Crown-Reach didn’t break with the usual call of market seagulls and the solitary creak of fishing punts. It broke with the deep, ringing drone of thirty river horns sounding all at once. A long, nonstop low-pitched bellow that rolled across the tidal mudflats and echoed off the marble facades of the financial district like the trumpets of an advancing naval armada.
By the sixth hour of morning, thirty huge freight barges—each sixty paces long, built from heavy heart-oak timbers and steered by thirty-foot steering sweeps—swung in an unbroken column around the southern bend of the river. He walked into the central harbor basin under shortened storm-sails.
They were the river fleet of the Seven Communities, mobilized by the Lower House Assembly and led down-current from the delta by Pilot Eren of Reed Bank. On the decks of the barges sat no luxury silks or imported wines. They were loaded to their boat sides with the physical substance of rural survival. Thousands of seasoned white-oak levee wooden support posts, ten thousand bushels of emergency grain, tons of clean limestone ballast, and three hundred working men and women from the down-river villages.
At the head of the lead barge, The Willow Queen, stood Elder Ada Fen of Fen Hollow. She leaned on her notched oak tally rod, her woolen shawl pinned with a silver carp badge. Beside her stood Elder Cel Bren of Brook End. His threshing flail was held across his shoulder, and Master Mason…
