Red Oak Gap was a natural notch cut through the limestone escarpment where the high chalk downs plunged toward the southern river plain. For three hundred years, it had been a bottleneck of extortion. Its forty-foot moss-stained cliffs forced all wagons, pack-trains, and travelers into a narrow stone throat no wider than two heavy cart carts abreast.
Six years ago, when Tomas Reed first carried an uncalled custody box through the Gap, an iron-banded oak barrier bar had blocked the passage. Guards in the red livery of the Holt Trade ring had lounged on the low roof wall with cocked crossbows. Meanwhile, a clerk in the stone toll-house extorted three silver crowns from every loaded carrier. Anyone who couldn’t pay had his crates seized, his boots cut from his feet, and his body thrown into the drainage ditch.
Now, as Tomas and Nessa rounded the final curve of the chalk road, the Gap looked entirely different.
The iron hinges remained anchored in the cliff face. But the massive oak bar had been unbolted, planed smooth, and mounted horizontally upon four cedar posts beneath a newly thatched roadside shelter as a clean rest bench for weary travelers.
Above the bench, chiseled into the limestone cliff wall, were the words of the Common Road Charter:
