Tomas and Nessa set out from the temporary camp at Willow Stair before the mist had lifted from the willow bottoms. The air was crisp with the first frost of late autumn, the fallen leaves of the water-oaks lying thick and black in the drainage ditches beside the highway. For forty miles, the King’s Road stretched westward toward the bluffs of Bellwether. But it was no longer the rutted, drowning mire that Tomas had walked as an Uncalled youth twenty years before.
The road was crowned with crushed river dark rock, three feet thick at the center. It was flanked by deep, clean-cut stone water ditches that carried the autumn runoff smoothly toward the marshes. Every two miles stood an open timber shelter with dry benches, a stone water tank fed by mountain slow leak. A brass mile-plate cast with the raised names of the highway’s true maintainers: the wagon drivers, ditch-diggers, and stonework apprentices of the Seven Communities. There was no tollgate at the border. The heavy iron turnstile that had once extorted six silver coins from every market cart had been unbolted from its granite footing, its rusted hinges now displayed in the common hall at Fen Hollow as a relic of an extinct tyranny.
