Pinewood
Brynvale’s foothill city, where roads, pack trains and seasons are repaired.
The pines that gave Pinewood its name survive only on the protected southern slope. Mule yards occupy more ground than houses, and the market measures distance in nights of shelter rather than miles. Caravan contracts include a place for an animal's name and a clause forbidding its abandonment.
Oren Halvek pays the road crews with pass tokens that can only be spent in his own warehouses. Sella Halvek has begun redeeming those tokens in food at an independent kitchen. Her nephew Tarin Halvek returned from the ice with a piece of ancient paving, offering a way around both the toll and the mountain.
A highland principality guarding the passes and the engines that keep them open.
Sella sends food to Rose Citadel and redeems road workers’ tokens at face value.
Oren understands the pass machinery well enough to know it is failing and poorly enough to fear changing it.
Hedra records the sound of furnace valves by making notches in a wooden flute.
Noll knows which pack animals refuse the eastern tunnel and which merely dislike its echo.
Boren names shelter ledges after the people who built them, rejecting the numbered military charts.