Ochre Mercers’ Hall
Garnetrun’s cloth exchange, where treaty measures became public evidence against the houses that kept them.
River damp has stained the hall’s lower stones the color of old mustard. Cloth arrives by shallow barge, is hung in the courtyard until its weight settles, and only then may be measured for sale. A merchant who weighs wet cloth is barred from the exchange for a season; the empty hook beside the eastern door records the most recent offender.
House Pell maintains the paired entrance towers, but the keys belong to two elected porters rather than to Mira’s family. Each morning one porter brings a reference rod from the dry tower while the other brings its river-cooled twin. Their disagreement used to be treated as a small, predictable inconvenience. In the year 684, the rods began disagreeing even after a day together on the same table.
During the Breaking of the Measures, the mercers opened the courtyard to people whose compensation claims had been dismissed as bad accounting. A seamstress laid three unpaid winter allotments along a bolt of undyed linen. The line reached past the witnesses’ bench. That length, rather than a speech by any ruler, became Garnetrun’s remembered measure of the scandal. The linen still hangs above the north arcade, with space left for claims not yet heard.
An inland workshop city whose scales are trusted more than its prince.
A border furnace guarding Brynvale’s most profitable road and its most dangerous secret.
A solitary eastern storehouse where the sea’s approach is measured on the walls.
The northernmost promise in the eastern rescue network.
A mountain fortress whose red stone conceals a hospice rather than an army.
A root-bound chamber at the heart of Alceria’s disputed history.