So two struggling villages were about to get what they needed to stop struggling and start prospering. And as a bonus there was about to be a large town within an easy distance of them. Granted, the “town” was going to take some building yet, but the people would be there, and their skills and tools.

The river made an abrupt turn, and there was Brandywine, with its cluster of thirty houses and its palisade of logs. Actually, all Delia could see from where she sat was the log palisade, the open gate, and a glimpse of a couple of wooden houses that were very different from the stone cottages of Valdemar. And it looked as if the entire village had turned out to cheer the arrival of the newcomers. They also looked very different from the folk of Valdemar; clothing was all of homespun, home-woven materials and colored with local, natural dyes.

All the Valdemarans had gotten the local tongue courtesy of Ponu, so at least there wouldn’t be any difficulty in being understood.

The river was just about to get too shallow even for the shallow-drafted barges, but the locals had prepared for that, building a pair of docks right at the point where the bottom of a barge would start to scrape gravel. Delia urged her mount up to the dock, and one of the locals—a handsome lad in homespun loose trews and a linen smock, with the reddest hair she had ever seen, deftly caught the rope she untied from the back of the saddle and tied up the string at the dock.

As she walked her mount away, the second string was pulled up alongside the first, and tied off to the dock and the prow of the first string.

Then the Tow-Beast pulling the third string splashed belly-deep through the water to the opposite side of the river, and another fellow waiting at the second dock caught the rope and tied the third string there.

And there was just enough room that if a fourth lot of Valdemarans decided to take up the invitation to settle here, there’d be space to wedge in a last string of barges, though they would be so tight-packed that you’d be able to easily walk from one bank of the river to the other.

As this was happening, Squire Lesley had gone to the second barge of the string, and with an apple and a cabbage was coaxing the Empress and her brood down a gangplank flung to the deck of the barge.