They stood there, cooling their heels, for the better part of three candlemarks, before someone finally turned up from inside the town. This person, a middle-aged, scrawny man with black hair and beard, wearing what looked like livery, ignored them to go straight to the guard and talk to him in a low voice for quite some time. Finally the guard gestured to them abruptly. “You can go in,” he said, with a brusque tone that bordered on rude. “But you follow this fellow, and you do what you’re told, and you don’t wander off pretending to be lost. Understand?”

“Quite,” Master Vance replied, making it clear with his tone that he was offended. He didn’t even speak to their guide, he just gestured to the fellow to lead.

They went in through a tunnel under the wall; as Abi expected, there were iron portcullises at either end, and stout wooden gates as well. The tunnel gave out into a street nearly identical to similar walled towns in the South of Valdemar: narrow, with houses and shops whose doors were right down on the street itself, wide enough for a single wagon with space for a pedestrian to squeeze by on either side.

I don’t know why that guard warned us not to wander off, she mused. We’d be pretty obvious if we tried.

The fact was, that rude greeting made absolutely no sense. And when confronted with something that made absolutely no sense, Abi’s first instinct was to become very cautious and keep her eyes and ears open.

What she saw did not make her feel any better. The few townsfolk they encountered glared at them, frowned, or actually turned their backs on them. It was almost as if they had somehow done these people some great wrong—at least, that was the impression she got.

It can’t have been the lake we drained. That was too far away to have affected them. Are they angry because we installed bridges they might have to pay tolls to use? That makes no sense; they can’t have found out about that yet. And that water system Vance worked out—that can’t be it, either. Something is very wrong here.

Unlike the last two places, this town featured buildings made of brick as well as stone, although stone predominated. Like Ellistown, the buildings were tall and narrow and literally built so closely together that you couldn’t have gotten a sheet of paper between them.