Trees ringed it, maples and oaks, and other buildings; the tall church, a bathhouse-cum-laundry, a tavern with a creaking sign that read The Hawk and Bear showing a very large eagle fighting a very small grizzly and right now doing a land-office business. There was a potter’s shop too; a wheelwright’s long sheds; and several stores selling things, rather than relying on peddler’s carts or passing Tinerant caravans. This was a baron’s seat as well as the village of a manor.

Everything was built of the same materials as the great house, tile roofs over whitewashed pisé walls on knee-high foundations of mortared basalt stone. The square was thick with activity, some of it preparation for a big public feast; there were a row of fire pits with whole carcasses of pig and sheep and ox roasting over them and giving off clouds of savory smoke as grease dripped on the coals, and women were setting up trestle tables and a series of stands that would hold barrels.

“I will be giving an address to my people tonight,” Lord Maugis said. “One way or another.”

Ingolf’s eyes were shaped by a lifetime’s campaigning; they rose to the heights eastward, the first time he’d done that here in daytime. He stopped still for an instant and whistled. He’d known that Castle Tucannon was on a hill over the town. And it was, but that was like saying that the ruins of Chicago were large or that Iowa had a hell of a lot of people.

This whole range of low mountains had obviously been a plateau once, and then been cut up by water action far in the past into a maze of ridges, peaks and canyons that got steeper as you went farther in. This looked like a lot of the ridges on the edge of the high country. Only the end of the ridge had fallen off somehow, leaving better than a hundred feet of nearly sheer basalt in a horseshoe shape with a tangle of huge rocks at the base.

The castle had been built atop that; it was the usual basic Association design, doubled as they sometimes were to enlarge it—what they called a mirror keep. But the outer walls were at the edge of those cliffs, and the builders had improved them by chopping out any projecting spurs. Mounted on one of the towers was a tall Ponderosa pine trunk, about a hundred feet tall with a ladder up its side and a small platform on the top. He tried to imagine what sort of a vantage it would give you, and failed. And it probably put Castle Tucannon in connection with the heliograph net all the way to Walla Walla, which would mean all the way to Portland and beyond.

Say what you like about this Arminger guy, he knew how to get things built, not just how to kill people.