“Not at all, but they speak it somewhere in Yinfold and so if someone is hiding in the brush along the edges of the fields, they’ll hear us using a language from this wallfold.”

Sure enough, there were soon children darting out of cover and running down the track ahead of them. “I guess we don’t look too threatening,” said Ram Odin. “If the children are willing to run openly down the road ahead of us.”

“But they still ran.”

“To give news of our coming,” said Ram Odin. “We’re the most exciting thing in days, I’ll wager.”

Rigg remembered life in Fall Ford. The children there noticed the arrival of strangers, but didn’t run to tell. That’s because strangers came several times a week and always went to Nox’s boardinghouse for a meal and news and perhaps a bed. Then they would go up the stair beside the falls into Upsheer Forest, or along the road—much more of a road than this King’s Highway—that ran east and west below the face of Upsheer Cliff, to the other towns that lived in its shadow. He had thought Fall Ford an isolated, sleepy place, but now he saw it as a hub of traffic, compared to this.

Fall Ford was also five times as big. More houses. More tradesmen’s shops. Rigg wondered if they thought of themselves as a village or a town? There was an open square in the middle that might be a weekly market. Or might not. It could simply be the place where they hanged strangers.

Ram Odin was making it a point to nod—but not smile—at the faces peering out of windows. “These aren’t smiley folk,” Ram Odin explained. “In this region, a smile means you’re a liar.”

Rigg noticed that people weren’t peering through cracks in curtains. They were fully visible in open windows. They returned Ram Odin’s solemn nod, some so slightly as to hardly be visible, some sharply, clearly, as if putting a bit of punctuation at the end of an unspoken sentence.

People must have gone out back doors and made their way to the square, because as Ram Odin and Rigg stepped into the open space, so did about twenty people, mostly adult men but some women, coming from behind houses on both sides, but only one man and one woman from the far side, where they hadn’t walked.

“Good morning,” said Ram Odin, glancing at the sun to be sure it wasn’t yet past noon. “We’re hoping to earn a bit of bread and ale in this place, if you find us worthy. And if you have enough work for us, a place to pass the night.”