Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
Hetty keeps the col-house supplied, hauling barley and stores up the pass twice a season and refusing, most times, to be thanked for it. Practical, warm, and entirely without sentiment, she has traded through these mountains for decades and reads the weather better than anyone. She keeps the keeper who feeds the road supplied. Her standing advice: don't run out of barley.
Brix is a young traveller who comes over the col burned out, his walking-party gone on ahead without him, and…
Caer is the road-warden who first comes to survey the newly-built house at the top of the col, back in its…
Fenwick is the mapmaker who crosses the col each spring and autumn — the col-house's newspaper and its window…
Marga kept the col-house for the better part of a lifetime before Toll, and she is the one who took him in…
Oswyn is the founder — the road-builder who raised the col-house from a shepherd's ruined shelter and became…
Petra is a cloth-trader who came up the col in the house's second summer, leading two pack-horses with a…