Cardir’s Crossing, late in the autumn of the kingdom’s twilight.

The healer came into the market town the way all news came now: on foot, alone, and later than anyone wanted. He set up under the faded banners of the toll-house — the white and the seven stars, gone the colour of old bone — and he laid out his herbs and his poultices on a cloth, and he waited for the hurt to come to him. None came. Not because the town was whole, but because the town’s hurts were the kind no poultice answers: a shuttered shop, a son on the northern wall who does not write, a square built for the commerce of two kingdoms and filling now a quarter of its stalls on a good day. The warband bought a little of his kingsfoil out of something that was not quite charity and not quite need, and watched him pack the rest and go on down a road that carried fewer travellers each year.

They earned their keep honestly that week. The town guard — thinning, grey, standing a wall it no longer quite believed in — was glad of four pairs of hands to patch the breach in the north rampart and drill the green lads, and gave the warband lodging and goodwill for the labour, which in a dying market town is worth more than coin. Thirwen turned his hand to harder work besides, mending what the guard could not afford a smith for, and brought in a few marks the company sorely needed. And word came down the thin web of old soldiers’ friendships that Edrig — Edrig son of Mallor, who had shared Thirwen’s trench and his hunger in the bad years — had sent aid up the road: supplies, a little silver. Thirwen took it and did not ask what it might cost him later, the way a man does not look too long at a gift in a lean season.

Then, following Maeric’s directions, they went out to the thing the contract had paid them to find: an old watch-post on the Cardolan side, abandoned these long years, its garrison gone the way of all the southern garrisons. They found it half-fallen, and they found it tenanted — by Tiriel, a prickly hedge-healer living in the rubble, who remembered when soldiers had kept the place, and who said, with the flat certainty of a man who has decided not to forgive it, that both Faith and crown had let it go when the roads grew unsafe. Halros knew him at once for what he was: a fellow keeper of the small green lore, athelas and bitter herbs and the words that still answer out in the world where the cold archive’s words no longer will. They shared a fire and a grudging hour, and Tiriel became something like a friend — mercenary, thorny, bound by the one bond that still holds in the Marches, which is survival.

They did not go down into the ruin. Thirwen read the ground and did not like it; Beregond, for once, did not argue. There would be time, or there would not. They settled into camp under a sky going to winter, and in the morning the rumour found them: enemy patrols are roaming the wild. Something was moving out there that had not moved in a while — deserters, perhaps, or the long reach of Angmar testing the thinning watch. The healer with no one to heal; the wall mended for one more night; the ruin left unopened; and now a word in the wind out of the south. They banked the fire and set a watch.

One roll set the whole week’s mood. The News result (d100) came up enemy patrols are roaming — so the quiet turn ends on a drawn breath rather than a rest. Everything else below is the bookkeeping behind the story.

Next week: the roaming patrols come looking, and the warband must decide whose roads these are.