Harad

Harad stands on the river west of Haudh-Gwenn, where a low stone bridge crosses north to south. The bridge is the whole reason for the town. There is no crossing at Forven, so a traveler who will not ford and cannot hire a boat comes here or goes up to Loshev. Everything crossing between Idir’s banks uses one of the two.

The span is old work, a lesser Mól structure rather than one of the grand ones, and it fell so long ago that what stands now is modern construction set on the original anchor points, because the anchors were already there. It has not proved sound. One winter the ice dropped a span, a wagon went through it, horses were killed and people hurt, and the town was still at the repairs when the party came off the lake.

Beyond the bridge Harad is small and tax-poor. From a passing boat it reads as a bridge-village about the size of Ridh. Those who have landed there call it a town. Malik called it tiny and Edrick answered that it was willing to fight slavery, which proved the more useful measure. It keeps a council, a militia, fields enough to feed strangers, and an inn with a better room in it than the place has any business owning.

Nobody has counted Harad. Its numbers, its districts, its founding year and the name its people call themselves by were none of them ever written down.

Two men account for most of what the town does. Captain Jack is an aging ex-soldier and reputedly honest, rare enough on this river to be worth two days’ riding. Luca Green keeps the tavern and leads the militia, barrel-chested and useful in a fight.

Campaign Updates

Harad’s honesty was used against it. Cargo under the Seal of Forven passed uninspected by an arrangement between Forven’s captain and Jack, who believed the goods clean; the people in the hold were sold on downriver. Two riders came for him after the slavers’ camp fell, because the party needed a force at their backs they could trust for the ambush the following night and Jack was the one name vouched for. He brought a crew down to the cave and helped take the buyers.

Then Jack set about making the river harder to use that way again. The seized goods went to winter food and to timber for a shelter raised off the back of Luca’s tavern. The recovered gold was spread across the towns the ring had used. A dock-master was appointed where there had been none, cargo was screened, and hounds were trained to find what the slavers’ hounds had found. Jack carried the evidence to Harad’s council himself, because the name at the top of it was Grayeras, and he learned in the same week that Ashtara Walnut, who kept a house in the town and had been one of its more generous donors, was his friend and a slaver both.

Since then Harad has been the Valiant Few’s most reliable back door. Its council bought and gave them the land at Westwood. Its surplus feeds the Crack, with refugees rotated out to work Harad’s fields and Luca running it. Couriers on the Haudh-Gwenn run come through, and the town has served as an address to write to when a name grew too loud to carry. Elliot, Professor Ashanti al-Hassan and the alchemy library were sent to Jack and Luca for keeping, and Cleven Gemsmith was settled there after them. The company kept Martyr’s Day in the town.

When the war on Haudh-Gwenn was raised, Harad was told rather than asked. It is a small place with a bridge to hold, and it has been left holding it.