Westwood

A small place in the woods southwest of Haudh-Gwenn, close to the Peredhel border, on the road people take when they are going to the city and not stopping. What to call it has never been agreed: a village in one account, a town in another, and a thorp in the two that come from Westwood itself. Nor is its bearing consistent. Southeast of Harad is the usual form; near Harad, and smaller than Harad but nearer the caves, and simply in the woods southwest of the city, are the others. Nobody has ever had cause to measure it.

The name came first and the councilor came after. Alex Westwood grew up here and carried the place’s name north to Loshev with them, which locals will correct a visitor on without being asked twice.

What Is There

Two buildings do all the business: an inn and a tavern, and they are the two most built-up things in the place, because people pass through on their way to Haudh-Gwenn and back and have to sleep and drink somewhere. Beyond those, everyone is a farmer, or keeps some sort of basic market, or is independently wealthy and does nothing at all. Westwood proper and every farm around it comes to the same tavern.

The tavern is also the post. There is no courier stationed here, but the riders come through, and the tavern keeper collects the town’s letters for nothing and hands them over, taking only what the courier himself charges. A runner can be bought to carry a single letter straight to Haudh-Gwenn for about five silver. The tavern is Aubrey’s, and he is gruff and territorial about the whole arrangement. The inn has an owner of its own, who is not named anywhere.

There was no guard here to speak of, only a couple of neighbors keeping an eye out, which is a thin arrangement for a place that a great many strangers walk through. That is being fixed: a proper guard station is going up on what had been Beltran Grayeras’s construction, taken over by the town after his interest in it lapsed. It was slowed but still going the last time anyone looked, and whether it was ever finished was never written down.

The Council of Three

Westwood is governed by three people, which is small for a council and not inappropriate for Westwood. They meet at seven in the morning on Sundays. One is a Peren well over a hundred and venerable with it; one a human in his late twenties with visible money; one a hobgoblin in his forties. None of the three has ever been named. Two of them are friends of the Valiant Few, which in a council of three is the vote.

The Tunnel

Beltran bought ground here out of the divided Westwood estate not long after its owner died, and put up a building for a facility that was said at the time to link two places underground. What that meant only came out when the party finally walked the ground: a smuggling tunnel, begun on what is now the party’s land and aimed at The Crack, sixteen or seventeen miles off. It was planned at two or three miles and is a sixth to a quarter dug. It has been abandoned since he lost interest in it, and it needs a real engineer before anyone walks through it, because otherwise it comes down.

Whether the tunnel and the surface construction that became the guard station were one project or two has never been settled. They were both his, they were both here, and the people who talk about them are not sure they were the same undertaking.

Campaign Updates

Westwood’s part in the Ten Lashes trade was quiet and essential. Buyers came north from Meshtes, lodged at the inn here, bought, and went south again, where the paperwork was made clean. The people they sold were brought through Haudh-Gwenn, Harad or Westwood to wherever they were going, and the caves the ring worked out of lie between here and the city. Beltran’s plan for the land he bought was a new facility nearer Meshtes than the old one.

When the ring fell, Harad’s council bought a small lot here and gave it to the party, taxed at two silver and eight copper a year. It sits well outside the center and adjoins the estate of Landor de Bellun, who bought some of the same freed-up ground himself and who has an old grievance against Leon Yaegar, now the party’s own quartermaster. Gwenivere Velmont holds a third of an estate here too, and counts it among the little she has left.

They did not set foot on it for a long while. When they finally did, they found that the heroes of Loshev and Haudh-Gwenn meant nothing whatever in Westwood, and set about fixing that with a song in Aubrey’s tavern and a courtesy call on the council. It worked. The tunnel mouth on their land has since served as a place to hold a prisoner and as the site of a blood-and-silver rite, and never once as a way through anything. By the time Davi Solt had to be got out of Haudh-Gwenn alive, Westwood was simply where the party had people, and that is where he was sent.