Free The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) by M. Edward McNally, mimulux Page B

“strangers” from the rest of the Empire wandering their lands.
    Indeed, the trio more than once saw watch towers on the hills across the river, or had their passage marked by parties of armored horsemen on the west bank.
    The party camped one night beside the river, and there was little talking among them as Tilda and Dugan had wordlessly divided the regular evening chores several nights back. The renegade saw to the horses while Tilda started a fire to warm the thinning rations for dinner, and Captain Block did little if anything. The dwarf had become more scowling and taciturn than ever since Dugan had joined them, and he shut down any conversation over the fire with an icy glare.
    Tilda’s aches and bruises had receded to the point where she felt up to doing her regular Guild calisthenics upon arising at dawn, which Dugan watched while pretending to do other things. Tilda ignored him and finished her exercises, assuring herself that she performed them only because they warmed her up on the increasingly cold mornings.
    After another half-day of travel the Girding Mountains were all the more imposing, forming a gray-and-green wall of jagged peaks across the southern horizon, topped by a permanent white snowline. The true slopes of the mountains were still at least a day away, but a jumble of piney foothills spread out before them. The three travelers reached the spot where the Winding emerged from the hills and began its long northern jag around the Trellanes’ narrow barony, and the Miilarkians stopped their horses to survey the scene. Tilda was surprised to find that while the ocean remained hundreds and hundreds of miles away, the place reminded her a bit of home.
    Her parents’ shop on Chrysanthemum Quay sat just above working docks, and most every morning of Tilda’s first twenty years of life had begun with the sounds of stevedores floating up to her second-story window. Men laughing and joking, mocking old friends or singing a dockside ditty. Tilda had learned a number of words from those songs which it had not, strictly speaking, been proper for a young girl to know. They were words she would never repeat with her mother in earshot, but they always made her father giggle.
    Here on the bend of the Winding was a different kind of port, but one that was still familiar. There were no deep ocean cutters nor many-masted tall ships of the kind to be seen in Miilark of course, for on the Winding cargoes were carried on shallow-draft barges. Long docks extended from a stone quay on the Trellanes’ side of the bend, just short of a wide, wooden bridge with stout arches built on stone piles in the stream. Two guards stood on the near end of the bridge, while across at the docks several river craft were moored. Brawny men crawled about the boats as they shifted bulk goods with the aid of rope-and-tackle cranes that looked vaguely like gallows. Various cargoes were moved both from the barges to waiting wagons, and back the other way. A good stone road stretched west from the quay past a few stone and timber buildings, one a barracks with an orange and yellow flag hanging limp on a tall pole in the front yard. Only a few miles further down the road Tilda could see the gray shape of what looked to be a sizable town.
    The Miilarkians looked over the scene from their horses, while Dugan stood between them.
    “ That is Trellaneville,” he said, pointing at the town. “The portage road hits the river again just a couple miles further on, cutting across the whole long bend. Saves days moving upstream or down, even while the river is high enough to float the whole way.”
    “ I am guessing the Trellanes charge to use the portage?” Tilda asked. Dugan smirked.
    “ Of course. It’s a turnpike. The baron sees coin on everything moving through, either upstream to La Trabon or down to the Runne, Lake Beo, and the rest of the Empire. He kicks some money up to his Earl, thence to the Duke, thence to the Emperor, and so nobody