Worlds to play, cards to import

The fen homestead of the Tallow oathtaker family — a Grimwold steading where disputed oaths come to be tasted at the brine-table.

The forest-edge trade post where the Rootwild meets the wagon roads — the last place money means anything and the first place the marked paths begin.

The Saltmere's great banking row — vault-houses built on old salt-cellar foundations, where the realm's money remembers longer than the realm does.

The Grimwold oathtakers' offices in the Saltmere — rows of small dim rooms where lies come to be tasted and contracts come to be true.

Terraced harvest-gardens and drying racks deep on the marked paths, where the Rootwild's physic herbs are gathered, graded, and bundled for the capital.

The narrow hall where the Saltmere's ninety-one-year penance is assessed, argued, and paid — the most resented address in the quarter.

The Saltmarches' great salt-pan works — shallow evaporation beds, windmill pumps, and rakers harvesting the grey crust that pays the Grey Tithe.

A grey-trade channel haven deep in the reed maze — moorings, a lantern-code, and a tavern raft where cargo changes hands and no one was ever there.

The deepest Root shrine — a descent among the oldest roots in the realm, where pilgrims whisper a question into the dark and some claim the dark answers.

The Saltmere's preserved-goods exchange: a covered market where the realm's salted, smoked, and pickled wealth is graded and traded by the barrel.

A roofless hall of grey standing stones carved with the names of everyone the Brine Revolt killed — the debt the Saltmere is still paying down.

The Chittik colony-mound whose scent-archive keeps the Brine Ledger's true books — everyone in the Marches knows of it, and nobody can point to it on a chart.

A bonded family grove of the Whitegall line — one tree for each living kin, and one tree standing healthy and unvisited whose name is no longer said aloud.

Fern Duskwell's apothecary shopfront on Physic Row — three storeys of drawers, drying-lines, and debts, where half the quarter gets its medicine and the other half gets terms.

The seasonal barge-city of the Riverspine: a thousand hulls lashed into streets at the spring flood, gone by first frost — the matriarchs' parliament and the river's beating heart.

The river-law court of the Riverspine: a Longwar flagship hull moored midstream on great chains, standing on no kingdom's ground and answering to no quarter.

The floating market of the Riverspine — a slow flotilla of lashed trade-rafts that drifts a season-long circuit of the braids, selling everything the river carries.

The largest tenement stack in Rootden — six storeys, four courts, nine hundred souls, and a landlord nobody has ever seen.

The pauper's burial ground behind Rootden's east wall — garden-rows for the city's unclaimed dead, greener than anywhere else in the quarter.

The seven-chambered great lock that lifts barges past the Greatfall cataract — the Riverspine's one gate, with the toll-town of Lockhale clinging to its cut.

Mirren Alderleaf's free clinic in a converted grain-cellar — the only door in Coronal where treatment costs nothing and every death gets counted.

An eelgrass backwater off the main braids — a night-anchorage of mismatched lanterns where quiet cargo and quieter passengers change hands.

Rootden's communal bath-house — herb-steamed pools in an old malting, where the quarter soaks its aches and trades its news under Nettle Marrow's ear.

Rootden's communal well and washing court — the quarter's oldest water, its loudest gossip, and after curfew, the ground floor of the rooftop songs.