Belcarrow

Two-row barley off Belcarrow comes down the gulf to Nuirendil, fourteen hundred quarters a season, and Nuirendil settles in remitted wharf fees rather than coin. Belcarrow's factors have asked for coin at four assemblies running and taken the wharf fees each time.

Two thousand quarters of barley come off Belcarrow to Karagunn each autumn, carted over the ridge road under Karagunn's escort. The price is fixed in spring on the previous year's tonnage, which a garrison with fixed rations prefers and a grower with a variable crop does not.

Karagunn's watch-towers cover the ridge road and the Redgate approach, and Belcarrow pays in barley and in not asking what the pass toll is on paper. Karagunn wants nothing that reopens the arrangement, and Belcarrow is thought on the March to be costing what the ground would be worth without it.

Kaldwyn's eight working months run on two hundred quarters of Wolds barley and forty of salt mutton, all of it landed by boat because the coast road stops at Sturmhalt. Belcarrow ships it in three lifts along the shore and charges the whole season's freight against the first.

Prospern stands on a gravel bar and grows nothing, so its bread comes down the tundra track from the Wolds, ninety quarters of barley and a wagon of mutton every quarter-year. Belcarrow takes half the price in schooling and half in coin, and reviews the rate whenever the weirs have had a good run.

Four of the Wolds' watch-road clerks and both its tally-men were taught at Prospern, at eleven marks a head a year set against the barley account. Prospern also drafts Belcarrow's returns for the assembly, which is why the Wolds figures are the only ones the assembly does not argue about.

Duskenmoor's yard buys its whole provision off the Wolds, a hundred and twenty quarters of barley and the season's mutton, landed at the yard's own wharf. Belcarrow charges the yard a fifth above what it asks the Falkvald holdings on the same shore, calls the difference a Vaskarni rate, and says so openly.

Duskenmoor's ironletters found the precedent that lets the Wolds' watch road stand as a garrison work rather than an enclosure, which kept the ridge out of the assembly's hands. The fee came off the yard's grain account, and Belcarrow has since asked for two further opinions on the same terms.

Cindralis's compound is provisioned entirely off the Wolds: barley, mutton, tallow and hay, delivered inside the gate and weighed there. Belcarrow has begun asking a quarter of the price in advance, which Cindralis pays and enters as a loan.

Forty pilgrim parties a season are escorted the last stretch to Faenlorn's gate by men off the Wolds' watch road, at two marks a head. Belcarrow charges the same for parties that asked for no escort, on the reasoning that the road was walked either way.

Pilgrim season at Faenlorn runs eleven weeks and takes a hundred and forty quarters of barley and three hundred sheep, all of it off the Wolds and all of it carted in through the one gated track. Belcarrow sets the price once the pilgrim numbers are known, which Faenlorn has complained about in writing and continues to pay.

That same road was cut across the head of the birch hollow in 771 AF and has been widened twice since, each widening taking a few more yards of the only spade-deep loam in the cell. Faenlorn has entered the encroachment at the Forge every year for thirty years and asks only that the encroachment be recorded, not that the road be closed.

Eight hundred marks on the wool and two hundred on the barley in the hollows go out from Faenlorn's committee every spring against the Wolds' clip. Two bad barley years would leave a good part of the Reach's lending resting on a house whose stake is entered as Breaks, and the committee has minuted that rather than acted on it.

Nothing grows on volcanic waste, so Grimhaldr's kilns are fed on Wolds barley and salt mutton carted up the Redgate road, sixty quarters a quarter-year. Belcarrow has raised the price twice since the house went cold and has been paid both times without a word.