Part I: Animals

The animals on this shelf are the ones the peoples live with: the cattle of the basin meadows, the horses and mules that carry the roads, and the driven herds of the Windscar kindreds, for whom a herd is food, shelter, trade, and the currency in which wrongs are answered. Around them live the deer a lord keeps and a poacher hangs for, the fox at the hen-house, and the crows and owls that every people watches for what they mean. Further out are the beasts people hunt and are hunted by: the wolf at the fold gate in a hard winter, the bear at the mountain waystation, the boar that has killed more young lords than war in some basin houses, and the hog in the ruin cellar that in some seasons kills more salvagers than falling stone.

At the edges stand the beings the peoples know least, like the eyeless creatures of the reservoirs beneath the Elderweald, and the dragon, which no one has seen for a very long time and most believe never existed.