The oldest roads on Caeldon were laid by the Upland Colossal world, which built the first great road network and then withdrew, leaving its roads without their builders. Its ridge roads still run along the heights. The greatest of them, the Long Tread, runs for weeks along the outer crest of the Ironspine from one gate to the next, too broad for any living builder. In the Broken Marches the Tallgrade runs on a grade too broad and too even for anyone now alive to have laid. Troll lines took charge of that network’s crossings under sworn charges while it stood, and kept the oaths after it was gone. Survivor lines walked the abandoned roads in seasonal circuits and became the Salvage Peoples. Much later, Human corridor powers set debt-bound Ogre camps to work on roads and fortifications, and Humans and Dwarves built the Headwater exchange roads over the same country, partly with that labour.

Every one of those layers is still on the ground. A medieval caravan on a Headwater road may cross a Dwarven bridge older than the town beside it, follow a stretch cut and embanked by a chain-camp whose camp-marks still name it, climb onto a colossal grade the kindreds keep, and pay a Troll house that holds its ravine by an oath older than any lordship. Younger frontier and war roads cross the colossal grades on worse foundations and fail first. Colossal roads fail too, without warning, because they are too large to mend properly, and a crew clearing one may lift a slab and find what the old builders sealed beneath it: mostly rubble, now and then a vault. And each layer’s keepers still demand a say in how the road is used, and back it with whatever spears they have.

This is the thread the histories call Roads and Crossings, and it runs into the medieval present as fought-over passage, repair forced on the weak while the strong take the tolls, Troll tolls nobody living ever granted, kindred keepright against a lord’s word, and at the Greyford Reach a failing bridge where every grudge on the thread meets at once.

The word means different things in different countries, and a traveller who mistakes one kind for another is in trouble before the first toll.

A river. On the Lower Serath the river is the road. Downstream travel is fast and cheap on the current. Upstream is slow, by towpath and pole, and much of it goes by land along the rises. Ferries tie the banks together at every town. River-thieves lie up in the reeds, wreckers light false marks above the shoals, and every bargemaster hires sellswords against both. In the Headwater Marches the opposite holds: above the basin edge the rivers run too steep and fast for boats, so they are crossed, not travelled, and bridges and fords decide where the roads can go.

A built road. The exchange roads of the Headwater Marches climb from the basin Sheaf Road through walled foothill towns and waystations to the outer gates of the Dwarven holds, over Dwarven stonework and Ogre-cut embankments (see The Basins and the Marches). In the Ironspine the passes are hold roads, walled, gated, and shut in winter, and the oldest follow colossal ridge roads.

A kept path. The Elderweald has no roads, only paths walked open rather than cut, along which a watcher from the nearest grove leads every visitor (see The Forest Heartlands). Human roads stop at the treeline, so traffic between the basins and the Ironspine goes round by the Headwater Marches.

A way by leave. In the Crownboughs the main roads are in the air: boughways running hall to hall and court to court, each belonging to the house whose growth carries it, so that travel aloft is by leave, and a fall from one is the ordinary death of the careless. Under the Ironspine the underways run hold to hold through the rock, the safest roads in the belt and the most closed, each hold keeping its own stretch and granting passage on its leave, while Kobold crews use service ways between them that no hold has mapped. In the Stonewake Deeps the warded corridors run junction to junction, and the greatest route of all is the Hauling Stair, the shaft by which stores come down and ore goes up.

A spoken way. In the Roothollows movement runs along the Known Ways, the routes the route keepers count survivable, kept spoken rather than written and learned by mouth and by foot. Under the old oath of refuge a Known Way is the only kind of route along which someone in need may be sent on, so adding a route or striking one off is never only a matter of where the water has risen.

A line of knowledge. On the High Scars a road is not a built surface at all but a line of cairns, shelters, warning ridges, and treaty-ground ledges where parties change hands (see The Windscar). On the fading lines the Cairn-Wakers stand across the route, escorts who failed to warn and cannot rest, and no party passes one without a word for the dead.

A water road. In the Rimward Basins there are no rivers, and routes run from one water source to the next; a route is only as open as the last well on it, and struck-name raiders know it. On the Tidelace the highways are water and every one is marked: the Lacework, the inner channels behind the islands, surveyed by the nearest sounding house and its marks moved only in front of the families who set them; the faster outer roads seaward of the islands, which close first in fog and storm. In the Tidebound Reaches the roads are currents and rivers, and almost nothing on them is cargo: what moves is people, clutches, notice, and memory, carried home in return season on the great current road called the Homeward Set, with blackfin pods following.

A timed road. The Lee Road runs from the Leeward fold markets to the Rimward Basins under Windscar escort and keeps Halfling market timing, so that a party off its day waits, and can lose its season waiting.

Almost every crossing on Caeldon has a keeper and a toll. What the toll buys is the question.

Where a road meets water, the water usually wins in the end, and every crossing is a bargain with that.

In the basins and on the Serath fords shift and banks slump, and some crossings lie about their own depth to anyone who has not watched them for a generation. In the Headwater Marches a bridge that stood for a century can go in an afternoon, and most fords are usable only in the low months. The oldest Headwater bridges are Dwarven, and the rivers there were channelled and bridged by Dwarven work before any Human town stood on their banks.

The Greyford crossing shows the whole repertoire in one valley: a lord’s bridge of old stone piers and newer timber spans set inside a braid of side channels, gravel bars, ferries, rope crossings, and low-water routes, where Goblin side-ford families and Kindred guides stake the fords in the low months, rope a party together, and go first with a pole. And at dusk the dead of old crossings are seen on the span, which is one reason the gate shuts at the dusk bell.

On the lower rivers the keepers are the Reedfolk, and no sensible boat crosses the Reedmere without one of their pilots, whoever takes the toll at the landing. In the Briarreach the one reliable through-route follows the cut of the Sallow, a narrow, silt-heavy river whose crossings are kept by Troll houses and change hands, collapse, and reopen over generations, and where the Troll families pile a stone at every place a ravine cat has killed.

Some crossings are stairs. The Verge Stair, between the Ironspine and the Crownboughs, is a stone stair of Dwarven building that ends at a gate the High Elf courts grew; each side has kept its own half for longer than anyone can date, and most exchange is done on the landing between. On the Soundchain Roads the Gullstair and lesser cliff paths bring escorted parties and their herds down from the Windscar routes to the stations' beach yards.

Toll buys passage. Escort buys the chance of arriving, and on most of Caeldon’s dangerous roads it comes with a promise: that the escort will warn in time, and that if the road betrays the party, someone will pay for it in goods, in service, or in blood.

Between the keepers stand the places where travellers stop, and on most roads the stopping places decide the road more than the road does. Beyond them lie the wilds, wide and deadly, where nobody keeps the way and nobody can be called on, so nobody crosses them alone: travellers go in armed companies from one stopping place to the next, and a journey between regions is reckoned in weeks and months.

Each of them is described with its own country in the atlas.

The worst crossings and the longest roads belong, in practice, to peoples who hold no land at all. Their power lies in local memory, route knowledge, their name on the roads, and the plain fact that no distant lord can make a broken ravine safe by his word. Their orders are told in The Civilizations of the Medieval Era; on the road a traveller meets them like this.

The Troll crossing houses hold bridges, ravines, flooded causeways, landslide routes, and storm-torn passes in the Broken and Headwater Marches, the Briarreach, and the High Scars. A house decides when its crossing is too dangerous to use, warns of it, mends what the slides break, and names the Bridge-Dead at every repair, and escort captains on the High Scars have learned to bargain with it rather than override it. On the Human side of the Marches troll-hunting is a trade, and every crossing house hunts the hunters in turn. The Edgeway kindreds keep more road than anyone and are present at each piece of it only a few weeks a year. Their waymarks claim a ruin or grade its danger from braced to never-touch, and road-wardens follow the danger-marks without admitting it; where a kindred’s marks have been scraped off, it stacks the scraped stones at the waymark as an offering to Corrow the Gale-Runner and cuts the marks again nearby, and kindreds say the stacks hum in the wind. Their keepright over the works they keep is the source of most of their quarrels with the lords who depend on the same culverts.

Heavy work on the roads is done by Ogre bands of the Hearth-Weight Compacts, fed and sworn before any load moves, and in a hard season a walk-off can stop a route as surely as a slide. They haul dressed stone and beams on the Headwater roads and keep the winter roads open, driving the pass bears off the waystations every autumn with fire and staves; on the High Scars they clear rockfall, carry stores to the shelters, haul the injured down, and rebuild collapsed ledges. Goblin companies of the Iron Compacts hold frontier roads, fort watches, and gates under a lord’s warrant and bring back heads, not prisoners, and a new lord may tear up his father’s warrant and send a compact on the march to nowhere that every Goblin song remembers. Below ground the Kobold crews of the Underhouse Compacts keep the underlayers alive. Their underways and old service tunnels in the Broken Marches carry people and goods that would rather not be seen, treasure-seekers hire their guides for the sealed storeworks the crews break into, and a crew’s refusal closes a shaft without a single seal-mark.

On the water the keepers are pilots. Reedfolk pilots hold their berths on the braided Serath by whatever bargain their reach keeps, and a Floodkeeper house may refuse to sound a reach whose guarantor has ignored its flood warning, and leave the town to explain the closure to the carriers. On the Tidelace the harbour’s pilot families take the helm of any stranger’s craft at the harbour mouth; at the Sounding Gate a craft must take the channel in the window the harbour names, with one of the harbour’s pilots at the helm. At the far-side river mouths Gnome pilots sound the marked channels and keep hazard markers, while Thaluren run-watchers close the ascent channels in return season; a fishing passage is not a return run, and a return run is not coastal traffic, and the drowned on the shelves are what happens when someone forgets which is which.

On most of Caeldon news moves faster than goods, and the means of moving it are part of the road.

The far side builds for it. On the High Scars warning fires on one ridge can be read from the next shelf before a runner could cover half the distance, and older children graduate from running messages between camps to warning runs, carrying news of storm, slide, or raiding along the warning ridges faster than any caravan moves. Along the Soundchain Roads and the Tidelace headlands the beacon lines carry closings, fog warnings, and the days a held party may ask again far faster than any hull; a closing called at one station is burning on the next headlands by nightfall, and a harbour that misreads a neighbour’s light is shamed along the whole coast. In the Tidebound Reaches messengers swim ahead of a run to give notice at the mouths and upriver, and a Kavari village sees notice before it sees escorts and escorts before it sees a run.

The cradle moves news on paper and on foot. Letters and rolls travel with nearly every convoy on the Serath and the Sheaf Road: grants, guarantee rolls, debts, oaths, and the second copies careful scribes keep somewhere else, because a lost roll is a debt or a grant the stronger side can deny. Along the heights of the Ironspine and across the Broken Marches, salvage, news, and danger-warnings travel the kindred circuits, which link the Marches to ruin zones as distant as the Glassbelt and, by the one crossing over it, to the far side. Corridor carriers from the Serath brought the name of Ostrin the Lantern-Bearer up the Headwater roads to Greyford. Below ground, the Kobold crews' sound codes carry a warning through a whole underhouse.

From the Headwater valleys, valley folk read one more signal: the Weatherline, a chain of colossal weather shrines on the Stormcrown’s highest ridges that shows as a broken row of notches against the sky. When cloud hides the notches, the high roads will close before night.

A border on Caeldon is rarely a line. It is the point where another people’s keepers take charge, and what a stranger meets there says more about a people than any map. What follows is what a traveller meets first, people by people.