The Wrongwood

Overview

The Wrongwood is the valley in the south-eastern foothills of the Headwater Marches where the Qzoth Incursion (c. 4,000-c. 3,500 BR) was burned back, grown over since into thick woodland round the ash-mounds of its towns. Kindless Broods still breed there, and the Changing Fever still rises from its ground.

The Place

It lies past the last farmed valley, where the hills climb towards the unmapped country under the unnamed range. Old terrace walls run under the trees, and the towns are low mounds of fused ash and bone with oaks growing out of them. The wood is wrong in small ways: bark like hide, a spring that runs warm and smells of milk, tracks no beast should leave. The burned ground keeps the protean spores asleep; dig or plough it and they wake. Under the mounds, by the valley's telling, lie the towns' strongrooms and the bones of the people who would not leave them, and every generation some delver with a spade proves the tale right and pays for it. The mound of the last town, the one that burned itself, is the largest, glassed on top where the fire ran hottest, and nothing grows on it. Hunters say the Broods will not cross that glass, and a hunt that goes wrong runs for it and waits there for daylight.

Keepers and Users

No lord claims it. The valley below keeps a watch on its edge by old custom, hunts Brood beasts with fire, and burns any sound beast that has mated with one. The brood-hunters are the valley's own sons and daughters, paid a bounty per head by the lords downriver, and they go in with torches, spears, and oil, never alone and never after dark; the valley's children are raised on the hunter who followed a wrong-born bear into the mounds and came out three days later burned to the waist with its head, and every hunt still drinks to her at the bridge before it goes in. Its own custom forbids felling, digging, or burying there; a few timber-cutters go in anyway for oaks nobody else will cut. The bounty draws outsiders too: sellswords and beast-hunters from the road towns who do not know the custom, hunt by night, and leave a carcass unburned. The valley watches them harder than it watches the wood.

The Medieval Present

Most years nothing comes out but a wrong-born fox or boar, and the hunt is quiet business that lords pay to keep quiet. Once or twice in a lifetime someone breaks the ground, the fever comes down the valley, the bridge is closed to strangers, and Red Mercy burners come up the road. The bridge into the valley carries a cut name for every hunter the wood has kept, and the valley says burn it twice of anything it wants truly finished, a quarrel or a beast.

History

Explained in the Qzoth Incursion: the last town of the valley was the town that burned itself.

Tensions

• The oaks. Wrongwood oaks are the tallest in the Marches.
• The strongroom. A company of treasure-diggers from the road towns has bought a lord's leave to open the mound nearest the valley edge, on the tale of its strongroom, and has hired the valley's own young hunters to guard the dig with fire.
• The burned herds. A herd that one Brood beast has run with is burned whole, and it ruins the family that owned it.