At the Crow Fork, the North Road splits, one arm reaching across the wastes toward the fabled Bridge of Iban Ja, where the Crow Road begins. There stands Crow Fork Market, an ancient trading post and bastion against the hobgoblin raiders who harry and destroy civilized outposts throughout the wastes between the Blackfall and the Draco Serrata Mountains to the north. Over the centuries the market had grown from a collection of tents to a fortified settlement and staging area. It sprawled and wound behind timber walls and beneath the pitiless sun of the wasted lands that stretch from the North Road away from the Blackfall toward the mountains. Remy had gone there for the first time a month before his father died, on a trading excursion in the company of a dozen other men and boys, of whom Remy was the youngest by more than a year. On that trip he had learned most of what he knew of the folklore of the Crow Road and the Draco Serrata. Those were stories for the campfire on the trip from Avankil; by the end of the trip, when the timbered walls had heaved out of the hazy glimmer at the horizon, Remy had been ablaze with the desire to see the world beyond the city he had known.

As he had fallen asleep that night, within sight of the glow of great fires and magical illumination inside Crow Fork Market, Remy had dreamed of going there again. And that night he had dreamed of taking ship and seeing the cities and towns of the Dragondown Coast: Karga Kul the largest, but Furia, Toradan and Saak-Opole each with their own histories and points of interest to an urchin who had rarely ventured beyond the walls of Avankil.

He had never dreamed that it would be six years before he saw Crow Fork Market again, or that when he saw it he would ride by, his errand too pressing to admit digression.