The river slows and widens behind a low headland, and the sea wind drops away as if someone had shut a door. Reeds hiss along the mouth. A shingle beach rattles under the backwash; a short timber jetty reaches out into brown water, and above the tide line stand a few boat sheds and cart sheds, black with tar, smelling of pitch and salt. Behind them a cart road leaves the shore, crosses a strip of salt meadow and climbs into the first hedges and apple trees. To the west, pale-barked forest comes down dark to the water's edge.
On a grey day it looks like very little: a working shore, gulls, drizzle on the river. But those who remember look at the beach and see it as it was, with dark-sailed longships lying in a row and carts of oil and pitch rolling away toward the orchards. Every sail off the river mouth now arrives carrying a question.
What a traveller finds
The Landing lies where the Greenfold's western river meets the Whale-Road Sea, close to the forest and boundary waters of Eilvaran. In ordinary years it is a working shore rather than a town, a place where boats can lie out of the swell and carts can meet them. From here the upper track climbs east into orchard country. It is one of the few places where the valley touches the open sea, and so one of the few where people arrive without having been introduced.
Its story
In the years of the Raven Marches, a Crown-aligned column of Skeldr sailed south by longship, passed the broken approaches of the Shattercoast and came ashore here. They unloaded carts, oil, pitch and search equipment, then marched east along the upper track, chanting as they went, until the lanes of the Greenfold burned on Bramble Night. They were one Crown-aligned force, not the Skeldr as a whole. Afterwards they went home paid in silver and praised in song; how they left the valley nobody recorded. Whether the Greenfold should now watch this shore, or close the upper track in bad times, is still argued over every hearth.