Wethercross had been a crossroads with a shrine, a smithy, and six houses. By the time Genna walked into it, it was the fourth largest town in the county, and nobody in it had chosen to live there. The roads met on a shelf of dry ground between two flooded bottoms, which is why the roads had always met there. The Cracking had turned the dry shelf into a bottleneck with four counties trying to pass through it in both directions. The camp had organized itself as camps do, by wagon and by parish and by rumor: a gray-brown sprawl of tents and tarps and tempers. The rumors ran to form: the far counties were worse, the near counties were next, and the Academy Provincial had opened its emergency writs, and gray registrars were already out measuring what the ground had done. It was the only rumor in the camp she approved of. Over it, providing what was being called order, flew the goose banner of Lord Vance Ellery, whose land this was, and whose men stood at the crossroads in matched livery directing traffic with the particular officiousness of soldiers who had discovered they would not, after all, be required to fight anything. Genna had planned to be through Wethercross by noon and sleeping past it by dark. She had it staked out in her head, because she staked everything now: one water stop, one bearing check, gone. The plan survived until the water stop. "Mistress Busterson." The man was at her elbow before she had heard him arrive, which in a camp of four thousand people spoke of practice. He was forty, spare, dressed in good gray wool with the goose worked small at the collar, carrying no visible weapon and a ledger under one arm with the…