The town of Harrow existed because geography demanded it.
Wedged between three territories — Vane to the north, Mourne to the east, the Eastern Council's administered lands to the south — it was the kind of place that had made itself useful to everyone specifically by being owned by no one. Its streets were stone-cobbled and old, its buildings the particular shade of grey that came from decades of rain on certain kinds of limestone, its population a mix of human merchants, unmated wolves between packs, and the category of person who existed on the margins of both worlds and found Harrow's ambiguity convenient.
She arrived on a grey morning with Aldric somewhere behind her — three blocks, he'd said, no closer, dressed as a merchant in transit, which he pulled off with the ease of someone
