Compiled from district records, Registry circuit returns, and four generations of correspondence Attributed to the Lorekeeper tradition

A note on this survey

Of the eight surveys this is the shortest, and it ought to be the longest.

The Boundary Lands hold the great majority of the people in the Heartlands and grow nearly all of its food. By any reasonable estimate they contain more unexamined ruins than the other seven regions put together. Yet the Lorekeeper archive holds less on them than on any other part of the dominion, including a forest nobody has crossed and a plain under a sky that is only partly sky.

For four centuries this tradition has described the strange well and the ordinary poorly, and the Boundary Lands are where the ordinary lives.

Classification

Region: The Boundary Lands Designation: Settled agricultural country between the House regions Associated House: None. Local allegiance to whichever seat is nearest Elevation: Rolling, low to moderate Climate: Temperate, regular, and the most predictable weather in the Heartlands

Primary Phenomenon: The Roads Are Right and the Ground Is Not

The Boundary Lands have no chiming snow or moving forest, and no mirage. What they have is a fact about distance that every carter knows and no scholar has explained.

On the roads, distance is exact. A journey between two market towns takes what the road says it takes. It takes the same time in either direction, and the same time this month as last, and a laden waggon makes it in the same time as a laden waggon a decade ago. Boundary Lands road-times are the most reliable figures in the Heartlands, and every trade route in the dominion is planned on them.

Off the roads, it varies. Cut across country between the same two points and the crossing takes a different time each day. The difference is modest and never dangerous: a morning's walk that comes in at three hours, then five, then a little under three again, with no weather or obstacle to account for it and no mistake in the walking.

Nobody has been lost to it. The ground between the roads simply never measures the same way twice, and everyone who lives here has arranged their life around that without finding it strange, much as people who have always lived by the sea pay no attention to the tide.

What follows from it

This one quality explains the region's greatest oddity.

The Boundary Lands are the most populous part of the Heartlands and the least explored. Those two things ought not to sit together, and the roads are why they do.

A shepherd finds a stone doorway in a fold of ground four miles from the track. He marks the way and goes home, and a week later brings three people back. They cannot find it. They know exactly where they are, and the fold of ground is simply missing. The following spring one of them stumbles on it by accident while looking for a sheep.

The archive holds hundreds of accounts of this shape, from every district and across four centuries, written by people with no reason to invent them who mostly seem irritated to be writing at all. Districts keep lists of the things somebody once found. The lists are long, but they are no use as maps, because nobody has ever made an off-road map of the Boundary Lands that worked twice.

The region's history is still lying in it, in country laid out so that nobody can go and fetch it.

Terrain and Geography

Surface

Fields and grazing, hedgerow and coppice, cut through by rivers and roads. Woodland comes in patches here, never in sweeps. The upland districts have stone walls and the low ones hedges. The country is beautiful in a quiet way without making anything of it, and visitors from the House regions often find it restful and sometimes dull.

The land rises toward each House region and falls away toward the Basin. Nowhere is there a border. The Boundary Lands turn into the Sablemire Lowlands over about thirty miles of ever wetter ground, and nobody who lives on that ground could tell you which region they are standing in.

The year

The sky of the Heartlands does not move, and the effect is felt most here, because here it is farmed.

Each season lasts exactly three months and arrives on the day it is expected. Spring never comes early and the frost has never come a fortnight late. A Boundary Lands almanac written two centuries ago is still correct.

The year runs on it. Sowing comes in the first month of spring and lambing through the second, with the hay in early summer and the grain at its end. Autumn is for slaughter and salting. The pigs go into the coppice for mast, and the ground is turned and left. Winter is for repair and weaving, brewing, courting and argument. Then it all begins again on the day it is supposed to.

Every other farming people the Lorekeepers have records of lives in fear of a year going wrong. The Boundary Lands never have, and that is the main reason this region can feed a continent.

What grows

Everything, in abundance. Wheat, barley and oats grow in the open country, with orchards on the slopes. The market gardens near the towns grow roots and brassicas. There are cattle and sheep in the uplands, and pigs everywhere.

What hunts

Ordinary predators in ordinary numbers, taking ordinary livestock. Wolves keep to the north and west, while foxes and raptors are found throughout. The occasional bear comes down from the high ground near the Chiming Snow.

Everything else that troubles the Boundary Lands belongs under Hazards, since none of it is an animal.

Population and Settlement

Who lives here

Nearly everybody.

There are no cities. There are a handful of large towns and a great many small ones, with villages beyond counting. The pattern is a market town ringed by a day's travel of villages, repeated across the whole width of the dominion, on roads laid down for that purpose and never in need of changing since.

Life here comes closer to unremarkable than anywhere else in the Heartlands. People work and live. They keep whatever festivals and entertainments their district has, and they marry within about a day's ride. A trade caravan or a bard arriving is an event worth remembering the date of.

Who governs

Formally, the nearest House. In practice the House is felt the way an ordinary person feels any distant seat of government, as something real and acknowledged that almost never matters on a Tuesday.

Real governance is local, in layers. Minor houses and landed families hold the districts, with every degree of competence that implies. Under them the towns and villages run themselves. A dispute goes to the mayor, if the district has one and the mayor is any good. Failing that it goes to whoever the district actually trusts, which usually means a particular person instead of an office: a miller or a widow, a retired courier, someone whose judgement has been right often enough for long enough. It works, and the Registry finds it impossible to file.

When a matter is beyond all of them, a district falls back on whatever practitioner happens to be passing. That is far less reliable than it sounds, and it is still what happens.

The House shadow

A Borderlands community picks up the habits of its nearest House without ever having been contacted by it.

The clearest case in the archive is a district three days' travel from the grazing line of the Turtle-Groves, where every farm plants in the same offset rows Vaulin use on shell soil. That pattern suits flat ground badly, and forty miles further east nobody uses it. Asked why, the growers say it is how planting is done. Asked who taught them, they say their fathers. Asked whether they have ever met anyone from Vaulin, most say they have not.

The same thing shows in idiom and superstition, in how people treat a stranger and in what they count as a rude question. It arrives through proximity and trade over four hundred years, and it is why a traveller who has crossed the whole dominion can usually name the nearest seat without being told.

Outsiders

Rare and welcome, and talked about for weeks afterward.

Economic Value

The Boundary Lands feed the Heartlands. Nearly all of the dominion's grain, meat, dairy, wool, leather, timber and cloth comes from here, in such quantity that the region produces a surplus every ordinary year.

That makes it the region the Heartlands could least do without, and the one with the least power. Both follow from the same circumstance.

Surplus moves along the roads to the market towns, and from there to the House seats and the Basin, while payment travels back the other way. It is an enormous, unglamorous trade, and it depends entirely on road-times that hold to the hour. That is the second reason the roads matter as much as they do.

Hazards

The Boundary Lands are misdescribed in two opposite directions at once, and the two errors combine into something worse than either.

Fewer strange things happen here than in any House region. That is plainly true. The Chiming Snow meets more in a season than a Boundary Lands district sees in twenty years.

More people die of them here than anywhere else. That is just as plainly true, and it matters more.

The cause lies in distance. Protection works like a field, weakening the further one goes from a seat. Whatever a House region carries, it meets early, through people whose whole working life is meeting it. The Boundary Lands lie between the seats, inside none of them. Help exists and is usually competent, but it is one to three weeks away, and in the outer districts it is as far off as the next practitioner who happens to be passing.

The cost here is counted in delay more than in disasters. Something that would be an afternoon's work near a House seat takes two barns and a boy of fourteen out here, and the district remembers his name for four generations.

What actually comes:

Aura beasts, wandering in from a region that could no longer hold their attention. Uncommon, and usually smaller than the story that follows them.

Deepening events, rare and localised. A season's crop lost, ground that will not take seed, a well gone wrong. The truly severe ones come once in a generation and are still spoken of.

People, by a wide margin the commonest kind. Banditry on the outer roads and raiding on the district edges. Small wars between landed families, fought at a scale that would embarrass a House and taken entirely seriously by the villages the fighting crosses.

The ordinary things, which take more Boundary Landers than everything above combined: a bad birth or a bad fall, a river in spate, a fever moving through a valley three weeks from a physician.

None of this makes the Boundary Lands a frightening place to live, and the people who live there do not feel it as one. An unlucky year is answered late here, and the last one is remembered in close detail. Outsiders take that for morbidity, when it is the local form of insurance.

Open Questions

Why are the roads exact? They were laid in the Age of Settlement by people who left no account of the method, across ground that will not hold a consistent measurement four hundred yards to either side. Either the roads were set on something already reliable, or laying a road makes ground reliable, and the archive cannot tell which.

Can the off-road inconsistency be measured, as well as reported? Every attempt has produced figures that disagree with each other, and that may be the phenomenon itself or only the difficulty of measuring it.

How much is out there? Every district has its list of things somebody once found, and nobody has ever gathered the lists together.

And the question the Lorekeepers ought to have asked four hundred years ago: why did a tradition founded to record what is true write so little about the place where nearly everyone lives?

The likeliest answer is that the strange is easier to write about than the ordinary. That is a failing of scholars, and it says nothing about the Boundary Lands. This survey is a first step toward correcting it, and a small one.

This survey is maintained by the Lorekeeper tradition. Field corrections and additional observations may be submitted to any recognized archive.