Thornhold

The mainland kingdom is walled twice over, and the two walls tell its whole history: the inner wall is older than the treaty, raised by east-Karan clans who trusted nobody, and the outer wall went up in the onslaught years, when Thornhold took in more refugees than it had citizens and then refused, against every sensible counsel, to close its gates. The Book of the Second Wall records the names of everyone who carried stone for it. The Hall of Lore stands beside that book now, which is no accident: Thornhold is where the world keeps what it will not let itself forget.

It is also, the honest histories admit, where the world keeps what it chose to forget: the founders burned the town's first records in a single deliberate night, and the four careful pages the Book spends not explaining why are the most read pages in it. Thornhold's crown rules the dry east with a plainness the other courts mistake for simplicity, keeps the largest standing muster of the four, and has never once answered a question about the burned archive. The town's unofficial motto does the answering: WE WROTE DOWN WHAT WE COULD LIVE WITH.