Stone Oast

Stone Oast is one of the old Wold lordships that survived after the country stopped needing a small warlord every twelve miles. Its name belongs to the feuds and pursuits of the later 4200s, during the Time of Trouble. The Feud of Stone Oast grew out of wealth from the kilns and the pressure of local oaths, and slowly turned a household grievance into danger on the roads. Together with the tolls at Grey Weir and the long hunt along the ridge road the Wold still calls the Pursuit, it produced the usages that still govern the open ground, made without any court or statute by people running from one another; the Water Court and its drover judges come out of the same quarrel. Older registers also mention a three-day fight at Stone Oast, but no account of it survives.

The hall is held by Baron Matthew Quire, whose family ranks among the Lesser Houses. He holds directly of the Crown, so in law he owes nothing to any of the four Great Houses, and he spends much of his life turning down invitations that would make him one of their men. He is rich in grazing and short of ready money, strict about hunting and water rights, and the first of the Wold's free lords to hire outsiders when he will not hire locally, especially when a quarrel touches House ground. The hall is a working country stronghold, not a modern fort: an old square tower, a short wall around barns and a deep well, and a gatehouse that was rebuilt once the last Baron War was over.

Owning Stone Oast is not the same as commanding it. Captain Hugh Deane, the baron's constable, keeps the keys and the powder room, commands the gate's four swivel guns and the household watch, and decides who is on the list to sleep within the wall. If Deane thinks the hall is threatened, even a letter from Quire is only something to argue with. People on the Wold say the well inside the wall did not fail in the dry summer of 4611, when wells all round the shoulder sank. The drove-road books complicate the picture: they describe Stone Oast, farther south on the drove, as a burnt-out fortified grain house left from the Pursuit, now used mainly as a weather mark. Whether that ruin is an older work on the baron's land or another place with the same name has not been settled.

Ask Quire for employment; ask Deane for entry after dark, and do not argue with him at the gate. Never assume the baron is any House's client, and say so in front of him at your peril. Respect his hunting and water unless invited.