The Keepers
Marga
Marga kept the col-house for the better part of a lifetime before Toll, and she is the one who took him in when he arrived at the top of the pass with nothing left. She fed him, gave him a thing worth doing, and — when the mornings grew…
Oswyn
Oswyn is the founder — the road-builder who raised the col-house from a shepherd's ruined shelter and became its first keeper. Weary at the end of a long working life, he stopped at the top of the pass, kept a fire and a kettle going…
Regulars of the Road
Fenwick
Fenwick is the mapmaker who crosses the col each spring and autumn — the col-house's newspaper and its window on the wider road. It was travellers' word, carried by men like him, that first named the place "the kettle house." He keeps an…
Hetty
Hetty keeps the col-house supplied, hauling barley and stores up the pass twice a season and refusing, most times, to be thanked for it. Practical, warm, and entirely without sentiment, she has traded through these mountains for decades…
