Olegton¶
Olegton stands on the spot where the Pentarchs first set foot in the Stolen Lands. It was Oleg's Trading Post then: a frontier waystation, a palisade, a place to buy what you had forgotten and hear what had gone wrong lately. The Pentarchy drew up plans there, gathered what it needed, and chartered a settlement on the same ground.
The name was not Oleg's idea. It is generally agreed that he would have preferred it not to happen, which is precisely why it did — "just put Oleg's name on everything," as the Pentarch of Revelation put it, "so he's immortalised in ways he never wanted."
It is the kingdom's working town. Where the capital does government and Wyrmwatch does the border, Olegton does trade and metal and livestock, and it does them at a volume that has repeatedly outrun its own streets.
What Stands There¶
The Marketplace takes up half the first block and is the reason the rest of the town exists. Goods that come down from the north come through here first.
The Smithy was broken ground by Perry Marlowe, drawing on the kingdom's stockpiles of ore and stone, and it changed what Olegton was for. A forge on the northern march meant armour and tools no longer had to travel, and the town's metalwork is now better than a settlement its size has any right to.
The Stockyard occupies an entire block on its own — the largest single work anyone has raised outside the capital, and the clearest statement of what Olegton intends to be.
There is no town hall yet, and no mill. Both are wanted. The absence of the first means Olegton's business moves through the capital more often than its people would like.
The Crowding¶
Olegton grew faster than its infrastructure could carry, and for one hard stretch it showed. The streets were crowded. The queue at the well was long. Families slept three to a room, and the goodwill of families sleeping three to a room has a shelf life that the Pentarchy was not inclined to test.
Houses went up. They followed the survey lines Perry Marlowe had laid down the previous autumn — whole blocks of sturdy timber-frame dwellings, built to a plan rather than wherever there was space, which is why the town's second district is laid out straighter than its first.
On a sharp bright morning in mid-Calistril, when those new houses opened their doors for the first formal market day, Olegton crossed the threshold from village to town.
The Fields¶
The plot south of Olegton had been asking for cultivation since the thaw — flat, dark-soiled, drainage running clean toward the river. It is farmland now, and it is part of why the granary at the capital is an accounting matter rather than a prayer.