It would be fair to say that Journey suffered because of Haven. Over the last three and a half years, it had gone from a bustling, trading town, to an isolated village. Since Haven and Wasolan had gone to war, slave traders from Wasolan had stopped passing through Journey, they never made it that far. Caravans from Altok had skipped Journey and passed through Outpost instead, or simply gone straight to Haven.
Eventually, slave traders from Ovek had stopped passing through Journey, too. Not because of any threat to their safety, but simply because it wasn’t worth it. Ovek didn’t particularly care about Wasolan, and certainly didn’t need them for anything.
Some people had simply moved to Satek, which was just as bustling as ever, and could use some more cartwrights and smiths and the like. A lot of people had stayed, not convinced that actually living in a slaving nation would be better than their newfound isolation.
Ato wasn’t the first person to suggest that Haven should take over Journey. She was too busy working with Borirnna to liberate the other old Independent Cities to involve herself in the process anyway.
Journey could easily produce enough food for the thirty-odd people who remained there. They didn’t need any help from outside. But with no traders passing through, no way to make money, they were missing the luxuries they’d once enjoyed.
With only a small excess of food and hemp, divided unevenly among those thirty-odd people, Journey was in the rapid process of passing into obscurity. The final blow came when the proprietor of the Journey Tavern packed up and moved to Haven.
The tavernkeep wasn’t the only person who had been on pretty good terms with Tengu, and wasn’t the only person who saw the end of the siege at Lookout as the perfect time to move to Haven. A number of the old caravanserai workers followed his example.
Most of the old merchants and craftspeople in the shrinking village knew enough about Haven to not particularly want to move there. Maybe they hadn’t made any kind of money in the last three and a half years, but they wanted to keep the possibility open to themselves just in case.
Even when the news that Borirnna had liberated itself from Wasolan passed them by, many still held on to the hope that trade would resume between Ovek and Wasolan.
It felt very like pity when a party from Haven stopped through Journey to buy some extra food on the way to Wasolan. No one was going to turn them down, though. Absent the tavern and most of the caravanserai workers, those people who wanted to sell to the party had to actually meet them in person to negotiate prices.
The tailor didn’t so much test the waters as belly-flop into the deep end. ‘This is all that Tengu woman’s fault,’ he complained, directly to someone from Haven. ‘If she hadn’t…’ He gestured vaguely at the well-equipped group and the wastes behind them. ‘We would still be prosperous here.’
The woman he was talking to, a woman called Weir, laughed at him. ‘Nothing so bad as having been prosperous, is there?’
He didn’t appreciate that, but didn’t have the luxury of avoiding her.
Weir was the most adventurous of the ‘inventors’, so she had volunteered to go to Kzara to teach them how to make the stationary crossbows. The rest were busy ignoring her advice and using all this new Iron from the mill to start work on a steam engine.
Journey didn’t have any of its own access to mines or quarries or woodland, they had always relied on people passing through to get the supplies they needed. Weir bought the last of the copper in town off some of the old caravanserai workers and mentioned, in passing, that Altok was still very good for caravan workers.
The trouble with Altok, for those people stubborn enough to stay in Journey, was that Altok didn’t like them. Altok had jumped at the opportunity to avoid Journey on the way through the wastes, as had Kzara. Why would anyone go to Altok if Altok didn’t want them.
In rapid succession, Journey received three more final blows. Ivterran and Catabron had both managed to free themselves from Wasolan, some eight months after Borirnna had done it. And then Ovek, without any apparent prompting from anyone, renounced their claim on much of their land along the western edge of the wastes.
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Ovek had only bothered claiming that land in the first place to move their border close to Journey, as a show of support. Nearly half the town up and moved to Altok, despite the steadily increasing number of people passing by from Haven.
Journey could barely sustain its own trade with the population it had had. There wasn’t enough money for anyone to be hiring each other to work on the farm. So the land had been divvied up before the farmer moved his family to Ovek. There was enough to feed everyone, with a little left over to trade.
Some people had managed the odd hunting trips to get some meat, and sold it very cheaply to their neighbours, or traded it for vegetables they hadn’t bothered to grow themselves. Journey was functioning fine. It just wasn’t what it had been.
While the tailor had his own garden around his shop, he only grey hemp in the farm, and traded his services for whatever food he felt like he wanted. He didn’t appreciate it when someone from Haven pointed out that that was basically how it worked back home.
The next final blow came when Kzara successfully push through Wasolan’s defences out west and forced them back nearly sixty years of expansion, away from Journey. With agreements from Kzara and the once again Independent Cities, Altok expanded south down the river and west.
A few more people left for Haven. There weren’t enough people left for the tailor to trade his services with, and he had to add more food to his growing plot on the farm. Except that there weren’t enough people left in Journey to keep the farmland running at its old capacity and the amount of food produced was shrinking along with the population.
It wasn’t Tengu who folded the remains of Journey into Haven, but they did it the same way she’d begun to change Haven all those years ago. A couple of people, in the next group to pass through Journey, asked how they would buy some of the empty houses in town.
No one had bought them from their previous owners, no one had that much money, or any need for more houses. They didn’t belong to anyone in particular. It was the tailor himself, after overhearing some musing on the subject from the people from Haven, who suggested to the remaining ten people in town that they sell this empty land as a town, and split the profits.
The economic boom in Journey lasted two months. Three of the old houses were bought by a couple of families from Haven. Then they bought the farmland that was no longer being used. Suddenly everyone in town had money, and they could pay for things again.
Trouble being that there wasn’t much to pay for. The tailor was the last dedicated craftsperson left in Journey. He became the richest man in town as people bought the nicest clothes he could make just for something to spend their money on.
There was nothing for the tailor to spend his newfound fortune on. The people who moved in from Haven were happy to trade for services. The village was much livelier than it had been in years. Now that they’d bought the houses, they didn’t feel much need to spend more money.
It was another three months, and another four families from Haven, before the actual final blow came to Journey. These new people, used to the technological conveniences in Haven, like electric lighting and indoor plumbing, wanted to upgrade Journey’s water, and build up a new power system.
‘It would just feel unfair, you know,’ complained a man called Osmond. ‘For us to build all this stuff and then charge you all to use it, since there’s no money coming into town.’
The tailor, still the richest man in Journey, seethed as the rest of the town agreed that there was no real need to pay each other for things. They could trade if they needed to, but there was nothing wrong with sharing, they supposed.
And so, ten and a half years after Tengu had first arrived in Journey, she took over the town without having even been there in over six years. When, eventually, the tailor got the change to complain to her in-person, she shook her head and told him that he was giving her too much credit.
The takeover of Journey concluded the completely obsolete plan to cut Wasolan off from Ovek. They had already been completely cut off from each other for over a year, since the Independent Cities took back their homes.
Journey didn’t grow as rapidly as some places in Haven had, but it certainly did grow. Combined with some new farms on the outskirts of the wastes, Journey became something like the hub of travel it had once been. Cravans from Altok and Kzara passed through on the way to Haven or Yarkot or Narmen. Caravans from Haven or Yarkot or Narmen passed through on their way to Altok or Kzara.
The tailor continued to seethe, but he couldn’t deny that things were almost getting back to normal. And, as much as he hadn’t minded all the slave caravans, they weren’t nearly as fruitful for the rest of the town as the food and resources that passed back and forth across the wastes.
He absolutely did not notice how different such a thought was to something he would have thought only a few months ago. He also didn’t notice how much better everyone seemed to be getting along these days.