We visit the town of Redsand, a fishing village in a lagoon built over and around old tools of seige and from with stones taken from a nearby fallen castle, whose sands allegedly turn red from the rust of forgotten weapons.
It is the month of Tillsoil in the season of Leap, and it is cold and rainy and we are all quite miserable (save for SUPERB, who is living for all this mud and puddles). We stop to stay in a tavern, The Fisher & King, so named for the bird wives who run it (an egret and heron respectively). We get into dry clothes; we try the perpetual stew purported to be a decade old; Evangeline, Chicory, and Valerie try to decide who gets to be the adult in the room with the kids for the night; and SUPERB gets a cool rock from a fisherman. We also learn about one of the local legends of a wombat who played the fiddle so good in a contest against a demon that the demon folded itself up to live in the fiddle so it wouldn't have to live without his playing.
The following day we discovered there'd been a landslide off a hill by the lagoon due to neglect to the embankments that helped support it, risking the habitat of the lagoon. Evangeline set up shop in the square and chatted with an otter glassblower about regional news and some gossip, and Valerie joined them and found that the otter was knowledgeable about local history and folklore and learned a number of variations on the wombat story, as well as more about a rebellion cell that used to be in the area. Later, Valerie joined SUPERB on the beach and they both helped with the efforts to contain and repair the damage from the landslide. When they were done, Evangeline gifted SUPERB a glass fish from the otter. We closed watching the actions of a "teacher who lived in the stones" rolling into town, and Evangeline catching the notes of a song sung by a demon in the distant waters, echoing a work song that the villagers had been singing while repairing the hill.