A Matter of Faith

You set out from Kelvin the next morning, traveling south along the Duke’s road. It is safer than the previous leg of your travel; the road still cuts through dense forests, with the Highreach River flowing to your left, but there are fortified watchtowers and small forts overlooking the road, and plenty of other people traveling south; mostly merchants, but a few farmers as well herding pigs or sheep to the market.

With the road well-traveled between Kelvin and Specularum, you have no trouble finding shelter at night in simple roadside inns. After several days of steady autumn drizzle, the dense woods begin to thin, giving way to a patchwork of fields, pastures, and scattered farms stretching across the horizon. By the time you approach the walls of Specularum, the clouds have thinned, allowing the sun to peek through every now and then.

There is a commotion awaiting you once you finally reach the city gates. Colorful tents, with banners representing every minor Thyatian noble house, sprawl just off the main road. Merchants paddle their wares, farmers set up stalls to sell fresh produce, and a few entrepreneurs from the city carry barrels of beer on carts back and forth through the main gate.

There are plenty of knights strolling the grounds, accompanied by servants, squires, and even their personal armourers, there to make some slight adjustments before the competition starts. All those farmers and merchants drawn to the tourney grounds end up crowding the main road and creating a traffic jam almost half a mile up, with merchants sitting on their carts without being able to make any progress for hours. The city guards constantly have to hurry the vendors off the road, to ensure the flow of travellers into the city remains uninterrupted, but it looks like they have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who came to spectate or profit off the fair.

What do you do?