You pass into the wild regions of the Silver Road that surround the Feywood. The mile long stretch through the Feywood is strange. Nothing about the place seems quite right, and you feel like you are being watched the whole time. All in all, you can see why the locals tend to avoid it. Reaching the estates that sit on the western flank of Tritower, you run into storms and get rained on for the last few days before Tritower. By the time you reach there, everyone but the mermaid is thoroughly soaked, and really looking forward to a dry bed and dry clothes. All three of you manage to make a minor name for yourself as you provide extra aid to the caravan and the villages you pass through on your journey.
After several days in Tritower where many wagons leave the caravan, a few others join, and everyone relaxes (including Arianna, who is greeted warmly by the local mermaids and asked to tell the story of the trip again and again; it's not very often they get reliable 1st hand accounts from their own kind), the caravan once more heads out, this time straight east, into the Baronies, straight toward Gist. After another several weeks of travel through sparsely populated lands, where you think even a single wagon on the road would cause a stir in the villages that still struggle to survive along it, you at long last reach the Barony of the Lost Hills, once a major mining region, now no more than a run down shadow of it's past self out in the middle of nowhere that has been forgotten by much of the rest of the world. Lord Maskon, the current baron, had feared that it would remain that way, but the push by outside forces to reopen the Silver Road has given his land a new life. Sitting about halfway between Tritower and Gist, in the foothills of the northern Baronies, Lord Maskon and the merchants who seek to benefit from an active overland link between Gist and Venza have found in each other a strong ally, and each hope that the alliance will result in a renewed economic strength in a region that even without the mines has vast reaches of forest and other natural resources.
Your presence, along with the other mercenaries who signed on, is just one of many visible signs of that presence. Your job is to clean up the outlying areas that Lord Maskon claims, but have been taken over by squatters, bandits, wildlife, and other ne'er-do-wells. After a rest in the main town of the barony, Silverton, during which time you are invited to a private meal with Gendrew and his lovely wife, Andolyn, a high level mage who seems to be doing some investigations of her own, you are sent to the area of a collapsed mine that still has a guard tower standing and charged with cleaning it out. Andolyn asks you to keep an eye out for anything particularly unusual or ancient looking.
