In her defense—if she needed any—she was exhausted from the length of the journey, and feeling especially woolly-headed today. And even if she’d been at her very sharpest, she might not have marked this quay because it was so humble. She had been on this river for a month, and had seen an uncountable number of wharves, piers, bridges, fords, and landings. Some, in cities, were vibrating entrepôts—little Amsterdams. Some, at the foot of barons’ country estates, were Barock stone-piles and iron-snarls, meant to overawe the other Barons. Others were little more than flat places on the bank where farmers could bring their carts down to trade with barge-men. But the only reason this thing outside of Pretzsch rated a second look was that two women had risked their lives to come out and put their weight on it. A hundred years ago it might have supported a carriage and a team; two hundred, a house. Today, it was a slumping huddle of black piles slowly being transubstantiated into slime. Half the decking had been pilfered, and the other half was being used by shrubs and grass in lieu of soil. Those madly waving women showed bravery by putting themselves in its trust. The slenderer of the two showed a kind of reckless bravado by jumping up and down. They’d at least had the good sense to leave their wagon on terra firma—it was drawn up at the base of a mud track that meandered down the hill from a shaggy copse that might conceal a building. To either side of the wagon, a finger of stone was thrust into the air, as if to test the wind. Around these spread moraines of alienated blocks, bricks, and vous-soirs, remnants of an arch that had been pulled down in some forgotten disturbance. In summer the loose stones would have been concealed by the leaves of the bushes and the sickly weed-trees that had insinuated roots among them, but winter had been even longer and deeper here than in France, and so most of these had not yet arrived at a firm decision as to whether they should put forth the effort of growing leaves, or simply stiffen up and die.