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Most of the year, Town Square Road was lightly traveled. Local merchants, farmers, and workers traversed the road to buy supplies, sell goods, and conduct business at The Whitecoat's compound or stop at the Traitor's Tavern Inn for a pint. During the convoy season, however, massive horse-drawn wagons carried lumber, hides, leather, salted meats, salted fish, textiles, and a variety of marine goods into the convoy staging areas. A few times a month, a large convoy left the village and headed toward the main supply route for the Crossroads. Town Square Road became a mudslide, workers in brown leather, guards in leather armor with iron or steel-tipped pikes and spears, wooden wagons, and horses all poured down the street. The Founder's Day Festival was the only time of the year when the road transformed into a field of flowers blowing in the wind: vibrant, flowing, and alive, with changing colors in a sea of green.

Green cloth with light embroidered floral patterns was the most popular style in the Lush Forest. At the festival, almost every adult and child from wealthy families wore cloth. Children of peasant families wore leathers, though, because cloth was an expensive luxury and was only worn a few times a year. Peasant children customarily didn't receive a cloth outfit until they turned fifteen.

Lesser lords wore unnamed iron or steel armor, which was often too large or small because they couldn't employ a shifter to alter the armor to fit correctly. Greater lords, merchants, and shifters wore named armor made of colored steel. Around thirty great lords and merchants were attending the festival, which was similar to previous years. Only ten shifters in named armor were attending, which was one quarter of the number of past years. A large part of the festivities centered around shifters demonstrating their skills and talents. With so few shifters attending, odds were against the festival lasting three days.

The morning of the first day centered around The Whitecoat's exhibition. Korg had held a staff fighting contest every year for the last decade. Any challenger who landed a clean hit received a wooden staff with steel supports. Anyone who defeated him won his quad-helix staff. A seashell steel outer cover encased an intertwined quadruple-helix inner support. In the contest's history, Korg has only awarded a dozen wooden staves, and no one has ever come close to winning. 

Karp stepped off the crowded front porch of the Traitor's Tavern Inn. She couldn't drink from her mug without someone in the dense crowds knocking into her elbow. Karp normally didn't wear armor unless she was training, and that also made drinking awkward. She wore a steel hauberk and greaves over training leathers. In the Lush Forest, business associates meeting for the first time customarily removed their helms and right gauntlets. The Whitecoat planned on introducing Karp to his associates, so she had decided not to wear gauntlets and also wore an open-faced steel helmet instead of needing to repeatedly remove a closed-face helm.

Once off the porch, Karp walked to a nearby cart that carried a large wooden cask and withdrew a few iron coins, handing them to one of the serving girls standing nearby. A tavern's serving girl wearing white cloth embroidered with red stenciling of flowers and decorative blue lines returned the mug to Karp. A small crowd gathered near the inn to watch a pair of fire jugglers.