Castelgard

The province that guards Astoria's eastern border, and the first place in the saga's present day that the Ruined God is actually touching.

What Hobbes says

Ch. 243, in one clause on a hanging map:

HOB: Now. Castelgard, the Walled March, guards our eastern border here.

What Corin says

Ch. 266, from Corin Ashby, who is its heir, and it is a great deal less tidy.

COR: My province has been at war with itself for longer than either of us have been alive. Border disputes, mostly, old grievances nobody living remembers the origin of, kept alive by people who find it easier to keep fighting than to stop.

And then the part that matters to the saga:

COR: It hasn't helped that the Ruined God's forces have begun testing our northern border, the stretch that meets the ocean. Small incursions. Nothing the histories will remember.

So Castelgard is fighting itself along its internal lines and being probed from outside along its northern coast, at the same time.

His own summary:

COR: I am the heir to a province that is bleeding out slowly at its own borders, and I am here, learning sword forms in a garden four hundred miles from where I'm actually needed.

Against Astoria

Ch. 266 uses the contrast deliberately, and Corin says it to Arthur's face without softening it:

COR: Astoria's borders are strong. Stronger than anything my province has managed to hold in decades. You've grown up entirely inside that strength, safe, without once having to consider what it costs to hold a line that doesn't hold on its own. I don't say that as an insult. I say it because it's true.

What it looks like

Ch. 274, arriving from the west after four days.

Astoria's gentle, well-tended countryside giving way slowly to something harder and more weathered, the particular unforgiving terrain that had shaped Castelgard's whole character across centuries of border conflict.

• Watchtowers. Dozens of them along "the province's ancient defensive line". The first one is how Corin knows he is home.
• An inner wall, "older still than the outer watchtowers", with the city behind it.
• The manor at the city's highest point, grey stone, ivy along its southern face that Corin's mother cultivated.
• A recruiting post in the market square, its board "thick with fresh postings" for the northern watch, on terms more generous than two years ago.

The relationship between the ruling family and the governed is stated in one clause: guards greet Corin "with brief, respectful nods rather than any particular warmth, the particular formal distance that had always defined his family's relationship with the people they governed".

And how the city carries the war:

the particular unremarkable rhythm of a place that had learned, across generations of conflict, to hold its ordinary life carefully alongside its extraordinary danger.

The distance

"Four hundred miles" from Solmere, by Corin's reckoning. That is the only distance figure the saga has given between two provinces. See maeris.md.

Open questions

• Who Castelgard is at war with, internally. Corin says "itself" and does not name factions.
• What the Ruined God's forces actually are. Ch. 266 calls them forces and incursions and nothing more.