Lake-town's like nothing I ever seen, nowhere I ever been, or even imagined. A whole city, bigger even than Woodland Hall, built on piers and quays out over a lake. I don't know why; there's perfectly good land on the shore they scarcely use. What's even more baffling is, this is the second one they built this way. I saw the ruins of the old Lake-town, down under the lake, what they say got burned down by a dragon -- a dragon! -- not so long ago, such as a few of the oldest folk there now were children when it happened. They tell me the new one ain't proper called Lake-town but is Esgaroth, but even the folks what live there call it Lake-town sometimes, and all them as visit do.
And there's a lot what visit, because Lake-town is a town of trade. Goods come through on boats and barges and waggons from lands all around, from Dale and the Lonely Mountain and the Elves of the Mirkwood, and from faraway places too. I reckon that's true in any city, but here, it's more than just that it happens, it's that everything everyone does is about trade, and coin. There's not much where folks trade a thing for another thing; everything is traded for coin. And everything about how the city is run is about making sure folks can trade.
Coin is proving a problem for me. Since I don't got any trade or skill, and I can't promise how long I'm staying, even though I've been here a lot longer than I expected already, I can't get any work to earn coin other than day-work. I met someone what showed me a place down by the part of town where barges come in, where folk needing work come every morning, then folk that need men come by and pick as many as they need for that day. It's hard work, lifting and hauling trade goods mostly, loading and unloading, and it don't pay much, but you can get it for a day, and then if you got something else to do -- like asking around about the Éothéod -- you just don't go that day, and then you can show up again the next and still get work.
But all I can earn that way is barely enough to pay for Kestrel's stabling. You can guess a city built out over a lake don't got many horses, so their stable on the shore only has a few what get used by rent, or by the town guard when they got to run to somewhere else. Mostly they're taking care of horses for them as come through for trade, and that means they expect those folk to got coin, and they ask what seems a lot of it to me. All my day-work barely keeps ahead of that and leaves none for my room or food. So I go fishing most nights, and cook over a shared fire what's near one of the docks, what lots of other day-workers use. Can't stay in the inn, but one the other dock-workers, feller named Dalton, told me about a place above some other houses, sort of a gap atween a few buildings -- they all get built piled next to and on top of one another -- what weren't being used. It's got no fire or anything, not even a level and flat floor, and you got to climb into and out of it, but it's shelter from the weather and mostly warm on account of a chimney goes through one side. Someone might come along and run me out of it any time, but in the meanwhile, it's a place to stay I don't got to pay for.
At first I reckoned I'd be here a few weeks at most, long enough to earn their trust, then ask my questions, like it were with the Woodmen, but that's not how things work here. If I want answers I got to pay for them, and usually it's with coin. So I been here most of the spring just hoping to earn enough to buy a few answers. All for nothing. No one seems to have ever heard of the Éothéod; most don't even know of the Mark as anything other than a land that sometimes trade goes through, but not often. What with the fact that the town burned down not long ago, there's no records or anything, neither. Folks did tell me that Dale might be better for my search -- they got libraries and scholarly folk and suchlike. But I won't be able to stay there, so it'll have to be done in day trips. I hope as I can get that done fair quick.
