Breck didn't know when it started.
Not the trade — the trade had started three months ago, when the first northern cart arrived at Oakhaven with tools that outperformed anything the village smith could produce. Breck remembered the first time he held a northern plowshare — the weight wrong, the edge too clean, the metal darker than any iron he'd worked with in twenty years of farming. He'd bought it with three bushels of barley, because the trader accepted barter and because three bushels was less than what Breck usually paid for a plowshare that lasted half as long.
No, the trade was just trade. What Breck didn't know was when the doubt had started.
