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Your map shows a number of routes that you can take over to Miranda's. The largest and thickest line represents the path taken by the High Road, which stops at every major town and city on the way between Riverton and Farbury, the capital of the next county over. Trade flows along the High Road like water down river, to the point where the Counts recently received permission from their liege lord to build a canal that will bring them together.
With so many goods that flow along its brick laid path, and so much construction going on in sight of the High Road, you doubt there's any safer route in the county. Perhaps even the Duchy, barring the stretch of the Golden Path that cuts through its western reaches. The one thing that makes you eye the Low Road is how circumspect its path to Miranda's house and the thorpe of Cartrefol.
Near twice the traveled distance, from the need to take its branching paths, and the fact that you'd leave the High Road just to get back onto the Low Road at the next Thorpe past Cartrefol!
The added safety of watchmen is not worth the extra distance traveled when you're never more than a day's travel from one of the villages that dot the Low Road. At its longest stretch, or if you get particularly unlucky, you might need to camp out for two nights between towns, but on some stretches you can leave one village at dawn and reach the next one over before the sun has gotten low. The hostels there are not as comfortable as the inns on the High Road, for sure, but they're better by far than cutting through the back roads and potentially getting lost.
Neither road leads to this goblin cave, of course.
You followed a deer trail from the Low Road to get there, one where you saw some goblin footsteps trampling their way into the forest. You can follow it back easily enough, the goblins are not exactly subtle.
Another benefit of taking the Low Road is that you can let your girls breathe freely. They need not hide beneath the cloth of your <span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">[Red Maiden's Cloak]</span></span> as they would have on the High Road, for the Low Road lacks the network of inns along the High Road that shelter travelers and give them places to sleep and bathe. All of that must be done beneath the light of the sun, and so no laws prohibit exposure. Solicitation remains restricted, but just giving people a look does not, so your ever so voluminous twins are free to bounce and jiggle in the open with every step you take.
To say nothing of the sense of freedom leaving them bare gives you, it comes with the delicious kiss of midsummer air upon your flesh. As far south as Riverton sits, the summers are a mild season that hardly ever reaches past 25 degrees. Perhaps at their peak you might get a day that brushes against 30, but such temperatures are rare enough that the peasants blame it on angry elemental spirits. The gentle warmth fills the great pine forests with a refreshing scent that mingles with the singing of birds and spreads a calm feeling.
