Ask three people in Ashfall how to reach the coast and you will get three answers, all of them correct, none of them the same journey.
That is not unhelpfulness. It is the honest state of the thing. A road is not a line between two points; it is a bargain about how much of your day and how much of your luck you are willing to spend.
The Kinds of Way
There is walking, which is what most of it is. Ground under you, no one to pay, and the understanding that you will arrive when you arrive.
There is the road proper — kept, drained, patrolled in the stretches where someone with money needs it patrolled. Faster than walking the same distance overland, and worth every extra mile you add going round to reach it.
There are gates, which are doors in walls, and which are only ever as open as the person holding them. A gate is not a distance. A gate is a decision someone else already made about you.
There is water. Ashfall is a port, and a hull will carry you further in a night than your legs will in three days — if the weather agrees, if the master is going where you are going, and if you have the fare.
And there are portals, about which the realm is not forthcoming. They are rare, they are old, and nobody who uses one regularly will tell you what it costs them.
What a Road Costs
Two things, and they are not the same thing.
The first is hours. Every way has a length, and length is time you do not get back — arrive at a gate after dark and you have spent a day to stand outside a closed door.
The second is risk, and it does not scale with the first. The short cut through the lower district is quick precisely because nobody maintains it and nobody watches it. The long road round is long because it goes where the patrols go. A traveller who only counts hours is a traveller who has not yet been robbed.
You will hear both numbers given for any route, from anyone who has walked it. Listen to the second one.
The Ways That Are Not On the Map
Some roads are simply there, and anyone may take them.
Some are restricted — they exist, everyone knows they exist, and you are not the sort of person they open for. Not yet. A name, a letter, a debt called in, and the same road is suddenly walkable.
And some are secret, which means you will not find them by looking. You will find them because someone tells you, or because you noticed a thing you were not supposed to notice. They do not appear on a map because the people who use them would rather they did not.
So: ask three people. Take the road when you have the daylight, take the water when you have the coin, and take the short cut only when you have a reason that outweighs the reason it is short.
And if someone offers to show you a way you have not heard of — that is worth more than the journey.