Factions and houses

Akh Gateward

One draw-chain can drop the span under its defenders. Akh's paid wall garrison keeps the barred river gate, bridge watch, break chambers, and the steep stair from plaza to battlement. Sappers cut a sacrificial line through the third pier and keyed its bearing blocks to a gatehouse draw-chain. If an enemy engine reaches the marked approach, the Gateward is to withdraw the keys and let the bridge's own weight drop the center span. Champions now stand above that break while Culdar households wait beyond them. The garrison calls the arrangement coercion performed on a sovereign defense.

Seat: Akh.

The Talakeden

The Mourn returns bodies. It does not return names. A Taladan shore house keeps the missing book: who went out, what came back, and who is still owed a search. It copies a Warden's note that a name stood living at a Heartwood and sets it beside the body that contradicts it, and the case stays open until the two agree. The temptation is plain: a closed case frees the stores the search was eating. Upland Whithclif keeps a second duty, the Red Watch, whose warning board reaches Oxlight ahead of the front, and when no warning comes the house explains what its watchers missed. A house whose closure its neighbours refuse to honour is finished.

Seat: Whithclif.

The Harvest Court

They sort what may be saved from what must be returned. The Court's tenders go into houses a city has given up on, and its notaries set up a table where the fighting stopped. It is stalls rather than a bench: contracted crews, washers, carriers and grave diggers, and a stall in one state commands no crew in another. A careful corpse-broker inventories boots and rings apart, pays the carriers, and writes down which office ordered the work and where the body went. A criminal one sells the body onward. Per-body rates and salvage rights decide which of the two a frightened town gets.

Avasul

Whatever the readers argue, the boats still go out. The Mourn returns bodies and does not return names, so every western landing keeps a shore house: drag lines, a washing room, bunks for waiting kin, a public book of departures and unnamed dead. The virtue is right keeping. Receive what reaches your shore, hold it without claiming it, release it when the duty ends. A household leaves the departure cup upright by the door until news comes, and creditors have learned that inverting one reads as a threat. Kesedi readers close a search on living contact or a body. Bekalor readers close it when the boats have done what boats can.

The Bellcutters

Hook-knives, roof-nets, and no clean landing. Bellcutters are roofers, riggers, fliers, surgeons, and the people strong enough to hold a net while armor falls into it. They became a named practice during the Bellfall, when fouled harness bells had to be cut away before their old working dragged another body down. No oath or temple owns them. Rarne's towns train different crews and argue over whose hook-mark is oldest. The Hooded Muster has split them: Shracha demands rescue cover, Sieqanch instructors will cover a bounded trial, Liat'tih crews want it stopped, and Qid-Dedh will supply either side.

Seat: Shracha.

Belldyard Landing-and-Grave Commons

Only evidence closes a case. Never convenience. Cove crews, witness circles and the households that keep the alternate landings on the north island. No distant harbor can judge a Belldyard launch, so crew discretion became a public office — and so did the witness circle that can declare a duty still open and put a boat into weather without ever issuing an order. They hold that evidence closes a case and convenience does not. Their own crews have been known to note who is standing safely on the beach while saying so.

Seat: Belldyard.

The Bethi Ashward

An ash line across the old road, repainted every dusk. A Bethi bank crew levered a squared stone free at noon and found a black seal under it. The Ashward is the people who stayed after the first retreat: Spellwardens, charcoal burners, water hands, shield carriers, families able to name the newly exposed dead. Each evening they repaint an ash line across the old measured road, so nobody takes the ground past it for safe. Shields buy cutters time to score a bedded seal, and crews time to burn the Roused already walking. First-fire wants every seal scored while its lid is still bedded. Last-read wants one lifted intact and read before it burns.

Seat: Bethi.

The Bilath

Between descents there is no Bilath. That is the point. The seasonal host of Shiz, named for the staging heights it forms on, never for whoever commands it. Households bring carts, guards, fodder and water; senior route leaders name a small command to set departure order and emergency shares, and that command dies with the circuit. It can hold a proud caravan behind a damaged water train, or strike a slow household from the protected order. A bare cart-width beside the first water line, an unused cup hung above it, stays empty until the rear count is called. This season it blockades its own heights, where a Khundush garrison stands.

Seat: Shiz.

The Black Loom

Paired cloth, enrolled ships, and frost on every rope. Linseriushe's sailmakers, nursery shade-workers and shipwrights pair every black cloth face with silver, and the great tally frame stands in their hall. One enrolled hull has crossed a raised Black Noon: frost on the forward rope, the White Hem charred open, a white column standing over the quay. The court ordered a full draw after riders reported companies massing at Keathanalin. Open-hemmers will enroll a warship only while its White Hem is left free to char. Whole-cloth makers want reinforced hems and a vent at Thil-Zed, and Thil-Zed will not brace one while its mole stone waits.

Seat: Linseriushe.

The Black Vigil

Keeping is care only while the kept may still answer. A church of rented rooms beside clinics: a clean table, two witness seats, a lockable chest, and no temple anywhere. Its chaplains witness a Kept household's renewal covenant read out, sit with the donor afterward, and put questions to a retained dead person to see whether the answer adapts, remembers and refuses when the question changes. A fixed repetition is not a person, and a room that charges a family to tend one is selling grief. Its danger is the renewal roll: the page where a donor's refusal is written is the page a besieger reads to learn which house can be starved.

The Boughwardens

The chaplain your guild did not ask for. Anchor-gardeners of the Old Faith, and the reason a guild's new Heartwood arrives with a chaplain nobody sent for. Boughwardens graft, water, prune and read a tree's health, and their judgement on whether an anchor can carry another return counts in courts that reject every other word they say. Their doctrine, that the tree is the Green Mother's whatever the register holds, turns every planting into a jurisdiction dispute over fruit, roots, shade and the prunings. The garden at Karithlon has outlived four states and its graft-books mention every one of them.

Seat: Karithlon.

Boulde Harbor Assembly

It closed the search. The yards are still working. The assembly that allocates Boulde's stores, yards and relief cargo, weighted by vessel shares and hated for the weighting. Last season it closed a search on weather and exhausted capacity, released the cargo, and kept the repair yards and the clinics running — and then Belldyard's crews recovered evidence that the search should have gone on. Both facts are true. It now wants a route levy and recognition of its closures, and fears a conqueror who keeps it alive purely as a tax clerk.

Seat: Boulde.

The Bowed Watch

They kneel when the Wake stands, and they turned the stakes. The Wake stands at the night bell. The Bowed Watch lowers both knees and hands, teaching that a watch without obedience is a later world's pride. Through the autumn of 1472 its cells replaced Fethedil's repair stock with matched iron and hammered a path of road-nails north. On the first hard night they turned all thirteen stakes toward Menergalo and bowed when the capital's bell began. The Held Line rose, each dragging a black stake like a walking staff, and walked until the bell stopped. Rimeward cutters tore up the nearest nails before the second watch. The thirteen stand at that gap still.

The Brand

Its saint's arm left Litur. The order will not say where. Nothing burns as holy fire without the Brand's warrant, and the order that issues a warrant also prices it and audits it. Its rivals ask who has ever failed an audit after paying the fee. Litur's chapters want the sealed Silver Sleeve brought home and the braziers lit on their own ground again. The field chapters answer that a siege reference has to travel, and that an order which publishes a route publishes a place to ambush it. Neither side has offered to open the box.

Seat: Litur.

The Champions

Fed, housed, armed—and holding Akh's bridge open. Corin's order takes contracts to hold walls and refuses payment: a Champion is fed, housed and armed, never bought. At Akh they have called the Third Bridge Muster and hold the third pier while a Culdar displacement column waits beyond the barred gate. Akh denied those drovers entry three days before Corin died for them in 1055; it had separately denied Corin citizenship twice. The Gateward calls the new stand coercion. The Champions answer that shutting out the column would turn Corin into a badge for repeating his city's choice.

Seat: Akh.

The Cordhall

Sealed at the Cord, and enforceable in both kingdoms. The boundary court of Longwade, the flood-basin causeway between Aladrynnlean and Mathessien: clerks, surveyors, field witnesses and adjudicators, with travelling desks so the court is more than one hall. It is named for the surveyor's cord and for the hall that keeps the measure every cord is checked against, an Assize markstone the Chain left behind that nothing alive remembers calibrating. Both crowns need claims that outlive a defeat, so both file here. Anyone it has ruled against twice calls it the Quarrelstone: a bench that certifies two contradictory measures, with a roof over it.

Dha Bell Captains

Six towns answer bells, paper, and practiced crews. A Bell Captain is named by crew assent and examined at Ekh. The craft comes from drove hails, shipyard work calls, and the orders that walk an armed company back through a gate without crushing the people behind it: cadence, route drill, litter movement, hand signs. Bell Captains write their orders down because breath fails and bells break. A prince may hire one but cannot make one by title. The Sixfold Muster divides them over One Bell for Ekh's two Heartwoods. Ekh examiners ask what Take No Prisoners means when an enemy drops his weapon; the answer that passes is that the cadence ends.

Seat: Ekh.

The Floodwatch

The one duty nobody disputes and nobody will pay for. The federation of work assemblies on the Longwade: maintenance households, ferrymen, haulers, dredgers and the flooded-out. The winter watch on the embankments gave it the name; its haulers work Mathessien's linen carts between floods. Its sections coordinate rather than obey; a delegate takes a narrow mandate for one flood or one repair season and comes back with a tally of hands and timber. Holders call it the Rope Charter, a title made of repair tallies and wet rope. Its answer is that a man who neither maintains a road nor admits the people who do owns a document about a road.

Seat: Mathessien.

Gararagz Mouthkeepers

They bricked a breathing kiln. Klis says open it. Clear the path before the fire is banked. Furnace crews, clay workers, Summoners and sweepers all keep that rule, because a fire banked early leaves the next load free to answer the old subject, the new one, or something related to both. The Lezed War taught Klis to call the delay desertion. Now the fourth door is bricked, the crown's order mortared across the seam, heat from the other three bending toward it, and some hear nails behind the brick. Khathumun carts water uphill to Gararagz. Kilaled's beds are already claimed by Mythta's patients.

Seat: Gararagz.

The Gold Owl Watch

The wall can end Black Noon—and expose the fleet. At Himsenilran's patched wall, the Gold Owl Watch sights the landward edge and ends the working before frost locks a ship or heat blinds a town. Its abort can open the White Hem and turn bearer panels silver, but doing so exposes the fleet and throws redirected glare out of the cut. The Loom calls the Watch too distant to judge. Its captain keeps a length of rime-split rigging above the signal gong and asks visitors which risk looks distant.

Seat: Himsenilran.

The Green Stay

A living brake tied around Falon's rear pillar. Unesalosaren's millers, the carriers who haul wet timber, households whose stock is in the frame, Heartwood attendants and Druids keep a braided living cable run from the mill to the Hill-Ship's rear pillar. Wet grafts carry side-load that stone and iron cannot, so a leg is turned and settled at the mill capstan. Falon's first pace burned a winter's charcoal and split a field below the seat. Some will slack it once the graft accounts are made good. Others want the hall rooted where it stands. All refuse an eastern march. Cutting it is easy; growing another season of selected wood is not.

Seat: Unesalosaren.

The Greenstar Pale

Char's Templars bear three green stars, not Corin's shield. Donagith's Templars take their name from the gold pale and three green stars of the capital shield, not Corin's, and they do not answer to Akh's Champions. They train their own Thaumaturgy. At Morbrokh they guard Char's public trials: the raised flightstone, the scarred fall-line, timber screens each pierced in a different place by one shot. They carry scorched casualties off the range and give recovered shafts to Mubrez's Raincutters. Range officers want the field armed before the next war. The carriers who lift them say armor that survives a bent volley only buys the crown a second volley.

Seat: Donagith.

Grolt'jess Cold Houses

Two panes, two hands, and no ghosts in either. The first cold rooms were kitchens dug into the slope after the Black Tide, where wet survivors were carried past the ovens. Furnace families make the paired panes; divers test them beneath the strait; Shade tenders work rooms cut into the hill, though most hands here are not Shade. One rule holds: two panes, two hands, count both before you cut. Their saying is that cold keeps a face, not a person. A black-hooded figure with an ice saw is painted on every shutter, a mark beside it for each diver still down. Children do not count them aloud. Adults do, and say they are checking the paint.

Seat: Grolt'jess.

The Icehouse Guild

Winter lake cut, summer cold, and no innocent profit. Gnilaug's cutters, packers, carters, sawdust buyers, and cold-cellar owners sell winter ice through the fever months. They lease cellars under the church; their dues roof it, pay a share of the Ridge Ward's beds, and maintain the crowded Heartwood. The Ugualla-Ni ban gives them the only licensed winter lake access and makes every fever good for trade, facts their workers know better than their accusers. The guild demands that whatever makes the pale wakes be taken alive before anyone declares the lake safe.

Seat: Gnilaug.

Ekh Ditch Keepers

They planted the second tree. The prince did not. Dock families, ropeworkers, blood donors, body carriers, and one attendant keep the Heartwood outside Ekh's ditch. They planted it by subscription for people the citadel list priced out, and still publish every sack of stock and every name admitted. The Nine Calls left six returned and three gone after both trees answered at once. Some Keepers want one agreed sequence so it cannot happen again. Others say the prince's One Bell would turn an independent refuge into his overflow ward. They will join the Sixfold Muster; they will not surrender the tree.

Seat: Ekh.

The Khundush

It paid for the towers. It cannot teach the spillway. The leading cistern house of the Zindush yards, named for the deep cistern its first yard was sunk around. It financed the draw towers and holds reservoir shares, guarded stores, plate orders and most of the basin's credit; its garrison stands on the Shiz staging heights. You belong by marriage, apprenticeship, guard oath, investment or dependent residence, which is why its cistern captains cannot resign: their debts and households sit inside the same patronage. The senior line points at the watered gardens. The captains know which plates were swapped in the shortage.

Seat: Zindush.

Kudg Stringers

They can sound the wall. They can also cut it. Bards hold the cadence, masons listen through wood pegs, riggers tend the blackened ropes, and cutters wait with wedges and wet hides. The order from Saqs is full Chord while the inner streets remain occupied. Evacuation already fills Ghazad and Kebun lofts and hires Akh grain carts that the Third Bridge column also needs. Some Stringers call an early stroke the shortest siege. Others will cut the eastern ropes first. The emperor owns the wall and one treasury. Only these hands can make it answer, and no treasury makes one wagon travel two roads.

Seat: Kudg.

The Lanternmen

Every chancery employs them. None of them trusts them. Night carriers. Lanternmen walk the roads no Farportal reaches, escort the wounded and the body wagons, and keep the register of the unaccounted: who left, from where, with whom, and whether anything came back. What they preserve is who said a thing, on what day, and which road failed; what it means is left to whoever must act on it. That register is the fullest count of the living outside the ice archives, and four states have tried to buy it. The order's neutrality is worth exactly as long as it keeps refusing.

Seat: Shiz.

The Mercies

A writ, two witnesses, a knife, and a contested door. Last custody. Mercies wash, identify and guard a body when no surgeon can close it and no tree has answered, and what they keep is narrow: the name, how the body came to be in that state, and which of the living took responsibility for it. They cut a support under Halda's rule, which is never alone, never unwitnessed and never for a fee. The Mercies hold that a support kept up without end becomes captivity and eats the household feeding it. The Black Vigil answers that release is killing with the paperwork done first.

Seat: Boulde.

Narzin

A scored jar teaches where a safe failure should begin. Narzin is the basin word for a jar scored to break. Households score their cistern liners and burial vessels the same way, so that dangerous pressure has a declared opening: a water jar must hold in ordinary use and open without scattering. A patron who buys a concealed seam so the surface looks perfect is said by kiln workers to be paying twice for one crack. Zadaz teachers keep the fitted break wedge in trained hands. Undaz teachers hand it downhill to the households who bear the risk. Adherents may use any of the eight major cults, or none.

The Near Watch

Read the dead where the living can answer back. Near Readers keep the same night bell and address the same Elder Void as V'eld, but they question a recent body at home instead of sending it north to Menergalo while the ember spends itself in the cart. Their Counterroll has named frauds, heirs, returned soldiers and people V'eld still lists as dead; it files a Heartwood return beside a Home Reading and makes neither office sign for the other. The Wake answers that a local witness favours a local heir. Men'la's duke pays the readers, which is the Wake's whole case and his.

Seat: Men'la.

The Nooncutters

Bloodshade break crews—not makers of darkness. Nooncutters are Bloodshade break crews, not makers of darkness. Exorcism trains them to diagnose the source, reference, path, and bearer behind an imposed working; knives, shears, wet cloth, and released panels do the physical breaking. The Loom hires them aboard enrolled ships before rime locks a deck. The Gold Owl Watch wants one at every tower. Some take both wages. If Black Noon fails, nobody knows whether to blame weather, sabotage, or the crew paid to make failure survivable.

The Old Faith

Life is relation before it is property. Old Faith households thank the living source before taking food, timber, a graft, or an animal's life. Boughwardens tend Heartwoods and gardens; the Red Hunt takes the cull and refuses a prepared return; most believers belong to neither. The quarrel is under the roots: tenant gardeners say a tree whose shade and water serve a street is common ground; the orchard house that raised it answers that a hungry town is still not a buyer. Some priests say the faith lost nothing in 1051 because it kept no Assize roll. Orchard families who buried children call that a boast, not history.

The Open Bell Houses

They open leased sky or Black Noon does not draw. Hlurthasenor sells its Overmarch in bell-ranges. The Houses are the leaseholders, bell stewards, roof crews, messengers and pilots who hold that no hot line may cross bought air without an audible warning and a corridor to fly out of. Some want compensation and a scheduled hour. Some want the main guide panels dropped below wall height. Some have opposed every raising since the first hot lift threw an observer onto a roof. Two older leases in the same air are already being argued with arrows. The Black Noon did not begin that quarrel. It put burning sailcloth through it.

Seat: Hlurthasenor.

The Open Yoke

Two fires, no locking bar, and every road kept open. An agreement carried camp to camp by donor households, cooks, teamsters, cattle hands, Vampire patients and armed road companies. A camp keeping it burns two fires, one for instruments, one for food and aftercare; no occupied donor cart carries a locking bar; two outward roads stay open until the camp moves. The sign is a cart yoke stood upright at the entrance, its iron pin tied to the wood with white cord. Drive the pin home and the nearest carts leave if they can. Some mean to supply Vrob on those terms; others to reach Ghiz-Vru and sail. The Three-Cross Levy calls it organized desertion.

The Pilgrims

A smuggling order with a saint on the door. Frame-keepers and escorts for the stateless. The Pilgrims keep Farportals nobody else will fund and walk unenrolled households across contested ground without asking what they pray to. A column moves the returned, the witness, the healer and the sealed papers through together; wagons and the dead still go the long way by road. Their masons wall a torn frame shut in the morning and find it opened again by Undersworn cells, who hold that a path still in motion never consented to be closed.

The Pillar Yard

Four answers in stone, one disputed direction. Each joint of the Hill-Ship is prepared for four responses: brace, lift, step, settle. The Yard that built its three legs holds masons, ironworkers, counterweight gangs, route setters and Golemwright designers; they sleep in Ithana because Falon cannot house them. The first pace left the purple roof angled farther east than the course wanted, and the Yard has argued since. Home-steppers would bring the ducal court down to Ithana. March veterans and the contractors who own charcoal pits want a mobile fort pointed at Nashrar. Senior makers want it unloaded until somebody explains the angle.

Seat: Ithana.

The Raincutters

Recover the bolt, cut the shaft, flatten the head. Mubrez bowyers founded the Raincutters after children began selling recovered Morbrokh bolts back to crown buyers. Fletchers, smiths, surgeons, drovers, and range spotters now mark every prepared shaft with three notches, account for every shot, saw recovered wood, and flatten the iron. They are not united. Breakers want the flightstones shattered; full-draw makers want one decisive test. Both know the Crooked Rain spends its failures in hands, roofs, horses, and whoever stands beyond the intended line.

Seat: Mubrez.

The Red Hunt

No countermark. No promised tree. The kill is eaten. The Huntress's cull, and the only order in Kilmoryn that refuses deliberate Heartwood binding as an article of faith. Hunters carry no countermark; an old natal enrollment or a quick surgeon may still save one, but the order promises neither. They take contracts against beasts, retained dead, and people, without being loud about the boundary. At Khorb they lead Scale-fall beneath live wyverns. An oath to the Hunt is sworn over an animal the swearer killed and is about to eat; in Gegzo, it sometimes has wings.

The Three-Cross Levy

Vrob's campaign hand: one road, one column, one order. The Levy wears Vrob's three gold crosses on black, not Dubud's blue state cross. Its quartermasters, surgeons, escorts, Vampire field cadres, and Barbarian callers are moving the Red Drive toward the capital. They are right that dispersed bloodcraft companies can starve while allies and vassals wait for soldiers. Their order also treats every cart, donor compact, cooking pot, and body as one campaign reserve. Some officers demand locked wagons. Others know a coerced supply line breeds concealment, flight, and knives.

Seat: Vrob.

The Replanters

They will tell a lord his tree is dying, to his face. The Replanters cut stock from failing hallows and old orchards, prune what a town's tree cannot carry, and burn diseased growth in public. Their cutters and cold wagons link Larith orchards to Kilaled's unhooking beds by a long inland road. Itheas now calls those same hands into the Full Sky muster; Kilaled wants them for Mythta, while burned crews from Gararagz take the beds they prepare. The order still bars Ismer's first graft from use as a living woman's spare body. Distance, winter care, and three claimants make every sound cutting dear.

Seat: Zindush.

The Ridge Ward

Boiled water, limewash, full pallets, no miracle claimed. The Ridge Ward is not an order. It is three hired halls at Wetheas, their cooks, carriers, laundresses, physicians, and the households that move Gnilaug's sick uphill. They know that boiled lake water and clean bedding reduce the fever; they do not know what causes it. The crown has taken one hall for hunt stores and calls the requisition temporary. Every night Ward workers put the pallets back. If Glassjaw dies and the fever remains, they intend the first surviving patient to be carried to Ins.

Seat: Wetheas.

The Rimeward

Find what holds the dead before striking the body. Thirty-three winters guarding one line above Fethedil made a northern school. Trackers, grave readers, cold-weather carriers and source-cutters open every search with five questions: what feeds this, who renews it, what matches it, where is its path, and who benefits while it stands. Students work with cold stakes, spoiled cloth and false trails long before they go near the Held Line. One early master cut a body before its stake and left the working pulling on an empty reference; the slate still chatters in winter. The school keeps it by the gate and gives no heroic version of the error.

Seat: Menergalo.

The True Weight

A repaired stool can be shown as honestly as a sword. Its scripture is objects. A finished thing is the whole argument, which is why no foreign bench can read a True Weight ruling as text and interpret it into something else. Brukh lies inside rival Eqoro and receives the shown work; Rezg rules the high bench; Nulgatharb trains the Weightsmen, who recognise a bench without obeying the ruler behind it. Treating the three as one institution is a foreign convenience and a local insult. The quarrel inside the cult is whether any finished object can close a living obligation. Its worst insult is still thrown across a table: “false weight.”

Seat: Brukh.

The Seven Fires

Seven road hearths; the living eat before the relic. Seven wartime kitchens survived the Hluinerynd retreat, the first at Sellagith's mill, and households keep them: cooks, millers, carters, bridge crews, children who fetch water. Their rule is bone after bread. No relic procession eats until the ordinary queue has. At dawn a traveller lays an unburned stick by the hearth and may add it to the fire after eating. A grieving household brings the dead person's bowl, fills it once, sets it where they would have sat, then breaks it in the fire. Brand writers call it slander; the cooks point at the guards, horses and wagons that walk with the relic.

Seat: Sellagith.

The Short Sky Companies

The last of a flight belongs to the ground crew. A Stormcaller lifts a close group; nothing in Tame the Sky teaches anyone to come down. So a company is mostly landing hands, shield carriers, surgeons and wagoners. In Keathanalin's white circles a company crosses to the next orchard bed, turns at twenty, descends at ten, and tackles anyone still chasing a target at five. That count belongs to the ground crew, not the senior person in the air. Itheas has called them all in. Oralye will not send its cold warders; the circles empty short each morning. Riders say Nashrar has tested a Black Noon hull. Replanters carry stock toward Kilaled.

Seat: Keathanalin.

Shrourypond Water-and-Burial Commons

Fresh water, burial terraces, and the right to refuse both. Water workers, gardeners, gravediggers and terrace stewards run the lake approaches, the washing rules and the burial ground of the western route. Their leverage is refusing polluting work near the water, and refusing a grave. Pilgrims walk from the gardens to the held plots of the missing, and clear a drain or carry water on the way. The commons will not recognize Boulde's closure and keeps the disputed plots open. An army can occupy the island in an afternoon; a fouled channel, a hidden household book and a fortnight of refused burials cost more than the island earns in a year.

Seat: Shrourypond.

Silver Lily Company

Let the gate close once, read the water, then burn. Boat owners, Vhalder witnesses, water claimants and hired Spellwardens work under one seal and the town's silver lily. Its measure men want the Roused held under guard until the old headgate stands shut, so the level at the old bank can show where the old course ran and what Boulde signed away in 1329. Then the bearers burn. Its low-road captains want that fire tonight: Myrybrel'la's tree opens to the field only on a captain's word, and they will not pay for a verdict in broken mills and dry channels. Both sides sleep armed on the field.

Seat: Nonirenilmo.

The Stonewade Charter

Title follows the paying, and the paying was sealed. Households, investors and toll lessees on the Longwade whose claims are sealed grants. It calls itself after the road it says it paid for; the basin calls its members the Dryfeet, owners who have never stood in the water they draw rent from. Dues and votes are weighted by toll share, so absent creditors outvote resident holders. What binds them is transferability: a road share or toll right must stay legible enough to inherit, sell, pledge and defend. In the Second Cord it took surveyed parcels for grain, timber and credit. Its gate officers hold the Aladrynnlean end.

Seat: Aladrynnlean.

The Undersworn

They remember claims the roll says never existed. Outlawed in most states, and used by people who would never swear the oath. An adherent household keeps the rejected page beside the accepted one, leaves an excluded person's place at the table, and reads an agreement's limits aloud before anyone seals it. Its cells chalk the edges of unsafe ground; a mason is paid to compare a stone written twice, a pilot to steer around a torn frame. A court will admit the drawing and jail the woman who made it. Cells fall out over whether such a site should be marked and left, or opened until it finishes.

The Vessa Houses

The iron says the war ended. Their wall names later wounds. Vessa of Rezg kept a ward open through the Emberwinter. Her arithmetic is still on the ward wall in her own hand: which donor's flesh paid for which repair. Her Houses feed the badly hurt and close a fresh interruption where the patient lies, out of that patient's own reserve; the mended walk out lighter and slower. Whether a Heartwood later caught the same person is a Warden's question. The Last Showing called the war finished in 1468. The wounded kept arriving until 1471, and the wall kept their dates. Rezg keeps the iron and rents Vessa's skull to her order by the hour.

Seat: Rezg.

The Vigil

Eight Saints, many households, no single altar. The Vigil says the eight Saints are owed because their recorded work still carries the living: roads kept, wounds closed, anchors tended, strangers buried. A household may light for several Saints without joining any order; children learn their names while packing road food or watering a graft. Reception uses maintained material references, usually relics. Corin's lost body and disputed shield-boss make the rule visibly imperfect. The orders share a calendar and no capital, and argue over whether bread or bone is owed first.

The Wake

Someone stands so another household may sleep. Wake worship begins as an ordinary night rota: one lamp trimmed, one bell heard, one neighbor awake while others sleep. Its teachers say the dark came before the world and takes no orders. Watching is a duty, never a right to rule. At Menergalo a reader in the frozen vaults can restore a name or unseat a false heir, for a fee and a watch stood in the cold. Men'la reads its own dead at home. The Bowed Watch kneels at that bell and thinks the Wake stands out of pride. The scandal is the Held Line: V'eld condemns private retention, and Wake warrants kept thirteen witnesses thirty-three years.

Seat: Menergalo.

The Wardens

A small government with a monopoly on coming back. Edrin of Kharb held an anchor garden nine days after the register stopped answering and would not let a lord's binding go ahead of a carter's. They broke his hands; the queue held. His order still keeps the roots and the queue. A Warden's seal names the person, the Heartwood, the witnesses and the hour; no tree sends word of its own, so chapters write duplicates for a rider or the returned to carry. In a siege the new owner may hold the tree while the attendants refuse it their countermarks. Kill the attendant before the body and the Wardens have a word for you: wick-cutter.

Seat: Kharb.

The Weightsmen

They prove a beam balanced, not that a war ended. Nulgatharb trains the circuit order; Rezg commands no Weightsman merely by ruling a True Weight state. Their masses let a mason, court, and siege crew agree what a load is. The same college sealed the measures that came apart in 1051 and has never conceded the point. At the Last Showing its examiners verified ten campaign pieces and the Rhiavud Iron's closed seams. They certify the object. Whether the object made peace is the high bench's claim, not theirs.

Seat: Nulgatharb.

The Whitehands of Akh

White palms on the stone, names called up the Shroud Stair. A palm pressed in white mortar beside a door means the whole building has been inspected and assigned to a crew. The Whitehands are Akh's masons, lime-burners, wall runners and returned-company attendants; Sanctifier is what other cities call their teaching. On the Shroud Stair an attendant calls a returned fighter into a named company before the climb to the wall. Some Whitehands provision the third-pier line and dress the waiting column's wounded. Others brace the break chambers, certain that saving Akh may mean dropping the span.

Seat: Akh.

Zanarb

Everyone suspects it of making scarcity. Everyone hires it. The largest of the basin water-train houses: the load-yards. Its partners share credit, loss, repair yards and one route oath, so it can withhold as a body though its trains rarely camp together. Carrying water over dry ground spends water to move water. It is indispensable when the galleries fail, unprofitable when fixed works run. Older partners sell emergency water to both sides and want posted rates. Armed captains take exclusive warrants from camps a blockade cuts off. The same house can water a cut-off town before the sides agree and own its next season by the time the carts leave.

Seat: Unzandush.

The Zinath

It can stop a work without fielding one soldier. The joined clay-yards of Narzin. A single house is a zinarb: kiln, clay store, training court, funerary craft and prepared salt plates. There is no supreme pourer and no see — a zinarb speaks in the Zinath's name until the other kilns stop answering it. Its sanction is material rather than military. It can refuse to fire a replacement plate, declare a liner unfit, or break its copy of a patron's key in public, and halt a work outright. The same refusal can leave every dependent household downhill of that work with a failing water source, which is the argument.

Seat: Unzandush.