Wars, Accords and Marriages

The seven realms have signed one treaty together, the Accord of Surmave, and they have kept it the way a family keeps a will: by arguing over it in the same room every year. Everything else that binds them is smaller and older than it looks. Aldmere's grain feeds Caelvenne because of a compact of 511. Caelvenne's gold pays Tharax because of a contract of 1131. Kaishon's silver pays the Cherüsh because of a war it barely survived in 470 and a habit begun in 971. Every one of those bargains was made at the end of a war, and most of them have a marriage somewhere in them.

The free peoples are bound in the same way, but not by treaties. A tribe on Aethorra has usually never signed anything. It is bound by who it sells to, who it married, who it fought last and who it fought beside. The Dunmorrow sell steel to everyone because two realms besieged them together in 555. The Saiga Followers are sacred to every horse tribe because of what they did in the summer of 502. The Drift pay no toll on Lake Surmave because of six words spoken at the Isle in 1113. These things are not written down anywhere the realms keep, which is why the realms keep getting them wrong.

The two signers who are gone. The calendar keeps seven Accord Days, one for each signer, and notes that two of the seven signers no longer exist. The Sitting at the Isle counts a signer as living while a realm still holds its seal. The Marrowmere League's seal is in the Vaides, the Twin Crowns' at Grarañe, the Khaasar's at Mazbaaran, the Three Thrones' at Kokrin, and Tharax's is Tharax's. The seals of Vareth and Wessary are both in the Chancery at Hethlend, where they have been since 178, and those are the two signers the calendar means. Aldmere therefore has two chairs at the Isle and one voice, which is the oldest running argument on the continent and, because the Sitting does not vote, the least important.

A note on the wars that follow. Four are told at length: the tribal oath that brought down the first steppe kingdom, the one time a realm tried to sweep the free peoples from its border, the famine war that touched every realm at once, and the great war of two powers against three. The smaller wars of the chronicles, the War of the Gap, the Marrowmere Wars, the Salt Wars, the three crusades, the Lords' War and the War of the Tsanha Fords, are not told again; they are named where they bear on a bond. The chronicles date each of them, and where a teller and the chronicles differ on a year, the chronicles win.

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The realm. Shaghis the Gray united the horse tribes in 455 and built a walled capital at the Tontanor fords, a few days' ride down the Tsanha from Lake Surmave. The Charnazin of Tontanor fought Kaishon's unfinished Rampart for nine years (461–470), lost, and was bought off in 471 with an imperial marriage, told below among the marriages. Shaghis's son Iygar, "Wall," finished the walls and his father's moats. Shaghis's grandson, whom the steppe remembers by the by-name Chaqus, "Tribute," and by no other, was half Kaishoni by his mother and had grown up among her clerks.

The cause. The chronicles say the tribes murdered Chaqus because they resented the taxes of a settled kingdom. The tribes say the same thing at more length. Chaqus's clerks counted horses. A tribe that had never counted anything found its herds numbered on a roll, a tenth of its foals owed at the fords each spring, its winter grazing assigned by a man in a tent with a brush, and its riders summoned to garrison a wall. The Cherüsh tale that Shaghis built a wall and was found dead against it, facing out, with his tribes gone, is about the grandson, told of the grandfather; the tribes have never forgiven Shaghis for the wall, and they have never forgiven themselves for helping him build it.

The oath. In the winter of 501 the olriqtun of seven tribes met at the fords' lower crossing, under the willows, out of sight of the walls, and swore what the steppe has called ever since the Tsal Bumong, the Seven Oath. Two of the seven still carry their names: the Shiygöl, the horse-breeders, whose olriq Sharyaq, "Shield," spoke first, and the Jilmu, the wolves, under Tsorlur, "Knife," who had raided the Charnazin's foal-tithe for two years already and had least to lose. The Angsit, "the Old," were the Charnazin's own tribe, Shaghis's kin, and they swore last and only when it was plain the others would win without them; the Cherüsh proper say the Angsit are called Old because they were the old olriq's tribe in 1141, and the Angsit say it is because they were Shaghis's, and neither telling is flattering. Three more tribes swore whose names were absorbed into the Cherüsh proper in the Ascendancy of 971–975 and are no longer spoken as tribes. The seventh oath-taker was not a horse tribe at all. The Saiga Followers, who walk the whole Grass Sea on foot behind the saiga and have never owned a horse, sent a woman named Shamont, "Water," and it was her oath that mattered, because the Followers know where the water is in every season and the Charnazin's garrisons did not.

The summer of 502. The plan was Shamont's, and it was not a battle. The oath-tribes moved their herds off every grazing Chaqus's clerks had assigned them and onto water only the Followers could find. The foal-tithe did not come to the fords in the spring. The garrisons on the walls, who were tribesmen under Kaishoni-trained captains, were sent out to collect it and found empty grass, and then found their own tribes' tents among the oath-tribes' and went over to them by the hundred. The barge-people of the Tsanha, who ferried the Charnazin's grain across the fords and were paid in Kaishoni silver, took their barges downstream the week the tithe failed and did not come back; the Cherüsh still say of a bargain that has quietly ended that "the barges went downstream," and the Drift, who were not yet called the Drift, take it as a compliment. By midsummer Tontanor's walls held Chaqus, his mother's clerks, the Angsit, and no herds. The Angsit opened the gate. Chaqus was killed at the gate by Tsorlur of the Jilmu, and the Cherüsh Eagle Burial was not given to him. The Charnazin collapsed in a summer, as the chronicles say, without a siege engine on either side.

What became of the land. The oath-tribes swore a second oath over the body: no olriq would build a wall on the steppe, no tribe would count another tribe's horses, and the Saiga Followers would never be raided or ridden down. The first oath held for 639 years, until Sarsak Tolmar began laying stones where Shaghis sat. The second holds. The third is why the horse tribes regard the Followers as sacred and slightly ridiculous, and why Bagoq consults them. The walled town was left to the wind; its moats became standing water, and standing water breeds fever, which is what the curse on any olriq who builds at Tontanor amounts to. The settled farmers of the Charnazin, who had grown grain for the garrisons on the Tsanha's banks, were neither horse tribe nor oath-tribe and were driven off the fords by both. They scattered upstream along the river and farmed there for six centuries under Aldmere, under Caelvenne, and under nobody, and they are the Tontanor Ghosts whom Sarsak has now called home by name. The fords themselves fell to whoever camped there, which for most of six centuries was nobody; the barge-town of Ford's End, moored beside Tolmar-Buyor since 1141, is the first thing to have stayed at the Tontanor fords since the barges went downstream.

Who remembers what. Kaishon's archives record the fall in three lines and the return of Princess Tokrai Hyuha to the Jade Gate in one. The Cherüsh do not sing of the Seven Oath, because a song would name the three lost tribes and the Angsit, and the Angsit are still in the Horde. The Saiga Followers tell it as the story of a woman who moved the water. The Drift tell it as the story of the barges.

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The realm and the ruler. When Tontanor fell, Kaishon had spent forty years and a hundred thousand conscripts learning that a united steppe could reach the Rampart. In 505 Emperor Tokrai Tsonda, "the Cold," whose reign the archives otherwise record for its granary reform, ordered that no tent, no herd, no plow and no people should stand within three days' ride of the Long Rampart from the Iron Gate to the wall's southern end at the edge of the Verdant Deep. The ministries called it Sheti Tsanha, "the emptied west," and entered it as a measure, not a war. The Rampart's commander, General Dezau Nogowei, "Iron," was given a hundred and twenty thousand conscripts and four seasons.

The peoples it hit. In the wall's own ditch lived the families of the men who had built it: the camp-followers of forty years of wall-work, discharged conscripts who had married steppe women, and drovers who traded through the gates. They were the first to be cleared and the first to come back. On the grass beyond them were the broken tribes of the Charnazin, riding leaderless after 502, among them the ancestors of the Nintang, the easternmost tribe of the present Horde, who then grazed within sight of the wall. Along the lower Tsanha, between the fords and the Jade Gate, were the Charnazin's settled farmers, the people now called the Tontanor Ghosts, who had just been driven from the fords by the oath-tribes and were now driven from the river by Kaishon. And crossing all of it twice a year, behind the herds, were the Saiga Followers.

The campaign. In the spring of 505 the columns went out from the Jade Gate and the Iron Gate and burned every tent they found empty and drove off every herd they found unguarded, which was most of them, because the tribes rode west at the first signal-kite and came back when the conscripts went home for the rice harvest. In 506 Nogowei kept the columns out through the harvest, and the columns starved. In 507 the ministries tried the steppe's own weapon and fired the grass in autumn along the whole front of the wall, to leave nothing for the herds to winter on. The wind turned in the night, as the Followers could have told them it does in the Tenth Month, and the fire came back along the ditch and burned the wooden hoardings off eleven miles of the Rampart, the wall's own granaries at two gates, and the ditch-people's huts, which were rebuilt inside the month. In 508 a column of eight thousand under a Dezau captain followed the saiga migration north to find the Followers and the water they knew, and found neither; the Followers had walked the herd's northern loop a month early and left the column's guides, who were Nintang, to lead it in a circle. Fewer than half came back. The Grass Sea's name for the four years is Ghorsot Zaghisrat, "the Grass Burned," and it is the only Kaishoni deed the steppe remembers by name.

Who survived, and how. The tribes survived by riding: the wall's shadow was empty every summer and full every winter, and the ministries could not keep conscripts on the grass through a steppe winter. The Followers survived by walking, and by knowing where the water is. The Tontanor farmers survived by going upstream to Aldmere's and Caelvenne's shores, where they were counted as Aldmeri or Caelvennois and never as a people, which is why the Ghosts have no register anywhere. The Nintang survived by marrying: the discharged conscripts who had guided the columns did not walk home when the columns did, and the Nintang have been half Kaishoni ever since and trade through the Rampart's gates because their grandmothers' cousins hold them. The ditch-people survived by moving one li west of wherever the last column had cleared and calling themselves, in the Doctrine's own register, "not present." They are the Rampart Squatters, and General Dezau Honmyan employs their descendants as scouts and denies it, as Nogowei did.

Why the realm stopped. In 509 Grand Chancellor Seiro Hishei, "Still," the second Seiro to hold the seals, laid before the emperor a memorial that the archives at Tsenkin still hold: four years of the Emptying had cost more conscripts than the nine years of the Rampart War, had burned the Dominion's own wall, and had emptied nothing, because a tent is not a house and does not stay where it is put. Tsonda died in the autumn of 509, of a fever the physicians did not name, and his successor's first decree ended the measure. The ministries drew the lesson that Kaishon has followed since: the steppe cannot be cleared, so it must be paid, walled, or both. The tribute to the Cherüsh that began in 971 is the Emptying's grandchild. The ministers call the tribute "gifts" for the same reason Nogowei's columns called the ditch-people "not present."

How the tribes remember it. On the Grass Sea a black-horse year is unlucky; 507, the year the grass burned, was one, and so is 1146. The Followers still walk the northern loop a month early in any year the Rampart's beacons are lit out of season. The Nintang keep the names of the conscripts who stayed, and when Makok orders the Rampart Squatters cleared, which he has done three times, the Squatters answer with the Squatters' one proverb, which is Kaishoni, not Cherüsh: tsò-tson, not so.

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The chronicles call the years 624 to 630 the Hunger Wars and list three things under them: Hrodvald raids, Aldmere border wars, and a Castavari invasion of Zarvand for grain that ended in the desert. That is the whole entry. It was in fact the one war that touched every realm at once, and the peace that ended it is the reason the realms still meet every year.

How it started. The Cinder Teeth erupted in 622 and the sky was dim for a year. In 623 the harvest failed across the continent; the Frostmarch, the Heartlands and the Sunmaw starved, and Kaishon opened its granaries and survived better than anyone. That last fact is the war. By the winter of 623 the only grain on Aethorra in any quantity was Kaishoni rice, and everyone who could reach it did.

• Caelvenne ate Aldmere's grain under the Grain Compact of 511, and in 623 there was no surplus to have first call on. The Conclave bought rice from Kaishon with gold, to be carried west along the Tsanha, and sent its galleys to the Wenvorm mouth to hold what Aldmeri grain barges there were.
• Aldmere, whose own people were starving, called the seizure of its barges a breach of the Compact and closed the Wenvorm at Hethlend's chain. Its north-shore lords took the Caelvennois rice barges at the Tsanha fords as they came in from the east. These are the "Aldmere border wars" of the chronicles: a war of grain barges on the lake and the Tsanha, fought with levied lakeshore boats against galleys, which Aldmere lost on the water every time and won on every quay.
• Hrodvald, in the worst famine since the Gray Cough, elected a Hearthking at the Vuvud of 624 whose name the skalds have not kept, which in the Frostmarch is a judgment, and raided down the Fur Trail and along the north shore of the lake for three summers. Lultolor's shire and the Northmere fed them, unwillingly, and then had nothing.
• Castavar asked Tharax for the Gap in 625, to reach the Talodin's date harvest and Kebidaan's grain, and was refused. King Llelilo's ancestor, whose name the Berrode has since struck for what followed, marched by the western road through Cluvedo and Daalher instead, with twenty thousand men and too little water.
• Zarvand had lost the Sunmaw's harvest to the ash and was buying grain by camel from the Nhal. It let the Castavari take Daalher and come on to the salest channels below Kebidaan, where the column camped along the water. On a night in the Second Month of 627 the Zarvani opened the upstream gates, floated jars of naphtha from the Cinder Teeth seeps down the channels, and lit them. This is the first use of Talodin fire the chronicles record, and the reason they record it: it burned on the water the Castavari were drinking, and a column that has lost its water in the Sunmaw is a column that ends in the desert. The Hizkari, who had sold the naphtha for salt, did not learn what it had been used for until 851.
• Tharax had the Bound to feed and the Bound were starving. In 625 the Thirty sent four thousand spears to Caelvenne's lake shore and were paid in Kaishoni rice, the first Tharaxi spears hired on the lake since the Marrowmere Wars. They came home the next year with the rice. The Phymun have argued about it ever since, and King Phospor Deneskid's arrest in 741 for taking Caelvennois gold was, in the Thirty's telling, the end of that argument.
• Kaishon was touched last and hardest. Its rice was being taken at the Tsanha fords by Aldmeri levies and Caelvennois marines alike, and paid for by neither. In the spring of 626 General Dezau Kyarau, whose name means "back," which the Rampart took as an omen, marched thirty thousand conscripts out of the Jade Gate to escort the rice convoys west and collect the silver Caelvenne owed. At the Tontanor fords, on the League's Day of the Accord Days that closed 626, which the Doctrine did not then consider a border, Kyarau's repeating crossbows killed some three thousand Aldmeri and Caelvennois in an afternoon and held the fords. That night the steppe tribes took the rice. Kyarau marched home in 627 with the silver, the first and only Kaishoni army to stand west of the Rampart since the Emptying, and the ministers did not depose anyone, because the silver was correct.

How it ended. It ended because the harvest of 629 came in. By 630 the Hrodvald had gone home, the Castavari had not come home, Caelvenne's galleys and Aldmere's chain had starved each other into a silence, and the only people still eating well were the Drift, who had carried for every side and been paid in grain by all of them. No one had won anything. The Conclave, which had the most to lose from another year of it, proposed that the signers of the Accord meet where they had met before.

The Peace of the Isle (631). The envoys of the six signer-realms met on the Isle of the Accord in the Accord Days that closed 631, the first time all six had sat together since 0 R. Hrodvald was not asked, having signed nothing, and would not have come. Kaishon's envoy came by the Tsanha under Kyarau's own escort to the fords and by Caelvennois galley from there, which the ministries entered as a measure of the lake. The Peace has five terms, and every one of them still stands:

1. The Accord Days are borders' days. The Accord's own term that no army crosses a border in the seven days was reaffirmed, and given a penalty for the first time: a signer whose army crosses a border in the Accord Days loses its chair at the Isle for seven years. Kaishon, whose general had crossed at the Tontanor fords on the League's Day, accepted the penalty in advance and was the first to sit it out, for the seven Sittings from 632 to 638. The Doctrine entered the fords as a border for the Accord's purposes, though the Rampart, built after the Accord, was not, and is not now.
2. The road is nobody's. No realm's soldiers may seize a Qaflan wheel or a Drift keel, or the goods under it, in war or peace. The Qaflan's Neutrality Oath was already old; the Road Terms are the realms' side of it, and they are what "neutral" means when a realm says it. A realm that breaks them pays a leusore a keel or a wheel to the people it robbed, which is a small sum meant as an insult.
3. The Reading. Each signer sends an envoy to the Isle every year in the Accord Days to hear the Accord read aloud, so that no realm can claim to have forgotten it. This is the seed of the Sitting, of which more below.
4. Grain in transit is not spoil. A grain barge, cart or camel under a realm's seal may not be taken by another realm's soldiers on the Golden Road, the Tsanha, the Spice Way or the Fur Trail, and the Drift and Qaflan may carry grain into a besieged town. Every realm has broken this since. Every realm has also, in its own famine, invoked it.
5. Prices are not war. A realm may sell grain to whom it likes at what price it likes, and no realm may call that an act of war. This was Kaishon's clause, and Caelvenne's clerks have been finding the edges of it for five centuries.

The Peace was sworn on the Isle by six envoys and read aloud in six tongues, and the Qaflan carried a copy to every capital. Ten years later Aldmere's King Hethwur IV, who had married a Zarvani princess in the Peace's wake, signed the Charter of Hearths for the refugees the Hunger Wars and the Reasoned Purge had left on his roads.

What each realm kept from it. Caelvenne kept the lake: after 631 no Aldmeri hull disputed it until 897, and none has since. Aldmere kept the chain at Hethlend, and the memory that Caelvenne will seize a barge when it is hungry, which the Clearance quotes. Kaishon kept its silver and its wall, and the lesson that the west can be reached and is not worth it. Castavar kept nothing but the name of a king it has struck. Zarvand kept Talodin fire, and the certainty that the desert fights for it. Tharax kept four thousand spears' worth of rice and an argument. Hrodvald kept its absence.

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Two centuries and a half before the present, the two richest realms on the continent fought a league of three over a debt, a river mouth and a ransom, and lost. Aldmere's Moot named it the Ledger War, for the Vaides' ledgers rather than the faith, which was then small. Caelvenne calls it the Grain War. Zarvand calls it the War of the Western Road. Tharax names it, as it names everything, for a year: the year of the Summer at Lokon. Castavar does not count it, because the Rislo of the day refused to call it a crusade, and a Castavari war on Zarvand that is not a crusade has no name in Grarañe.

The two powers. Caelvenne and Castavar had been bound by silver since the Puesdro strike of 752 and the marriage of 758: Castavar's silver was minted at Grarañe and changed on Coin Row, and by 890 Castavar owed Caelvenne's old banking houses, the ones that lent before Farisel existed, most of the ransom it had paid Zarvand for King Mairo II in 868, his weight in silver. Castavar wanted the silver back from Mazbaaran. Caelvenne wanted two things from Aldmere: the arrears on the Compact debt, which the Black Autumn of 801 had doubled, and the Wromthalm Toll House as security for it, which the Moot had refused three times. In 891 a wet summer rotted the Heartlands' wheat in the stook, and the Moot voted to halve the Compact measure for the year. The Conclave called that a breach, stopped the year's lending, and in the spring of 892 sent the Yards' squadron to the Wenvorm mouth.

The league of three. The Seizure on the Mirror (Second Month, 892) took forty Aldmeri grain barges and, by mistake or not, the Drift barge-town of Threeoars, which was moored among them. Aldmere closed the chain. Castavar's King Gaduo I, "the Silver," who had been promised the loan of the Vaides' gold for a march on the Talodin if he would first send his knights to the lake, sent them, and Caelvenne's old houses paid for a Castavari army on the western road. Zarvand's Khaasar Vemeneer learned of the bargain from a Qaflan letter-house before the Castavari army had mustered, and sent to Aldmere by the one road that reaches it, up the Talodin to Tharxa and over the Gap. In the Seventh Month of 892 the envoys of Aldmere, Zarvand and Tharax met at Wrunvos, the last Aldmere town on the road to Tharax, and swore the Compact of Wrunvos: no separate peace; Aldmere to send grain down the Tharax road to the Talodin cities; Zarvand to send horse to Aldmere and to hold the Daalher road; Tharax to close the Gap to Castavar and to send spears to the lake, paid not in gold but in twenty years of Aldmere grain. The Thirty accepted the grain and refused an offered leusore, which the Moot's clerks recorded and Tharax's envoy did not need to.

The campaigns.

• The Summer at Lokon (893). Castavar asked Tharax for the Gap and was refused, then marched twelve thousand to Lokon anyway and sat below the pass from the Third Month to the Seventh, waiting for the Thirty to change its mind or the Phymun to come down. Kings Kraxor Deneskid and Sperxor Sastorid did neither. Kraxor took six thousand spears north to Aldmere by the Stair and left the Gap to Sperxor and the Bound skirmishers, who rolled stones. The Castavari went home when the Grandees' silver ran short, having fought nobody, and the Gap Wardens, who fed them for four months, have been called Castavar's pensioners by the Phymun ever since. No army forced the Gap. Tharax counts the summer as a battle and names the year for it.
• The Battle of the Darthir (895). In the spring of 895 the Yards' squadron landed the Lilies, four hundred Castavari knights, and two thousand Hrodvald crews hired by the leusore on the shore below Wromthalm, to take the Toll House and the Darthir's quays and hold Aldmere's lake trade until the Moot paid. The Earl of Wromthalm held the town wall. Kraxor's Phymun, who had wintered in the Southdowns and learned nothing from the archery guilds because they did not need to, met the landing on the shingle between the eel-houses and the breakwater, in silence, and three thousand Zarvani horse archers under the Jaarzeb of Kebidaan's brother Khusjiraad, "Arrow," who had come up the Talodin and over the Gap the year before, shot the Lilies' horses in the shallows of the harbor. The Lilies broke on the phalanx and went into the water in enameled armor; the Hrodvald crews got back to the galleys; the Castavari knights, who had no ships of their own, surrendered to the Earl and were ransomed at fifty larrama a head, a price the Salt Brotherhood later borrowed. Caelvenne held the water and could not land on it again. Solvaine says the Lilies' roll was set at fifteen hundred after the Darthir so that it would never again be counted on a beach.
• The Battle of Daalher (895). In the same spring Castavar's western army, sixteen thousand ratorlon and knights under Gaduo himself, took Daalher, Zarvand's nearest town to Castavar, and burned the pistachio orchards of the meemakh of Kebidaan on the road east. The Jaarzeb of Kebidaan, Tokunaad, "Shield," did what Zarvand has always done: refused battle, let the Castavari come to the orchards, and cut the water carts on the Cluvedo road behind them with cataphracts and camel corps. Gaduo turned back at the edge of the orchards with the Talodin in sight. The Jaarzebeem of Kebidaan's words, The Orchard Remembers, are older than 895, but the orchard has had more to remember since.
• The Burning off Baamarsh (896). Castavar's ocean navy, which could not reach the lake, blockaded Baamarsh through the summer of 896 to stop Zarvani paper, spices and gold going west by sea. On a calm night in the Sixth Month the Jaarzeb of Baamarsh sent the harbor's fire-boats out among the anchored galleons with their siphons, and burned nine of them. It was the first use of Talodin fire at sea. The Vinvelon still say the navy should never have been sent to sit off a port it could not enter, and the Ecclesiasts still say it should never have been sent at all.
• The Thalmirn Boats (897). Aldmere tried the lake once. The Earl of Thalmirn and the Northmere lords built forty lakeshore boats with bolt-throwers through the winter of 896, to break the blockade of the Wenvorm mouth from the north. The mirror towers reported the boats the morning they were launched, and the Claupiose and Solvaine squadrons burned them at their moorings that evening with pitch, as Claupiose had burned Ienvaune's harbor in 271. Aldmere has not built a warship since and levies lakeshore boats when it must.

The peace. By 898 the Conclave had spent more on the war than the arrears it was fighting for, Castavar had lost an army's water, nine galleons and its king's temper, and Aldmere's Moot had granted its tenth six years running and was being asked for a seventh. Kaishon, which had sat out the war behind its earthquake of 890, offered its ambassador as a go-between, and the Qaflan carried the terms by wheel-letter between Hethlend, Solvaine, Grarañe and Mazbaaran for a year. The Ledger Peace was sworn on the Isle of the Accord in the Accord Days that closed 899, in the Sitting's hall, by the envoys of all six signer-realms, with Tharax's envoy in the room and Tharax's chair, as usual, saying nothing.

Its terms:

1. The Grain Compact restored, word for word. The Peace added nothing to the Compact, on Aldmere's insistence; what it added was around it. The Compact measure would be set each New Year's Day by the Moot and the Conclave together and never again halved by one of them. The forty barges of 892 were paid for at the Compact price. The Chancery had paid the Compact interest on every Settling Day of the war, by wheel-letter, because the debt and the grain are separate clauses and the Chancery has never missed a Settling Day; the Vaides had accepted every payment, because it is a bank. The Vaides's own clerks say the fourth clause of the Compact, that each realm keeps the grain road open and Aldmere may be asked to lend soldiers to guard Caelvenne's grain towns, took its present wording here; the Chancery says it was always there.
2. Threeoars paid. Caelvenne paid the Drift a leusore a keel under the Road Terms for the barge-town taken on the Mirror, the first time the Terms' penalty was ever paid. The Drift have been fond of the Ledger Peace ever since, and it is the reason the Helms' Moot drinks Caelvenne's health once a year, ironically.
3. Castavar's chair emptied. Gaduo's western army had crossed into Daalher on the Khaasar's Day of the Accord Days that closed 894, the fifth of the seven, which the Zarvani took personally. Castavar's chair was declared empty at the first Sitting after the breach, in the Accord Days that closed 895, and stayed empty for seven Sittings, to 901; Castavar swore the Ledger Peace standing. It is the second realm to have sat out the penalty of 631 and the last so far. Castavar got nothing else from the Peace: not the ransom silver, not the Talodin, not a crusade. The Rislo's refusal to bless the war is why the church has never counted it, and why the Old Jevarrie, who paid for it, have.
4. Daalher's gate. Zarvand kept Daalher, which it had never lost for more than a season, and doubled the Jaarzeb of Kebidaan's twentieth on Castavari goods at the Daalher gate for a generation. The road stayed open through it, because Castavari silver goes into Zarvand even in crusade years.
5. The Grain Spears. Tharax was paid its twenty years of grain and took nothing else, and the Thirty entered a resolution that Tharax would never again be paid in gold for its spears. It kept the resolution for 232 years, until the Iron Contract of 1131. Caelvenne drew the other lesson, that it could not beat Tharaxi spears and had better hire them, and formally did so in 949, on Tharax's condition that no Phymon ever sleep inside Solvaine's walls.
6. The Bench. The Qaflan's Council of Wheels and the Drift's Helms had to be in the room to swear the Road Terms again, since it was their keels and wheels that had been seized, and they were given a bench along the wall of the Sitting's hall to sit on while they swore. The bench stayed. It is the Bench of the free peoples, of which more below.

What each side holds and resents. Caelvenne holds the lake absolutely, and it holds the memory that a Moot can halve a measure. Aldmere holds the chain and a grudge; the older houses of Solvaine refused to lend to the crown for four years after the Peace, and a glass-merchant's widow named Vailine Farisel did not, which is where the House of Farisel comes from. Castavar holds its silver and a war it will not name, and the Grandees hold the receipts. Zarvand holds Daalher, the fire, and a fixed opinion of what Caelvennois gold is for. Tharax holds the Summer at Lokon and the resolution it broke in 1131. The one thing the Peace settled badly was the sentence that assigned the banks of the Tsanha fords, which the Reader of the day wrote in a hand two clerks read two ways; the War of the Tsanha Fords (911–914) was fought over that sentence, and the border it drew, with Larvir on the Caelvennois side, is the Ledger Peace's last word.

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What it is. A council of the seven signer-realms and a bench of the free peoples that meets once a year on the Isle of the Accord in Lake Surmave, hears the Accord of Surmave read aloud, enters treaties, sets boundary stones, hears complaints of tolls and passage, and decides almost nothing. It grew out of the Reading required by the Peace of the Isle in 631 and has met every year since, 515 times, through the Ledger War, the crusades and the Great Winter. It has never been called anything grander than the Sitting, and in the Vaides' rolls it is liau Mervole, from mervole, to sit, the clerks' habit of naming a thing for what is done there. Everyone else uses the road-cant word, which is the same.

When and where. The Sitting opens at dawn on Vareth's Day, the first of the Accord Days, and rises at sundown on Tharax's Day, the seventh. In a fourth year it sits the Absent Day too, in silence, which Tharax's envoy considers the only useful day. The Accord Days are the one week of the year when no army may cross a border, no debt falls due and no court sits, which is why an envoy can leave home. The galleys of the Yards lie in their sheds in the Twelfth Month; one, the Accord galley, is kept fitted through the winter for the Isle run, two days north of Solvaine, and it is the only hull on the Mirror in that month. The envoys therefore arrive together and leave together, and none of them can walk out. The Sitting meets in the Accord House, a plain stone hall the Marrowmere League built beside the landing in 1 R. and Caelvenne has re-roofed nine times; the seven chairs in it are the League's, and the eighth chair, the bench and the saddle are later.

The seven chairs.

The Bench. A plain bench along the north wall, set out in 899 for the Qaflan and the Drift to swear the Road Terms and never taken away. The realms call the people on it "the Bench" and let them speak after the chairs have. Who sits:

• The Qaflan send one elder, the Isle Wheel, by custom the eldest of the Wheelwrights, who misses the Council of Wheels at its crossroads and is told what it decided by letter. Mother Hamen has sat it herself twice.
• The Drift send the Helm of Surmave Float, since the lake is home, with the new river-fish on his arm still healing from the Helms' Moot.
• The Dunmorrow send a "mouth" from whichever hold's turn it is, Harrowdeep most often, who comes for the steel-price register and says nothing about the deep.
• The Vargate Clans have sent a Coldbrook since the Bridge Treaty of 1052, on Duke Durift's coin, to hear the pass tolls entered.
• The Gap Wardens send a mule-master whom Castavar pays to come and Tharax's envoy does not look at.
• The Salt Brotherhood has sent a captain since 1131, admitted as "the islanders' voice." The Reader enters the Captain-Queen as "a captain," and Castavar's Grandee leaves the hall when the captain speaks and comes back when the captain has finished, every year, and the bishop stays.
• The Hizkari sent Hizikaad the Younger in 1141, for the first time in their history, and he sat as near the Zarvani chair and the Castavari chair as the bench allows, and enjoyed it. He has come every year since.
• The Stairfolk used to send a guide. They are too few now to spare one.
• The Cherüsh never sent anyone in six centuries of olriqtun. In the Accord Days that closed 1145 Sarsak Tolmar sent a rider named Kholab, who refused the Bench and demanded a chair as the Charnazin's heir. The Sitting refused, on the ground that the Charnazin never signed the Accord and its heir may sign it any Accord Days he likes. Kholab laid his saddle on the Bench and rode for the fords. The saddle is still there; the Reader has entered it as "one saddle, unclaimed."

Who does not sit: the Waheli, who have never sent anyone anywhere and do not count years; the Tzalan, whom no one has ever asked, and who since 1142 would not answer; the Uusung, who do not know the Isle exists; the Deep Sands Nomads, whom Zarvand claims and cannot find; the Ember Pilgrims, who are not a people, and whom the bishop would demand arrested if they were; the Rampart Squatters and the Tsenkin Hill-Folk, whom Kaishon's ambassador will not have named in the hall; the Baamarsh Converts, whom Castavar tried to seat in 1143, and whom Zarvand's envoy said would empty the Khaasar's chair if they sat, so they did not; the Tontanor Ghosts, who have no register anywhere; and Hrodvald, which is not a free people and not a signer and has a chair anyway.

What it can do. Read the Accord aloud in the six tongues of the signers, with the road-cant seventh. Enter a treaty: a treaty read at the Sitting is "entered on the Isle," and every realm's clerks keep its wording from the Reader's copy, which is why the Grain Compact, entered in 631 a hundred and twenty years after it was signed, the Bridge Treaty, the Gilded Pact and the Iron Contract are worded the same at Hethlend, Tharxa, Solvaine and Grarañe, and why the Iron Contract is dated in a Tharaxi named year and a Reckoning year on the same line. Keep the conversion tables between the realms' calendars, which the Vaides' clerks write and the Sitting reads out each year. Walk a boundary where a stone has moved and set it back, by two envoys with a rope. Hear a complaint of a toll taken or a passage refused, and enter it, which is all it does with it. Declare that a signer's army crossed a border in the Accord Days, and empty its chair for seven years, which it has done twice, to Kaishon in 632 and Castavar in 895. And feed everyone for seven days, eight in a fourth year, on Caelvenne's account.

What it cannot do. Bind a realm to anything it has not itself sworn. Order a soldier anywhere. Judge a king, a prince, a Khaasar, an emperor, a Hearthking or a skekir. Admit a new signer without the consent of all seven chairs, which Tharax's chair has never given to anything. Vote, since there is no rule for counting Aldmere's two chairs, and the Sitting has spent five centuries avoiding the question by never needing to. Tax, since it has no treasury. And settle the pressure points of 1146, all of which were laid before it in the Accord Days that closed 1145 and none of which it touched: Zarvand's envoy read the Khaasar's letter of 1137 about the Talodin's headwaters into the record and Tharax's envoy did not reply; the bishop preached the Fourth Crusade to the hall and the Lalos entered the sermon as "remarks"; Kaishon's ambassador denied that anything stood in the Rampart's ditch; the Salt captain asked for a kingdom and the Grandee left the room; Selra Stormbrand's letter asking for the Absent Chair was read and answered with the Sitting's one standing reply to Hrodvald, that the chair is for a signer of the Accord and the Accord may be signed on any Accord Day; and Kholab left his saddle.

The record-keepers. The rolls of the Sitting are kept by the Readers of the Isle: one Reader, a Caelvennois clerk appointed by the Conclave for life, who reads the Accord and writes the roll, and two Counter-Readers, chosen by lot each year from the clerks of the Kaishoni and Zarvani envoys, because the two literate realms will not trust a Caelvennois copy alone. Three copies of every roll are made: one for the Vaides, one for the archive-city at Tsenkin, one for the House of Learning at Mazbaaran, and the Qaflan carry the second and third. The rolls before 890 survive only in the Vaides and Mazbaaran copies, because Tsenkin's fell into the lake. The Reader in 1146 is Alaudine of Claupiose, a dye-house clerk's daughter of about fifty who has held the office for nineteen years, speaks the six signer tongues badly and the road-cant well, and is the only person alive who has read the sentence of 899 about the Tsanha fords in the original and will say what she thinks it says: nothing.

What it has actually settled in the last fifty years. One thing. In the Accord Days that closed 1113 the Aldmere envoy, to annoy Caelvenne, moved that the Drift's barge-towns be freed of the lake toll, which they had never paid, on the ground that "a town is not a hull." The Caelvennois chair accepted it, because to refuse it was to enter the Drift as a people who could be taxed, and therefore treated with. The Drift's Helm on the Bench was asked nothing and said nothing, and the six words were entered. They are the reason Threeoars can drift between Aldmere and Caelvenne for thirty years and pay neither, and the reason the customs boats of Solvaine, who know exactly what Surmave Float carries, have to catch it. The Northmere stones of 1097, walked and set by the Aldmere and Caelvennois envoys along the dried marsh east of Thalmirn where the border of 914 had been drawn through water, are not counted as settled: both sides say the other cheated by a pace, and the stones stand where they were set.

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The rules of marrying out. Every realm marries abroad, and every realm has a rule about it that it applies to its own royal house and forgets for everyone else.

• Aldmere. The Charter of Hearths means a foreign spouse keeps her faith and her priests, and Hethlend has held a fire-shrine, a Sun chapel and a Berrode chaplain at one time or another. Since the marriage of 899 the Moot claims a word on any marriage of the royal house abroad, which the Crownmen deny and the Mootmen have never had to prove; the last two royal marriages were at home. Lords marry for land and lately for the north: the Northmere lords take Nugag and Vargate brides, and the Westmarch has been cousin to the Vargate Clans since 1091.
• Tharax. No Phymon marries out, ever. A Phymon woman who did would lose her terraces to her sister, and a Phymon man his seat in the mess-hall; neither has been recorded. Outdwellers marry as they like, and the Gap Wardens, half of them bastards of the Castavari masesben, are what the Thirty point to when asked why.
• Caelvenne. Marriage among the houses is a contract, and a foreign match needs the Conclave's seal on the dowry. Claupiose houses do not marry Ienvaune houses. The house's mirror-name is spoken only at the Mirror Vow and never to a foreigner, so a foreign spouse of a Caelvennois house never hears it; King Dobarmo IV has not heard his queen's.
• Castavar. Marriage belongs to the church courts. A foreign spouse must be received into the Berrode before the vows, as Queen Rorelle was at Grarañe in 1135, in a service the Berrode's own clerks describe as brief. A marriage of House Grarañe with a court of another faith needs the Rislo's leave, which has been given twice since 655: in 758, for silver, and in 899, for peace. The Berrode does not undo a marriage, which is why Castavar has never annulled one it regretted and has struck the names instead.
• Zarvand. A Khaasar takes his wives from the families of the Jaarzebeem, and by custom one from abroad "for the road." A foreign wife's son can inherit, since the throne passes by survival and survival does not ask about mothers. The Fire Marriage's one question, whether each has ever lied to the other, is put to a foreigner in the foreigner's own tongue, by a Rahaash who has learned it for the purpose. A Zarvani princess goes abroad with a fire, a physician and a copy of the star tables, and the fire is kept.
• Kaishon. Once, in 471, and never again. The Measured struck the marriage of Princess Tokrai Hyuha from the imperial register in 503, on the day her son's death at Tontanor was entered, and the register has recorded no foreign spouse of the Tokrai since. A ministry man who marries a foreigner loses his office and his examination-name. The Nintang, who are half Kaishoni by the discharged conscripts of the Emptying, are the border's own answer to the rule, and the ministries do not see them.
• Hrodvald. Marriages are made between clans to end feuds and seal trade, before the groom's Hearth-Stone. To marry out of the north is to leave the Hearth-Stone, and a clan-daughter who marries an Aldmere lord is counted as gone; Clan Nugag, which has done it most, counts its daughters as sent. No Hearthking has married abroad. Selra Stormbrand is unmarried, and the Old Way says so as if it were an argument.
• The free peoples. The Dunmorrow marry within the holds and say they always have, and the Tinkers' Wain say otherwise about their own descent. The Waheli marry within the Groves and no outsider has been asked. The Cherüsh marry captives and neighbors, Ghorsan arranges the Horde's marriages, and Sarsak has written to Aldmere's prince proposing one, which is the first steppe marriage offered to a realm since 471; the letter is unanswered. The Qaflan marry within and between the twelve clans and keep the dowry in wheel-letters. The Drift marry the river first, at the second naming, and each other second. The Salt Brotherhood marries whoever is on the beach. The Hizkari have married out once, downhill.

The marriages. Every marriage between realms or peoples that the rolls date, in order. The three the chronicles already tell are marked so.

Marriages refused. Tharax has refused every offer since 0 R. and keeps no list. Kaishon refused the Cherüsh olriq of 975 a Tokrai bride and paid him instead, which is the tribute. Zarvand refused Castavar a daughter for the Crown Prince in 1102, on the Khaasar's accession, because the Berrode would have required her received, and the Fire Marriage's question cannot be asked of a woman who has just been made to lie. Aldmere has not yet answered Sarsak Tolmar.

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The merchants' books give every price, toll and road in numbers. What follows is the bonds: who carries what between which peoples, under whose oath, and what each border takes for it.

The five roads and the water. The Golden Road carries Aldmere's grain down the Wenvorm and across the lake to Solvaine, in Aldmeri barges, Drift keels and Wheelwright wagons, and brings back glass, silk, wine and credit. The Tsanha Crossing carries Caelvennois glass and Aldmeri wool east across the Grass Sea to the Jade Gate and brings back Kaishoni silk, tea and porcelain, and steppe horses, felt and hides on the way; the Tsanha Qaflan carry the road half and Tsanha-Drift the river half, and since 1141 both pass Tolmar-Buyor. The Spice Way carries Zarvand's pepper, saffron, paper and glass north to Ienvaune and west to Castavar's Tinoda, in Salt-Bearer caravans on Talodin camels, and brings back wine, gold and silver, and runs up the Talodin to Tharxa besides. The Fur Trail carries Frostmarch furs, ivory and whale oil south through the Vargate to Hethlend in Fur-Road Qaflan wagons and brings back grain, salt, cloth and Dunmorrow steel. The Gap Road carries Castavari salt, wine and silver through the Tharaxi Gap to Tharxa and on to Hethlend in Gap Warden mule trains, and brings back wool, grain, Tharaxi iron and falcons. The Salt Sea Lanes carry Castavari silver and wine by galleon up the western coast to the Nugag fjords in summer and bring back furs and cod, when the Salt Brotherhood lets them. The lake is Caelvenne's, the northern waters are Hrodvald's and the Barerk Whalers', the eastern waters are Kaishon's and the Chaiyo Boat-People's, and the Long Reach of the Salt Brotherhood sails all of them.

What the tribes put on the roads. The Dunmorrow put steel on every road at once and take gold from every realm, and the Restorers know what happens to four realms if the holds close, because it happened in 555. The Cherüsh put horses, felt and hides on the Tsanha and take Kaishon's tribute and the passage gift. The Hizkari put naphtha on the Baamarsh road and take the Khaasar's gold with a slab of salt in every ten jars, and since 1140 Castavari silver. The Deep Sands Nomads, the Salt-Bearers and the Hizkari move water, salt and fire in a circle. The Tzalan put pepper and bitter-bark into the spice-forts' hands until Ixatl closed the jungle. The Waheli trade through Moss Harbor only, and never for a cutting tool. The Vargate Clans put timber on the Fur Trail and toll it. The Uusung, the Tsenkin Hill-Folk, the Upland Shepherds and the Barerk Whalers each sell one thing to one neighbor and pay one thing for the right. The merchants' books price all of it. And the Qaflan and the Drift put nothing on any road but themselves, and carry all of it.

In whose hands. Between two realms, the carrier is nearly always a free people. Aldmeri bargemen and Caelvennois galleys share the Golden Road with the Drift; everywhere else the realms' own carriers stop at their own borders and the Qaflan go on. A Castavari merchantman does not sail past Tandosa's Mouth without the Vinvelon's blessing; a Zarvani caravan-master does not go north of Ienvaune; a Kaishoni junk does not go west of the Jade Gate. The peoples of the road, the Qaflan's twelve clans, the Drift's nine barge-towns, the Gap Wardens, the Stairfolk, the Tinkers' Wain and the Lantern Road, are the joints of the continent's trade, and they belong to no realm because if they did the other six would not let them through.

The tolls at the borders. Every border takes something, and the Sitting enters what it takes.

The sworn neutrality of the Qaflan and the Drift. Two oaths hold the roads open. The first is the Neutrality Oath of the Qaflan, which is older than the Reckoning and is theirs: the Road takes no side, and neither may its children. A Qaflan caravan carries for both sides of a war, carries letters between enemies, and crosses a battlefield after the battle to carry away whatever both sides will sell. The Ledger Peace of 899 was bargained over for a year by wheel-letter, and every Qaflan letter-house on the continent knew the terms before the Sitting did. A Qaflan who breaks the Oath is cast out and marked with a broken wheel, and Zesose the Wheel's Wheel-Breakers, who take sides on the Spice Way for pay, are the first such in living memory to do it as a company; every counting-house is watching whether a Wheel-Breaker's wheel-letter is worth anything, and the Council of Wheels has said it is not.

The second oath is the realms', the Road Terms of 631: no realm's soldiers seize a wheel or a keel. The Drift took the Terms as their own charter and have kept the realms to them more strictly than the Qaflan have: the Drift ferry deserters, the wounded and the fleeing from both banks of any war, carry grain into any siege, and carry the Bound across the Wenvorm to Aldmere soil where the Charter of Hearths makes them free. The Tyrthas has never caught a Drift barge doing it. The one time the Terms were broken openly, at the Seizure on the Mirror in 892, the Drift were paid a leusore a keel for it in 899, and they have not let a realm forget the price. What neither oath covers is a tribe: the Cherüsh are not sworn to the Terms, and the passage gift at Tolmar-Buyor is what the Tsanha Qaflan are bargaining over to make sure a gift does not become a seizure.

What is never traded. Talodin fire and the Khaasar's horses, which are given, never sold, as gifts of state. Castavari destriers, without a Grandee's letter. The rearing of the Tsenkin silkworm, on pain of death. Dunmorrow starsteel to anyone who does not pay gold, which is everyone except Zarvand and, in armor, Castavar. The Waheli's cutting tools. The Bound, in theory. And the Hizkari's naphtha to anyone but Zarvand, in theory, which is the theory Castavar's envoys have been testing since 1140.

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Every pair of realms, and every realm against the free peoples on its borders, in one line each: the last war between them, the last marriage, the standing treaty, and the current grievance. "None" means none recorded.

Realm against realm

Realms against the free peoples on their borders

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