Worlds to play, cards to import

Elder keeper of the Listening Root — eighty-one years old, guardian of the pilgrim ledgers, and the man who writes down every answer while refusing to ask a question of his own.

A Bramblestack chimney-jack who runs the rooflines by night — the only person in Rootden who claims to have stood close enough to the Night Voice to hear it breathe.

Mistress of the Mallow Baths — Rootden's bath-keeper, gossip-broker, and the quarter's most carefully neutral pair of ears.

A human grey-trade pilot who runs the fog channels by ear and memory — Eel-Yara's standing rival and Cress Aldy's carefully unmentioned sweetheart.

The Listening Root's novice keeper — nineteen, quick-handed with a pen, and quietly cataloguing which pilgrims' claims come true.

Master of the Greyling Pans — a fair-handed salt-boss squeezed between House Vairre's new rents and a workforce he refuses to short.

Halbren mistress of Tanglemark Post — cousin to the Thrifthall victuallers, keeper of the truce-yard scales, and the only trader both forest and wagon-road trust.

A young Chittik scent-courier of Weir-Under-Salt — mends tide-tackle in Farthingdeep by day and carries the colony's memory through the fog by night.

A Sylvithi gatherer of Alderhollow who sends her best bundles to Mirren Alderleaf's tenement rounds — half trade, half tithe, all conviction.

The drowned-village rememberer of Farthingdeep — at every low tide she recites the rolls of Old Farthing's dead over the roofs that hold them.

Chief customs officer of the Tollwater House — four officers, forty smugglers, and a tariff code she still enforces like it matters, because someone has to.

Keeper of the Drowned Lantern — a Molded made in the Longwar to steady grain-barges, now steadying the quarter's drinkers, debts, and grief instead.

The Bramblestack's fixer — unofficial superintendent of nine hundred tenants, who can mend a roof, settle a feud, or lose a rent-notice, all for a favour to be named later.

Rent-agent for the Bramblestack's unseen Saltmere owners — a careful man with a skim to hide, an audit to dread, and the Green Door Clinic's lease sitting unexplained in his folio.

Proprietor of the Tideline Chandlery — chandler by daylight, quartermaster of Riverrun's smuggling trade by arrangement, and famously never once caught holding anything.

Bell-mistress of the Silverside Shambles — the fish market's auctioneer and unofficial magistrate, who sets the price of the city's fish with a hand-bell and a look.

A struck-off Crown Ward physician now cutting and setting at the Green Door Clinic — the best surgeon in Rootden, carrying someone else's disgrace.

The youngest pilot trusted with the Night Braid and the only human flying a matriarch's colours — brilliant on the water, showing off everywhere else.

Widowed keeper of a Rootden boarding house — respectable to the street, and landlady of the Taproot Cellar where the Chorus meets below her boards.

Judge of the Anchored Bench: the incorruptible voice of river-law, famous for rowing a crown's writ back unserved — and quietly vain about exactly that.

Master of the Greatfall Lock: a guild man holding the Riverspine's one gate through the worst queue in living memory, terrified of the day a gate fails on his watch.

Matriarch of the Mallow barge-clan and convener of this year's Merrowmoot — Sedge-Ilai's oldest ally, determined to sell the river's neutrality dearly or not at all.

The Greatfall Lock's living crane: an Ondrel who has hauled the great gates for nine decades and gives the gorge its slowest, surest counsel.

The Anchored Bench's Grimwold oathtaker: he tastes every testimony in brine, and keeps a private tally of the lies the claimant houses' agents tell on the river.