The Sevenfold Crown

Deputy guildmaster of the Chandlers' Concord in Granton — Maud Tolley's loyal second in public, and in private the most patient student of when she might fall.

Riverrun's best canal-law advocate — retained by House Meriel for a tenth of her fee, because she believes the River Oath should mean the same thing for a barge-widow as for a claimant.

A Granlands widow eight months in the petitioners' camp — came to contest a granary consortium's seizure of her farm, stayed to become the camp's unelected mother.

A widowed Sheavebury landholder with a modest public barn and a very private second one — the quietest grain-hoarder in the Granlands.

A twenty-year-old chantling pamphleteer of the Barefoot Chorus who pulls pots at the Split Reed to make rent — and prints faster than she checks.

Veskarn master bead-wright of the Pyre Quarter — the artisan who fires the city's dead into glass, and knows all its griefs.

Veskarn quench-master of the Quench Yards — heat-blooded reader of tempering steam, whose face the smiths now watch harder than the water.

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.

The tithe assessor at the Sackford Toll — a meticulous Crown officer collecting grain under a dead Emperor's seal, and hating every stamp of it.

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.

House Draken-Sol's liaison on the Liveried Row: a decorated ex-sergeant who does his politics in taverns and guardhouses, recruiting sympathy where Obol recruits debt.

Sexton of the Fallowfield — the man who buries Coronal's unclaimed dead by number, and keeps their names anyway.

A Sylvithi hollow-town grown inside seven living alder trunks — homes coaxed, never cut, where the forest's law is spoken in the oldest room.

The Reaches' biggest company mining town — three shifts, company scrip, and a mountain being hollowed out on paper held in Coronal.

The last true water on the ash-road between Coronal and the deep Pyrelands — a walled well, a caravanserai, and the region's whole supply of neutral ground.

House Vairre's city seat in the Saltmere: a bank pretending to be a palace, or the reverse — nobody who enters leaves unrecorded.

The capital, built where seven armies met to swear peace — a circular city of seven quarters around the Concord Tree.

A dying mine town at the Deepworks' gate — half its doors nailed shut since the sealings, held together by one old Draken-Sol captain and sheer refusal.

Fern Duskwell's apothecary shopfront on Physic Row — three storeys of drawers, drying-lines, and debts, where half the quarter gets its medicine and the other half gets terms.

A stilt town standing on black piles above the drowned village of Old Farthing — at low tide the old roofs break the water like the backs of sleeping whales.

The Iron quarter: forges, arms, mining guilds — martial pride currently burning with shame over the rot.

The Pyre Quarter's furnace-street: a half-mile of glassworks whose chimneys never cool, where the city's finest lenses, vessels and memorial glass are made.

The Grain quarter: bakers, brewers, the Bread Courts and the grain exchange that feeds the city.

The seat of the Harrowick estates — a moated manor amid the realm's best wheat, run with an absent master and a very present steward.

The war-hero house of Flame and Iron: claim by battlefield regency, beloved of veterans, whispered to prefer another war to a lost vote.

The commons' house of River and Grain — young, charismatic, broke, and possibly steered by its own stewards.

Salt-oath bankers turned claimants: patient, contractual, convinced the crown is a formality they already own.

The provisional government: seven Oathseats and the Graftwarden, paralysed by design.

A commons movement from the print-shops and tenements: let the Tree choose no king — let it choose the realm.

Organized crime wearing banking's face — or the reverse. They finance all three claims and keep the receipts.

The united guilds — weights, wages, and gates. Officially neutral; actually the city's second government.

Coronal's city-legion, sworn to the Crown Ward stones themselves — stretched thin, bribed often, prouder than paid.

Tenders of the Concord Tree — part clergy, part arborists, part forensic lawyers of the Oaths — losing authority by the week.

A heresy inside the Graftwardens: the Tree is not sick — it is deciding. And lately, they say, answering.

A grey moth of the Echo Halls whose wing-dust deadens sound — the only vermin in the realm that eats sung law by silencing the rooms it lives in.

Feral war-lizards of the Veskarn lancer-lines, running the Pyrelands at dawn in wedge formation — still, after a century and a half, waiting to be mustered.

A blunt-headed serpent that swims through deep ash-dunes as through water, surfacing under whatever the wake behind it fails to warn.

Moths bred in the Longwar to devour enemy standards, still swarming anything dyed in the old kingdom colours across the Granlands.

A glossy carrion-jay of the Pyrelands with an eye for worked glass — infamous above all for robbing Veskarn of the beads that hold their dead.

A sleek seal-bodied hunter of the fen channels, doglike in its curiosity, that follows night-boats for miles — credited by outsiders with the Grimwold's own gift for tasting lies.

Pontoon-bridge turtles of the Riverspine, grafted flat-shelled to carry army decking — which now surface beneath barges, answering a muster nobody sounds.

A bold fox-jackal of the city margins that has moved into the Petitioners' Camp in numbers, grinning at fires and thieving from the realm's most desperate.

An eyeless, boneless-seeming thing of the Grey Cellars that eats preserved goods through their sealed casks — and is rumoured, correctly, to eat other things for pay.

A swarm-vermin of the Granlands that wears the chaff it scatters, stripping stooked grain from inside the sheaf while the field looks whole.

The Granlands' devouring cloud — a grasshopper that swarms once in a bad decade and eats a district's year in three days.

Incendiary war-birds gone feral in the Pyre Quarter, caching live coals in chimney nests — blamed for every fire in Glasshouse Row, guilty of few.

Feathered cliff-dwellers of the old Song enclave; their law is sung, never written.

Small chitinous scavenger-folk of the Saltmarches; brilliant mechanists whose colonies share memory through scent.

Stone-grown people of the Ferruhm deeps, skinned like polished ore, incapable of breaking a promise.

Nocturnal fen-people with bioluminescent blood who can taste lies in brine — the courts' oathtakers.

Hearth-folk of the Granlands — famine-shaped, food-hoarding, the realm's finest quartermasters.

The plurality of the realm — seven oath-cultures, one species, most of the institutions.

Amphibious river-traders whose word given on water is legally binding everywhere; barge-clan matriarchies.

Giantkin of the high passes — few, slow-speaking, hired as living cranes; they count time in decades.

Desert-glass people of the deep Pyrelands: translucent skin over slow-moving inner light; born in clutches, mourning alone.

Root-tied forest folk whose lives are bonded to a family tree — and who regard the Concord Tree with quiet horror.

Longwar constructs of clay and oath-magic who outlived their purpose — citizens in Coronal, 'equipment' elsewhere.

Ash-adapted scaled folk of the Pyrelands; heat-blooded funerary artisans who carry their dead as glass beads.