Cait Sith

Pronounced catsy. Ears, whiskers, fur, and tails — the Cait Sith are as cat-like as they appear, and they hold the hedgerow country that threads between the Heartland and half the Kingdom's other provinces. Less a territory than everyone's shared border, the Hedges are one enormous ambush, which suits its owners.

They are playful, sociable, and warm to other Faeries. They are also hunters, and the thing they hunt is the subject this page cannot avoid.

Appearance

Fur in every pattern a cat comes in, with a fully mobile tail, upright ears, and short wings built for bursts of speed through cover rather than for open sky. A Cait Sith at full flight through a hedgerow is the fastest thing in the Kingdom over short distances and completely outclassed above the treeline.

Attuned Magic

Animals — the odd one out among the attuned magics, being a relationship rather than an element. A nascent Cait Sith can calm, call, or read the intent of a beast. A powerful one can borrow an animal's senses at a distance, take a hunting pack under a single will, and hold a much larger creature motionless with nothing but attention. Notably, it does not work on anything that can talk.

Society

Mousehold, at the junction of the Nine Roads, is the Kingdom's inland port, livestock market, and rumor exchange all at once, and at 60,000 it is the second-largest city in the world despite governing nothing. Everything moving between provinces passes through it. Old Tibbault, the Mouser, runs it in the sense that everyone pays him and nobody has written it down.

Because the traffic passes through them, the Cait Sith know more about the Kingdom's movements than the Queen's own customs officials, and sell that knowledge cheerfully to everyone, including the customs officials.

Relations

The Hedges teem with mice, voles, beetles, and songbirds — all of them speaking people, and all of them Low-Brood by the Kingdom's reckoning — and the Cait Sith hunt them, legally, as game. Nobody at court considers this a crime. Increasingly, several Cait Sith do, and the resulting argument inside Mousehold is the closest thing the Kingdom has to an abolition movement.

There is a second thing this page cannot avoid. Ears, whiskers, and a tail are read at court as sylvan charm; the same idea drawn all the way through is read as grotesque caricature, and the peoples it is read on work the quarries and the fighting pits. The Cait Sith are the exact measure of how little distance the Kingdom's line of personhood is drawn across, and most of them prefer not to be measured.