Cait Sith

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.

Court aesthetics read all of this as sylvan charm — ears, tail, and whisker-marks as grace notes on a humanlike frame — which is a judgment about degree rather than kind, and which is examined further under Relations, below.

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.

That exception is the most-discussed clause in Faerie magical theory, because it draws a line the Kingdom's law does not: the magic itself distinguishes people from beasts, and it disagrees with the Chancery.

Life

Bank-burrows, thicket-halls, and ditch-side terraces, strung along hundreds of kilometers of boundary. Work is traffic: escorting, carting, brokering, tolling, and knowing things. A Cait Sith household with no view of a road considers itself badly housed.

Names. Two, always. A company name for market and Kingdom business, and a hunt name known to family and to whoever runs the same line. Asking a Cait Sith for their hunt name is either a proposal or an insult, depending on how well it goes.

Arrival. A new-metamorphosed Cait Sith is taken by whoever finds them, given a bed and a share of a route, and trained to the whistle-codes before anything else. The debt is real and is called the first road, and is repaid by taking in the next one.

Hospitality. Enormous, genuine, and slightly overwhelming. Nobody is turned away from a Hedges table, which is charming, and which is also how everything anyone knows ends up at Tibbault's.

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.

Tribes

There are five ways of holding a border, and the Cait Sith practise all of them — four arms of the ring, and one tribe that left it.

The five do not argue about which of them is really the Hedges. They argue about everything else, over dinner, at length, and would be offended to hear it called charming.

Currents

The Long Whisker. Old-guard hunters who hold that hunting is what the Cait Sith are, and who have started hunting demonstratively — publicly, in numbers, where the argument will be seen. Nothing they do is illegal. That is the point.

The Unhunted. Cait Sith who have stopped, joined by Basekin who have stopped pretending it is acceptable. A pamphlet trade, a drinking-season meeting in Sloegate, and no legal argument at all.

The Toll-Keepers. Nine gate appointments, nominally the Crown's and practically Tibbault's, collecting a tariff that is not the posted tariff. The most boringly powerful institution in the province.

The Ditch Runners. Not Cait Sith — the mouse and beetle couriers of Underbank, who move goods under the tollhouses. Half the province's young hire onto their lines and come back with opinions.

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.

Playing One