The Shah Balam

Stout, heavily muscled and broad-jawed where their briar-dwelling and city cousins are lithe, the Shah Balam hold the drowned eastern crossing where the Meadowlands run down into the salt of the Singing Sea. Every traveller bound for the Manywaters passes through their water, and the Shah Balam watch all of them.

Where common fey balk at damp ground and fear open water, the Shah Balam revere the tide and the flooded caves beneath it.

The Tide

The Tidal Wilds rewrite themselves twice a day. At low water there are silt banks, walkable channels and a route; at high water there are none of those things, and a traveller who memorised the morning's path is in the water by evening. The Shah Balam do not memorise paths. They read the tide, which is a different skill and takes a childhood.

This makes them pilots by default and by monopoly. The overland route to the sea does not exist in any practical sense, so a party bound east hires a Shah Balam and pays what is asked. The Kingdom has twice attempted to license this trade. Both licences were issued, framed, and ignored.

The Hunt

They wear water-slick rosettes and ornament themselves in river-clam shell, shed snake hide and woven sedge. The day's heat is spent lounging along low branches over blackwater pools, which visitors mistake for indolence, and then they slip into the flood and hunt like otters.

They use almost no weapons and need none. The Shah Balam bite is the strongest in the Hedges by a wide margin, and they take armoured lizards and giant catfish by simply closing on them underwater. In a tribe of ambushers and sprinters, they are the only ones who hunt by waiting in the water, and the others find this unnerving in a way they have trouble articulating.

Ways

Serene, and menacing in a manner that is difficult to complain about, since nothing is ever explicitly said. They guard the liminal threshold between the Kingdom's pastures and the deep sea with a proprietary seriousness that the Merrow on the far side find charming and the Chancery finds irregular.

Their villages are stilted platforms above the flood, reached by boat and by nothing else, and the boats belong to the household rather than the individual — a Shah Balam without a boat is a Shah Balam in disgrace, and everyone can see it from a distance.