The Shah Gaz

Sleek black fur, piercing green eyes, long claws, and a reputation the Shah Gaz have never once attempted to soften. They hold the Briar Patch, the densest and darkest of the four Hedge crossings, and they hunt anything short of a Faerie that passes through it.

They do not hunt for food. They do not hunt to hold territory. They hunt because they like it, and the qualifier about Faeries is doing a great deal of work that the Shah Gaz decline to clarify.

The Thicket

Bramble, thorn and succulent on ground that does not want to be walked on, with light reaching the floor in coins. Everything living here has learned to move without shaking the thicket, because shaking the thicket is how you announce yourself — and the Shah Gaz have refined that into a discipline taught to children before they can speak clearly.

Thornwatch sets the whistle-codes: the layered signalling system by which the whole arm is coordinated, taught orally, revised constantly, and never written down. A traveller who has hired a Shah Gaz guide is safe. A traveller who has not is being discussed.

The Hunt

Ambush is the whole method. They do not run prey down and they do not fight fair, and both facts are stated openly and without embarrassment: a Shah Gaz who takes an animal in open ground has, by their own reckoning, done it badly.

The Shah Hadiz call this thuggery, loudly and at length. The Shah Gaz have never replied, which the Shah Hadiz find infuriating and which is, of course, the reply.

Ways

The Kingdom's writ runs in the Briar Patch nominally. No bailiff has ever served a summons here and returned with it signed, and the Chancery long ago settled on a policy of routing traffic around the arm and calling that a road.

At table they are famously, disconcertingly gracious. A guest formally received in a Shah Gaz hall is safer than anywhere else in the Hedges, and the transition between the hall and the thicket is not gradual.