The Leprechauns

Above the working valleys the air thins until Faerie wings — natural, prosthetic, anybody's — stop working at all, and from there up it is Leprechauns country. Cable-runners, lift-tenders, high-guides, ice-walkers, and rescue crews: the Leprechauns who go where flight does not, on rope, rail, crampon, and judgment, and who keep the province's lifelines — the cables, the passes, the listening posts above the avalanche slopes — open through weather that closes everything else.

Nobody is born at Cablehead, and everyone there chose it. The Leprechauns is the one tribe you join rather than inherit — apprentices who bought out their bonds, journeymen who walked away from good benches, Wichtel who could not stand another lease-day — and it is organized in the Cable-Runners' Lodge: the only body in the province the Works Council genuinely cannot replace, and, to the Council's ongoing bafflement, has never managed to buy.

The Thin

Above a certain elevation, flight stops. Not degrades — stops. The finest wings in the Wing Vault are dead weight above the line, which makes the thin the one fact in the Rimeward that no amount of Winterworks artifice gets past, and the only place in the Kingdom where the doctrine of wings means nothing at all. The Leprechauns will tell you, if pressed, that it is the most honest air they know: up there, what you are is what you can do, roped to people who can do it too.

The work is the cables and what the cables cannot reach. Runners walk the lift-lines in all weather, reading strand-wear by hand through a mitten; high-guides move goods and the occasional desperate traveler over passes no machine serves; rescue crews go out when the weather is the reason nobody else can; and the observatory above Cablehead watches the Glacier Face move its four feet a year. The avalanche listening service is Basekin crews with better ears than any Faerie, who by Works Council rule are not permitted inside the shelters they warn. Lodge shelters on the high routes have no such rule. This is not an oversight; it is the Lodge's entire politics, expressed in the only medium it uses, which is who gets through the door.

Ways

Cablehead life is spare on purpose — bunkrooms, the rope-lofts, the long refectory table where every rank of the Lodge eats at once — and the Lodge's law is short enough to recite: keep the count, share the shelter, honor the fee, and no rope carries a lie.

The walk-up. You join the Leprechauns by walking the last pitch to Cablehead unaided, whoever you were below. Masters have done it wheezing beside their own former apprentices, and the custom's point is made at the top, where the Lodge asks your name and nothing else — not your rank, not your mark, not your bond. The walk erases the ledger. It is the only ascent in the Kingdom that works that way, and people who have done it do not describe it as a formality.

The rope-oath. The Lodge oath is sworn holding a working rope, and the rope then goes into service on the routes. The Lodge does not keep relics; it keeps equipment, and somewhere on the ice, every member's oath is currently holding somebody's weight — which is the oath, restated daily, in the medium the Lodge trusts.

The count. Every party is counted out and counted back, and at first freeze the year's un-returned names are read at Cablehead — once, and never again. The Glacier Face gives back what it takes, at four feet a year; the Lodge keeps the arithmetic, and there are runners at Cablehead who know to the season when a friend is due out of the ice.

Relations

The Fossegrim are kin below — half the Lodge came up out of the bond-halls, and the bond-halls know it, which is why the Council watches Cablehead the way it watches nothing else in the province: not as a rival, but as an example. The Wichtel families buy standing rescue contracts, which the Lodge honors at the same flat fee schedule it charges a picker, a policy the families find insolent and pay for anyway, because the ice does not take appointments.

The court finds the Leprechauns picturesque at a distance and infuriating in person: nobles touring the Glacier Face discover that the Lodge's price list is the only one in the Kingdom the Ring has never negotiated, that rank buys no place on a rope, and that a high-guide will turn a duke around at the weather-line with the same three words she gives anyone. The Chancery has a file on the Lodge. The file is thin. This also is not an oversight.

Playing One

• You go where nobody else can. Climbing, ropework, cold-craft, altitude, and rescue — when wings fail, when the weather closes, when the route does not exist, you are the option that is left.
• Your word is the asset. The Lodge's reputation travels with you: unbuyable, exact, and honored on every weight ever cheated — which is none. People trust you with things they trust no one else with, and that is a door and a burden both.
• You are slow, on principle. No flight — by fact at altitude, by habit below it — in a Kingdom of fliers. You arrive last, carrying the rope everyone will shortly need.
• A starting complication: the count came back one short on a route you led, the Lodge does not blame you, and the glacier's arithmetic says the body should have come out of the Face last season — and it has not.