The Wichtel

The Wichtel

Where the geothermal vents run beneath the ice, there are meadows — hot springs, moss, flowering ground, insects, an absurd green pocket in the middle of a province that kills the unprepared — and the Wichtel live in them. They are the Rimeward's farmers, which sounds like a joke about the Kingdom's coldest province and is instead its most valuable ground: every green pocket is owned, every one is worked, and the food, fodder, and glass-orchard fruit that come out of them feed the works and flatter the capital.

Thawmeadow, the largest — springs, orchards under glass, and the province's only agriculture — is owned outright by three Winterworks families, richer than the Works Council and considerably less careful. The Wichtel who work the ground own, on the whole, the tools they carry, and not always those.

The Green Pockets

A vent-meadow is warmth with a border. Inside the line: green ground, open water, fruit ripening under blown glass in the middle of an ice field, beautiful past reason. Outside the line: the Rimeward. The border is not natural — it is held, daily, by Wichtel cold-craft run in reverse: where every other Leprechaun works cold into things, a Wichtel's trade is the frost-fence, walking the perimeter and holding the killing air out of the growing ground. It is the province's most skilled magic and its worst paid, which is not a coincidence; the people who set the wage own the warmth.

Because the landlordism here is total in a way even the Works Council has not managed. The Council owns benches; the families own summer. Ground-leases are paid in labor and produce, renewed annually at the family factors' pleasure, and priced just below what would make anyone leave. The glass orchards sell novelty fruit to the noble houses of the Eternal City at prices that would fund the province, and the money goes instead to marriage brokers, Ring introductions, and the long project of becoming the kind of family the capital invites — which is to say, the Wichtel work in the warmest place in the Rimeward for owners whose ambition is to stop being from it.

Ways

Life is the growing rota, the herd (the vole pastures fatten on vent-moss), and the harvest calendar that Bellowsgate's refectories and the Ring's fruit-bowls both run on. Wichtel hospitality is famous and real — warmth is the one thing there is plenty of, provided someone else owns it.

Lease-day. The annual renewal, when the factors sit in the springhouse and every working family comes to hear its terms. Gifts are brought. The gifts are rent, everyone understands the gifts are rent, and the fiction that they are gifts is the year's most carefully maintained piece of craftsmanship.

The open pool. One hot spring at Thawmeadow's edge is held common under a custom older than any deed — bathing, laundry, and the winter's only free warmth. The families have produced paperwork against it three times. Three times the paperwork has gone missing, and the Shutterless — nobody knows who they are, which in a settlement of 4,500 is itself an achievement — have never been caught.

Second fruit. The first fruit of every glass tree goes to the owning family; the second, by custom, to the pickers. The custom appears in no lease, which every Wichtel understands precisely: a generosity written down would be a right, and a generosity unwritten can be withdrawn — and the year it is withdrawn, everyone knows what time it is.

Relations

The Fossegrim eat what the Wichtel grow and grumble at the prices, aiming at the wrong target — the pickers set nothing. The Works Council would annex Thawmeadow tomorrow if it could; the families hold it because the capital likes their fruit, and both sides court the Wichtel workforce with a solicitude neither shows its own. The Leprechauns sell the families standing rescue contracts and treat a lease-holder and a picker identically on the ice, which the families pay for anyway and privately find insolent.

To the court, the Wichtel are invisible behind their product: the fruit arrives, the glass shines, and no one in the Ring has ever asked who holds the frost-fence. The families, meanwhile, are the province's likeliest candidates for the doctrine's great promise — wealth, refinement, upward marriage — and the Wichtel watch their landlords chase metamorphosis with the particular expression of people who will be left behind either way.

Playing One