The Errantry

The Errantry are the Sidhe who hold the Kingdom everywhere the Ring cannot see it: wardens, governors, factors, and garrison commanders, from the toll roads of the Heartland to the contract-houses of the Rimeward. They are the surplus of the other two conditions — third sons, awkward daughters, and, by a custom nobody writes down, Sidhe whose artifacts resist concealing — given a posting the way one is given a settlement, and expected to draw the revenues and not be interesting.

Some of them work at it. Duke Aureling, Warden of the Nine Roads, is the type specimen: a third son handed a sinecure forty years ago who rebuilt it into the best-run administration in the Kingdom. The Ring's verdict on this achievement is that he has become very provincial, and the Ring's verdict is the wound every Errant carries — provincial power, court contempt, and a season's leave each year in which to feel the difference.

Ruling from Exile

The arithmetic of an Errant's life is inversion. A warden commands eight hundred armed Faeries — the largest force outside the capital's guard — and cannot get a decent seat at an investiture. A governor's word moves a province's harvest, and at court her word arrives a season late, in a letter, answered thinly. The Kingdom's real machinery — tolls, assessments, garrisons, the ledgers and their uncounted columns — runs through Errant hands, and the society those hands belong to measures worth exclusively by proximity to a city they are paid to be absent from.

The posted respond in one of two ways. Most perform the Ring at a distance: the estate garden grown in imported soil, the court fashions worn a season late, the household drilled in forms no one present can grade. But a posting is years, and years become decades, and some Errants commit the one transgression the Ring has no procedure for — they start to care. They learn the province's names, take its part against the assessors, spend their own money the way Aureling does, and stop performing. The Ring finds this more alarming than rebellion, because rebellion is legible — it can be filed, priced, and put down — while a Sidhe who has gone native has stopped wanting what the Ring is for, and a ladder is only a ladder to those still climbing.

Ways

The Season's Return. Each year the posted come back for the court season — ruinous, obligatory, and the sole official measure of an Errant's continued existence. It grows shorter every decade as postings grow heavier, and a few Errants have stopped coming altogether. There is a list of those who have stopped. It is kept at the Chancery, it is read in the Ring, and appearing on it is how a Sidhe learns what they have already decided.

The Provincial Table. Errant hospitality is famous and faintly scandalous: the local great house feeds everyone — clerks, caravan masters, village elders, and guests from the lesser races, seated, served, and heard. It began as administrative necessity. In many houses it is now conviction, and the distinction is exactly what the Ring's visitors come to assess.

The Letters. Every Errant household keeps its correspondence with the Ring — written weekly, answered seasonally — and an Errant measures their standing by the answers' tone the way a farmer reads sky. The letters are also the Errantry's own web: posted cousins writing province to province, comparing assessments and directives, which means the Errantry collectively knows more about how the Kingdom actually runs than anyone except the Chancery, and has begun, in a small way, to know it together.

Relations

The Errantry are the Ringborn's children and remittances — mocked at the season, relied on for the revenues, and expected to be grateful for both. The Vergers pay them better and respect them less confusingly: a governor who will move a schedule is a line in a ledger, and the Errantry, who live among ledgers, find the honesty restful.

The Queen they serve most literally and see least — her name is on every warrant they execute, and most Errants have met her twice. With the Chancery of Forms they are colleagues in all but name: the clerks and the posted run the Kingdom between them, each pretending the other is the junior partner. And they are the only Sidhe most lesser Faeries will ever meet — which makes each Errant, personally, the Kingdom's whole face in their province, a fact the kind ones lose sleep over and the rest never notice.

Playing One

• You are the government where you stand. Warrants, garrisons, tolls, and the benefit of every doubt — real authority, anywhere that is not the capital, where you are a rustic with a good name.
• You know the Kingdom the court only taxes. Roads, harvests, garrisons, the second meanings in the ledgers — the machinery is your daily work, and you know where it creaks.
• Two sets of manners, fluent in both. You can dine in the Ring and drink in a posting-station yard, and you no longer remember which one is the performance.
• A starting complication: you have started caring about your province — held its assessment down, misfiled a Chancery directive — and your parent house has sent someone charming to determine whether you have gone native, and they have arrived, and you loved them, once, at court.