The Alseid

The Roan was old when the High Forest was young, and the Alseid have been in its hollows long enough to have stopped counting. They identify by holler and by extended family, rarely by tribe, and the question are you Alseid? is usually answered with a family name and a valley.

The Hollers

Each hollow — holler, to anyone born in one — is effectively its own small country, and the ridges between them are enough of a barrier that neighbouring families can go a generation without a serious quarrel. There is no capital, no moot, and no mechanism by which one holler could bind another, and every attempt to explain this to a Chancery clerk has ended with the clerk writing no government and the Alseid agreeing cheerfully.

What holds instead is kinship and obligation. A stranger is fed; a neighbour is helped; a debt is remembered for three generations. It works, at the scale it works at, and the Alseid have never been asked to make it work at any other.

The Levelling

Alone among the Faeries, the Alseid hold no race to be inferior to another, and extend this without irony to every animal, chrysalid and sprite in their mountains. A beetle-drover at an Alseid table is a guest at an Alseid table.

This is not preached. It simply never occurred to them to arrange things otherwise, and they find the Kingdom's caste ladder both baffling and faintly disgusting — a reaction they express by not mentioning it, which visiting nobles have learned to find worse than an argument.

Ways

Fierce independence bordering on anarchism. An Alseid would rather do without any luxury in the world than be beholden for it, and the Roan's poverty is therefore substantially voluntary: they could trade timber and growing-magic westward tomorrow and have declined to for four centuries.

The High Forest sits between them and the capital, which makes them among the most isolated people in the Kingdom, and means the Queen has never had cause to make an issue of their politics. Beyond the western ridges lie the Hollow Marches — a country of Faerie ruins that the court will not discuss and the Alseid see out of their windows.