The Iyara

The Everflow runs in a closed circle and reaches no sea, and the Iyara run with it. They build nothing that cannot travel, keep no permanent ground, and have gone round the loop enough times that the journey has become the calendar: an Iyara gives their age in turnings.

The Flotilla

An Iyara settlement is a raft-town — pontoons, barges, lashed platforms and the odd hollowed seed-pod — that will be somewhere else next season and considers this unremarkable. Households join and leave a flotilla freely, so the composition of any given town changes faster than its name does, and the name usually belongs to the lead raft rather than to the people on it.

Because the river returns to itself, nothing is ever truly left behind. A grievance dropped at one bend will be back in a year, which has made the Iyara unusually good at settling things quickly and unusually bad at letting anything go entirely.

The River

The Everflow's ecosystem holds nearly as many species as the rest of Everdew combined, and the Iyara can name a startling proportion of them. Their water-craft is bound up in this: current-working, flood-reading, the slow persuasion of a channel, and a healing tradition built almost entirely on river plants.

They are playful and generous with anyone they have decided to trust, and they decide quickly. They are also, without warning or apparent transition, absolute on the subject of the river. The Everflow is not a resource to the Iyara but a body, and injuries to it that an outsider cannot even perceive will be answered tooth and claw. More than one Kingdom survey party has located the boundary of Iyara patience by crossing it, and the surveys were not completed.

Ways

They trade downstream with the Silt-Braided Basin, where the Everflow's overflow becomes the Odo Oya and the Orisha live much as they do. The two peoples get on enormously well and each privately regards the other as a slightly odd reflection.

With the Dryads of the canopy above they are cordial and distant. With the Alseid of the Roan they share a border, a stubbornness, and a low opinion of anyone who arrives with a charter.