Pooka

Pooka

Golden-skinned and golden-voiced, the Pooka are the Kingdom's musicians, and music for them is not an art but a language. Virtually every Pooka is a prodigy; most prefer singing to speaking; and each one carries a heartsong, an innate melody unique to them that functions as name, signature, and self all at once. To learn someone's heartsong is a serious intimacy. To perform it without leave is an insult that has started feuds.

They are not a violent people, but Pooka on a battlefield are formidable: their music steadies allies, unknits enemy nerve, and carries further than any horn.

Appearance

Warm gold in every shade from pale honey to old bronze, with broad soft wings that produce a low hum in flight. A crowd of Pooka in the air is audible before it is visible, and each individual's pitch is as distinctive as a face.

The hum cannot be silenced, only muffled, which is why Pooka are poor sneaks and why Vale infiltration work is done by people who have accepted being heard and made a plan around it.

Attuned Magic

Music. A nascent Pooka can steady a frightened animal or make a listener weep with three notes. A powerful one can enchant a room, compel a confession, hold a crowd motionless, or unmake a battle line. The magic requires sound, which makes silence the one reliable defense, and makes the Kingdom's occasional attempts at silencing Pooka more literal than they sound.

It also works on the Vale itself. The province's resonance laws specify pitches rather than acts, because the wrong note in the wrong chamber brings stone down, and a Pooka who does not know the local restrictions is a structural hazard.

Life

Terraces cut into the valley walls, cave-halls below for the Gale, and a cricket-stall in every household — bred for tone, argued over endlessly. Work is instruments, tuned stone, cricket-breeding, and performance, and the province exports all four.

Names. The heartsong is the name. Spoken names exist for the convenience of other races and are treated as nicknames — useful, casual, and not really you. A Pooka introduced to another Pooka sings four bars.

Arrival. A new Pooka arrives with their heartsong and nothing else, and the first thing anyone does is listen to it — the whole household, in silence, once. Then they are told which of the province's known songs it resembles, and that becomes their family, and the resemblance is genuinely how Vale kinship is reckoned.

The Gale. Twice a year the wind comes down the valley past the threshold of pain and everybody goes underground for a week. It is a festival because the alternative is thinking about it.

Society

Governance is conducted as performance in the amphitheater-city of the Round: proposals are sung, opposition is sung over the top, and consensus is literally harmony. Outsiders find this ridiculous until they attend a session. The First Voice presides without ruling — and is obliged by office to sing any position that would otherwise go unrepresented, including ones she opposes.

Tribes

Three landscapes, three musics, one insistence that the music is the point.

Nothing the Pooka know is written down, and all of it is sung, which the Chancery has spent eighty years failing to prosecute.

Currents

The Ballad Trade. Not an organization: a profession. Vale singers travel the whole Kingdom, and every seditious idea in circulation has a tune, and the tunes cannot be confiscated.

The Censor's Office. The capital's answer — clerks transcribing, classifying, and interdicting songs, competently and hopelessly, because a ballad mutates faster than a file can be opened on it.

The Consonance. Vale conservatives who hold that the province's music is a civic art and that its use as a vehicle for politics will eventually cost the Vale everything. They are not wrong. They are extremely unpopular.

The Stall Choirs. Cricket-kin and beetle musicians — the finest players in the province, ineligible to hold a seat in the Round, and increasingly the actual authors of the songs the Round is singing.

Relations

Cordial with everyone, which is itself a strategy. The Round is the most politically dangerous place in the Kingdom and the court has never quite noticed: a Pooka ballad travels faster and further than any decree, cannot be confiscated, and cannot be prosecuted, because the Kingdom's censors have no vocabulary for charging a melody. Nearly every seditious idea in circulation has a tune, and a good many of them came home from the Hedges with a verse added.

Playing One