The Nixies

The one Undine tribe that does not live in the Manywaters. The Nixies hold the freshwater lakes, ponds and slow streams of the Meadowlands, hundreds of kilometres from the sea, and have done so for longer than the Kingdom has kept records.

They fish the water, keep the channels clear, and are paid in grain for both. The arrangement is old enough that neither Sylphs nor Nixies treat it as remarkable, which is the remarkable part.

Fresh Water

A Nixie cannot comfortably live in salt, and the reverse is true of every other tribe in the race — a Merrow visiting the Meadowlands is a Merrow with a headache. This is not a small difference and the Nixies are tired of being told it is.

The consequence is isolation. The Nixies see their own race rarely, and when Tidewell's business reaches the Heartland it reaches them last and in summary. They have their own water-craft, their own festival calendar keyed to the Sylph harvest rather than the tide, and a body of song that no Merrow has ever heard.

The Arrangement

The Nixies maintain the Meadowlands' waterways: clearing weed, holding banks, keeping the mill-races running and the drinking water clean. In exchange they take grain, cloth and a fixed share of every harvest they watered.

It is not vassalage and it is not tenancy, and the Chancery has never successfully filed it as either. Both parties describe it as an arrangement and decline to elaborate, and four hundred years of clerks have written customary in the margin and moved on.

What the Nixies get out of it, beyond grain, is a Sylph province that regards drowning as a shared problem — the dew-watch of the Meadowlands is a joint institution, and the Nixies staff the half of it that involves going in after people.

Ways

Water magic of a domestic and extremely practical kind: current, clarity, and the slow persuasion of a channel into a new course. Nothing the deep tribes would call impressive, and all of it load-bearing for the most populous province in the world.

They find Sylphs funny. Not unkindly — the Nixies are fond of their neighbours — but a race that lives at the top of the grass and panics at a puddle is, from the bottom of a millpond, a comic proposition.