The Selkie

Pale-skinned and white-haired, with a natural resistance to cold the rest of the race regards as a good trick badly used, the Selkie live on the ice of the Boreal Shards rather than in the water beneath it. Every other Undine finds this perverse. The Selkie have stopped explaining.

The Ice

Floes and shelf carry an ecosystem of their own — surface mammals and birds feeding on the fish and krill below, or on each other, and cold-water life thriving in water that would give a Merrow hypothermia inside the hour.

Selkie homes are carved into the ice itself or built from cut block, and both are temporary by design: the floes move, calve and melt, and a hold is expected to be rebuilt within a few seasons. The Selkie have consequently no architecture worth the name and an unmatched body of knowledge about how ice behaves, which the Dwarves of the Misted Fjord pay well for and pretend they worked out themselves.

The Skins

They take their name from the sealskins they wear, and from the glamour that goes with them: a Selkie in the water is half-seal more often than not, and moves accordingly.

The skins are not costume. They are property — inherited, individually named, repaired rather than replaced, and never lent. A Selkie separated from their skin is not merely inconvenienced but diminished in a way the other tribes have never properly understood, and the stories the Kingdom tells about stolen sealskins are, unusually, close to accurate.

Ways

Undemonstrative and thoroughly capable. They swim as well as any Undine and simply prefer not to, which their cousins read as eccentricity and the Selkie read as having somewhere dry to sleep.

They keep the Kingdom's northernmost watch by default, since there is nobody else up there, and the ice-shelf boundary with the Rimeward is the one border in Everdew that both sides agree is nobody's fault when it moves.