Grindyloc

Green-skinned and rubbery, with fingers far too long, the grindylocs hold the drowned places: weed-choked ponds, sunken hollows, and the cold black bottoms of lakes. They are the finest swimmers in the world, Undine included, and they resent the comparison being made in the other direction.

They have an old and well-earned reputation for pulling the careless under. Their position is that anything entering their water uninvited has made its own arrangements.

Appearance

Long, loose-limbed, and green through black, with webbed hands whose fingers run to nearly the length of the forearm. Out of water a grindyloc moves badly and looks worse, which is the only form in which most Faeries have ever seen one.

In water they are something else entirely — fast, precise, and unnervingly quiet — and the Kingdom's whole account of them is built on the one context in which they are at their worst.

Attuned Magic

Deep water — distinct from the Undine's command of it. A nascent grindyloc sees perfectly in black water and moves without disturbing it. A powerful one can hold a current still, chill a body of water past survivable, drag the light out of a pool, and travel between connected waters faster than anything can follow.

The everyday application is cultivation: coaxing the weed that makes the channels navigable. Grindyloc territory is grown, and the magic that grows it is the same magic that could stop a Tidewell expedition's heart, and both facts are known in Tidewell.

Life

Holds of woven weed suspended in the water column or set into a hollow's wall, moved when the current changes. Work is cultivation, ferrying, cold-pearl harvest, and the routes. Nothing is written; everything is memorized.

Names. Route-marks. A grindyloc's name records where they hold and what connects it — the equivalent of a chart reference — which is why their names sound like directions and why giving a false one is a serious matter rather than a lie.

Arrival. A new grindyloc is taken to the Nurseries and taught the water before anything else: cold, pressure, dark, and the ascent. It takes a season, it is the only formal schooling in the province, and it is the reason the Nurseries' location is the most closely held secret in the Wilds — not from the Kingdom, which does not know they exist, but from the Undine, who do.

Silence. Grindyloc etiquette is built for a place with no line of sight: you announce, you wait, you approach along the marked weed. Doing otherwise is not rude, it is an attack, and is answered as one.

Society

Dispersed, territorial, and organized around the water itself: who holds which mere, and which channels connect them. Vahl the Weedking holds the deepest and most connected of them, which in the Meres is what a throne amounts to.

Whoever tends the weed decides where anyone can go, and that is the whole of grindyloc government — a polity held together by gardening and by two hundred people who have memorized the roads.

Currents

The Cultivation. Vahl's crews, who grow and maintain the channels. The government, in the only sense the Meres recognize.

The Chartmasters. Perhaps two hundred keepers of the memorized routes, twenty-year apprenticeships, nothing written. The Kingdom has been trying to buy or take one for a century and a half.

The Ferry Trade. Smugglers to the Chancery, the postal service to everyone else, and the pipe through which the Goblin King's best intelligence comes up.

The Deep Holds. Grindylocs who live below four hundred feet and rarely come up, within Vahl's realm and not entirely under it.

Relations

The Meres run beneath the Kingdom's border and surface in the deep parts of the Manywaters, which makes the grindylocs the Goblin King's finest smugglers and spies. It also makes them the subject of the Kingdom's most persistent lie — that grindylocs are beasts — because acknowledging them as people would mean acknowledging that a foreign power's territory extends underneath the Undine's own capital.

Playing One