The Feral-Kin

Upright, handed, mostly Faerie-sized, and unmistakably animal about the head and legs: muzzles, ears set high, digitigrade stance, thick pelt or scale. They stand where a person stands and speak as a person speaks, and the Court has decided that this makes them worse rather than better.

The reasoning is aesthetic, and the Chancery has never pretended otherwise. A Cait Sith carries ears, a tail, and a few whisker-marks — sylvan grace notes on a human frame — and holds a province, a seat, and the affection of the whole Kingdom. A Feral-Kin carries the same idea drawn all the way through, and is filed as grotesque caricature: the beast portion no longer decorating the person but overwhelming them.

Anatomy

Everything the Cait Sith have, and more of it. Full muzzle rather than a suggestion of one; a beast's jaw, teeth, and range of expression; legs built to spring rather than to stand at court; hide, pelt, quill, or scale over the whole body. No wings, and no glamour worth the name — a Feral-Kin cannot make themselves acceptable even temporarily, which the Court finds telling and which is in fact the entire practical difference.

They are strong. This is noticed constantly, and always in the same tone.

Doctrine

The Court's line on the Feral-Kin is pity, which is more corrosive than contempt and much harder to argue with.

They are described as tragic souls: creatures whose metamorphic climb stalled halfway between animal instinct and civilized refinement, caught with the body of the beast and the mind of a person and belonging comfortably to neither. A herald will say this sadly. He will say it to a Feral-Kin's face, and expect to be thanked for the sympathy.

The doctrine is load-bearing, because pity licenses the arrangement. One does not exploit a tragic soul; one gives it work suited to its nature, and the work suited to its nature turns out to be everything the Kingdom does not want to do itself.

Work

Three trades, and no fourth.

Heavy labor. Quarries, kilns, the Winterworks' cold floors, the loading yards where the Nine Roads caravans are made up. Paid in kind where paid at all, since a Feral-Kin cannot hold a contract.

The pits. Arranged combat as spectacle, run below Mousehold and in the Emberwaste holds, with the season's best fighters bought up and shipped to the Eternal City to perform at court. The nobility find it thrilling and slightly improving — a demonstration, they say, of what instinct looks like when it is given rules. The fighters are celebrated by name for as long as they keep winning, and revert to equipment in the ledger the week they stop.

Frontier scouting. The Kingdom's border with the Outer Wilds is watched almost entirely by Feral-Kin, because they can move through country no Faerie patrol survives and because the Kingdom would rather not lose Faeries. Scouts are trusted with the Kingdom's outermost secrets and forbidden to own the ground they die on.

Relations

With the Kingdom: intimate, load-bearing, and unacknowledged. With the Cait Sith: the sorest subject either people has, and the one most likely to be raised at the table. Some Cait Sith see the comparison and are ashamed of the distance; more see it and take considerable care not to.

With the Goblins: the open door. The Goblin King recruits from the labor towns and the pits without much subtlety, and his offer is the only one anyone has made — a place on the Great Hunt, the word people used without qualification, and a weapon in your hand pointed at the Eternal City. Many have taken it. Many have not, and their reason is worth understanding: taking it means becoming goblin, which is another Faerie word applied from outside, and some Feral-Kin have had enough of wearing names other people chose.

With the Chrysalids: wary sympathy. They are told the same thing about being unfinished, and are feared for it where the Feral-Kin are merely pitied — a difference both castes understand and neither envies.

"He was named at the Ring, before the Queen, and cheered for an hour. In the ledger for that month he is a line item, and the line item is the mass of him." {.flavor}