Lady Nerissa

Cecaelia of Tidewell, which places her at the bottom of Tidewell's blue hole and the top of the province. She has spent forty years maintaining that the black meres are not part of her sea, an argument she is losing on the evidence and winning on the paperwork.

In Person

Pale, unhurried, and entirely at home at a depth that makes visitors' ears ache. She receives at the Cecaelia level and does not come up for anyone, which is protocol rather than pride: the Cecaelia is defined by being deepest, and an Undine who holds audience in the air has conceded something.

She is courteous, exact, and formidable in an argument, with a lawyer's memory for what was said in which year. Her one visible weakness is that she cannot let a point go, and everyone who deals with her regularly has learned to use it.

History

Elected Cecaelia at thirty-two by a communal process that took nine months and produced no rival, which is unusual and remains the foundation of her authority. Her tenure has been defined by one dispute: the deep, and who owns it.

She inherited a province that had quietly accepted the grindylocs below the thermocline and has spent four decades reversing that acceptance in writing — surveys filed, claims registered, expeditions chartered, and a legal position with the Chancery that is now unassailable and entirely unenforceable. In the same forty years the Weed-Line has moved north roughly four hundred feet.

Method

Paperwork, patience, and the tithe. The province's payments to the Eternal City are always paid, always late, and always accompanied by an itemized complaint, and the complaint is the instrument: forty years of formal grievances have built a documentary record of the deep that the Kingdom now cannot disown without disowning her.

What she will not do is fight for it. The Deep Claim faction wants a generation of expeditions; Nerissa has blocked every one, on grounds of cost, and everyone assumes it is caution. It is not entirely caution.

Household

The Deep Families. Six old houses of the lower hole. Communal, obstinate, and constitutionally incapable of moving quickly, which suits her.

The Colddoor Divers. Her expedition service at the thermocline, grim, well-paid, and superstitious. They bring up cold-pearl, black pondwort, and pieces of worked stone that she has been quietly cataloguing for years.

The Reedmoot Liaison. A junior relative posted to the shallows city to keep the Assembly happy, who has gone rather more native than Tidewell realizes.

Relations

Cold and correct with the Chancery, whom she needs. Increasingly strained with the Reedmoot Assembly, who do the province's trade and resent being governed from a hole. Openly hostile, in every public statement of forty years, toward Vahl the Weedking.

She has read every Colddoor report on the Sunken Stair — the stone stair below Tidewell that descends past every level the Undine use, with a handrail, built for people who need stairs — and she has classified all of them.

Reputation

At home: the Cecaelia, respected without much warmth, credited with holding the province together and blamed for holding it still. In the Wilds: the author of the most exhausting correspondence in either realm. Vahl's people are said to read her complaints aloud for entertainment, and to have adopted several of her phrasings sincerely.

Hooks

• A Deep Claim expedition is chartered over her objection, funded from the capital, and staffed by outsiders. She cannot stop it and would like it to fail safely.
• A crayfish landholder sues Tidewell over a shallows concession, in her own court. If the case is heard, Low-Brood property rights are established in Kingdom law. The Chancery has sent someone to make sure it is not heard, and Nerissa has not yet decided which way she will rule.
• Somebody has cleaned the Sunken Stair. All of it. In one night.
• She asks the party, privately, to carry a letter to Coldgate. Not a threat, not a claim — a letter. Forty years of public hostility has to be worth something as cover, and she has finally decided to spend it.

"She has filed the same objection annually for forty-one years. The Chancery has answered it twice. She considers the record to be going well."