Matriarch Dunnowar

The loudest voice at the Motherstone moot, which is not the same as being in charge and is as close as the Hollows get. She has seated mole and worm speakers at three consecutive moots over the objection of two clans and the confusion of a royal observer, who reported the arrangement to the capital and was told to stop wasting the court's time.

In Person

Broad, grey, and unimpressed. She conducts business sitting down, takes a long time to answer, and has an unnerving habit of letting a silence run until the other party fills it with something they did not mean to say. Gnome negotiation is largely this and she is the best in the province at it.

She is not stern. She is funny, in a dry register, and she likes visitors — she simply declines to be moved by any argument that arrives faster than she is prepared to consider it.

History

Eldest of the Ninth Hearth for sixty-one years, which is a long tenure by any measure and an unremarkable one in the Hollows. Her great work has been procedural and nearly invisible: over three moots she got mole, worm, and beetle speakers seated with the same weight as any clan, not by winning an argument about personhood but by never holding one. She simply put them on the roll, ruled the objections out of order on a point of moot custom, and let sixty years of precedent do the rest.

The capital sent an observer. He reported the arrangement as an irregularity. The Chancery told him to stop wasting the court's time, and that reply is the legal foundation on which the only mixed assembly in the Kingdom now rests.

Method

Precedent, patience, and the absolute refusal of a confrontation she has not chosen. She has never defied the Crown and never obeyed it: royal instructions arrive at the Hollows, are received with great courtesy, are referred to the moot, and are still pending. Some have been pending for decades.

Where she is genuinely ruthless is in the Assay Office. Its surveyors are mostly Gnomes now, its maps are mostly wrong, and this is not an accident of recruitment.

Household

Speaker Brill of the Wormhaven Banks. A worm, seated at the moot for thirty years, and the best procedural mind in the Hollows. Dunnowar's actual ally rather than her client, and increasingly the person other clans go to first.

The Hearth's Deep Factors. Her trade with the Kobold Deepworks: ore up, grain down, and two crowns lied to about the volume for as long as anyone has kept count.

The Gate-Under-Stone Custom. A customs post that has never examined anybody's paperwork, run by her nephew, who is married to a kobold and has not registered it on either side.

Relations

Correct and glacial with the Eternal City. Genuinely warm with the Deepworks, where she has more relatives than she will confirm. Cordial with Foreman-Ascendant Coilbrass, who buys her ore and whom she regards as a man who has replaced too much of himself to be trusted with a decision.

She has read every dispatch out of Lumenhal that she has been able to obtain, and has told nobody, including Astronomer-Primary Vesperine.

Reputation

In the Hollows: the Eldest, meaning exactly what it says and no more. In the capital: a provincial eccentric presiding over an embarrassing local custom, which is the most valuable reputation in the Kingdom and one she has cultivated with enormous care.

Hooks

• A moot speaker — Brill, or one of his — is arrested by the Assay Office for holding office while not a person. The moot adjourns. Nothing moves in the Hollows, including the ore the Winterworks needs.
• A competent, uncorrupted surveyor arrives from the capital and starts producing accurate maps. Dunnowar would like her stopped, and will not say how.
• The knocking on the Long Root is answered in a rhythm a Tallow child recognizes. Dunnowar sends for outsiders rather than clan.
• She offers the party something no one in the Kingdom can: a hearing, at the moot, in a body where their Basekin companion's word counts the same as theirs. What she wants in exchange, she has not yet said.

"Objection noted. Objection is out of order. The speaker has the floor. — She has said this three times in sixty years and it has cost the Kingdom more than a war."