Old Mother Ash

Has been in the same human household longer than anyone can verify, through a number of generations she declines to specify, and is the closest thing the hobgoblins have to an authority. Everything the Kingdom believes about humanity traces back through her network. She has never been invited to the capital, and has said she would decline.

In Person

Small, ash-grey, and always working. She receives at the hearthstone, does not stop what she is doing, and answers questions in the order she finds useful rather than the order they were asked. She is not unkind. She is simply the busiest person in either world and has been for a very long time.

She smells of woodsmoke, which is not sentiment: ash defeats scent, and scent is the only thing in the Waking World that actually matters.

History

She will not give a number. What is known is that the Ash House has had four families in it during her service, that she attended two of their funerals from inside the wall, and that the current owners have never seen her and believe the house is simply well-behaved.

Everything the Faerie Kingdom knows about humanity — its fashion, its architecture, its manners, all of it copied and passed off at court as original work — came back through hobgoblin service and most of it through her network. The Kingdom has never acknowledged this and has never seated a hobgoblin at any table.

Method

The hearth, and the rule. Hobgoblin doctrine is three sentences: the house is kept, the humans are not told, and the fey world is not brought here. She has enforced all three for longer than the Kingdom's current government has existed, and the enforcement is entirely social — a household that breaks the rule finds that nobody in the district will trade, warn, or help, which in a world containing cats is a death sentence with a delay.

Her second instrument is the Cat Watch: the shared warning system every household in service maintains, standardized and taught, and the most successful cooperative institution in either world. Nobody has ever written it down.

Household

The Ash House hearth. Neutral ground. Any fey in the district may sit and be heard, and the ash and hearth-smoke cover both scent and voice.

The Long Shelf family. Four generations reading a human library at night and transcribing it, whose work the Far Bank jacks carry back through the fens. The fey world's entire real knowledge of humanity is their handwriting.

The Tellers. Her problem. A very small group who believe one human should be told — carefully, chosen, as an experiment. She has forbidden it. Two of them have not stopped.

Relations

Known to Jack Nine-Wicks across the crossings for longer than either will say; between them they are the only people who can state who has gone through and who has come back.

She despises the Fetchers — Kingdom fey who cross to steal design and technique for noble houses — and her people guide them anyway, for money, which she permits and has never pretended to like.

Both crowns want the same thing from the hobgoblins and she has given neither anything. The invitation to the capital that never came is a standing joke in her network and is not funny to her.

Reputation

Among hobgoblins: not a ruler. The oldest, which in service means the one whose judgment settles things. In the Kingdom: an unnamed source of secondhand knowledge, uncredited in every book that depends on her.

Hooks

• One of the Tellers has done it — spoken to a human deliberately and been understood. Ash wants to know what was said before the rest of the Service learns that it happened.
• A cat has learned the district's warning system and is waiting where the warnings send people.
• A Ring noble commissions the party as Fetchers to bring back a mirror from a human house, and the commission specifies that it must have been used. Ash will hear about it before they arrive.
• The Long Shelf's youngest has spent two years transcribing a human account of the fey — accurate in ways that should not be possible, published four hundred years ago — and the Far Bank refuses to carry it.

"She never stopped sweeping. I asked whether the Kingdom had ever thanked her. She said the Kingdom had never asked her anything, and swept."