The Goblin King

The Queen's brother, who once ruled at her side and grew jealous of her power. His attempt to take the throne cost him the war and the Kingdom, and in exile he has consolidated the ugly fey into something the court did not expect them to become: a polity. He promises to return with his army, reclaim the throne, and unite all of faerykind. The Kingdom finds the prospect disgusting, which is a strange reaction to a proposal for unity, and one worth asking about.

In Person

Nobody agrees on what he looks like, and the disagreement is not evasion — it is testimony. He is described as tall and as squat, as horned, as tusked, as unmarked; the one constant is that everyone who has sat at his fire says he looked like something they recognized. The court's explanation is glamour, which goblin glamour is not good enough to manage. The Wilds' explanation is that he has metamorphosed more than once and does not hold a shape well, and this is said quietly, because it raises a question about what he was.

He is plain-spoken, unarmored in company, and asks a great many questions. People come away from the King's Fire having said more than they meant to and having been treated better than they expected, and both halves of that are deliberate.

History

The official Kingdom history: shared throne, jealousy, war, banishment. His account differs on one point only, and he states it without heat — that the throne was not shared and never had been, and that what he objected to was not his sister's power but her Chancery.

Whatever the cause, the war was short and he lost it. What he did afterward is the part the court failed to anticipate. He went out into the Wilds expecting to find refugees and found nine peoples with their own laws, their own institutions, and four centuries of practice at surviving being called ugly, and rather than ruling them he built a court that travels to them. Two hundred years of that has produced the only functioning system of law in the Outer Wilds.

He is not a Faerie word for anything. He was not born a goblin, he took the epithet deliberately, and the Wilds have never let him forget that he chose a name they were given.

Method

The assize tent, and motion. He hears everything anyone brings, rules quickly, and leaves; the rulings hold because the Great Hunt will be back. He has no capital because a capital can be besieged, and he has never given battle on ground the Queen's generals chose, which has cost the Kingdom four expensive campaigns and produced four empty campsites.

His actual innovation is the open floor. Anyone at all may stand before the assize and be heard — goblin, Basekin, Feral-Kin, or Faerie — and this is the most radical institution in either realm. It is also the thing his own court is quietly fracturing over, because the trailing camp has begun asking whether heard and covered by the King's law are the same word.

Household

Iron Jarl Gorrach. Marshal of the Hunt, commander of the column, and the head of the party that wants a battle now. Loyal, blunt, and increasingly open about the disagreement.

Vahl the Weedking. Intelligence and smuggling, run out of water that lies underneath the Kingdom itself. The King's best-informed servant and the one he sees least.

The Household proper. Perhaps forty people who travel with him constantly and whose composition is not published. It is persistently reported, in three provinces, to include at least one Faerie. Nobody in the column will confirm it and nobody will deny it either.

Relations

He has never spoken publicly about his sister, in four hundred years, which is exactly what she has done, and the symmetry is noted more often in the Wilds than in the Kingdom.

He receives Thornmother Pesk's hospitality and has been refused by her four times, courteously, and has kept buying her remedies. He rides around the Hollow Marches and has never explained why. He has never asked the boggarts for anything, which is either an oversight or the single most interesting fact about him.

Reputation

In the Wilds: a king in the working sense — he shows up, he rules, he leaves, and being on his route is the closest thing to citizenship anyone out there has.

In the Kingdom: a monster, and specifically an ugly monster, which is the whole of the official case against him. The court's histories describe his proposal to unite faerykind as disgusting without ever getting as far as describing the proposal.

Hooks

• A herald from the Eternal City arrives at the King's Fire with terms in the Queen's own hand. They are generous. The column's real fear is that he might take them.
• The Camp Speakers bring a case the assize cannot dodge: a goblin defendant, a Basekin victim. Whatever he rules settles what his law is for.
• Somebody in the Household is selling to the Queen's Ears. Gorrach is investigating without the King's authority and wants outsiders to do the parts he cannot.
• He asks the party — outsiders, unaligned, owed nothing — to carry a message into the Hollow Marches, which he will not enter, to somebody he will not name.

"He asked me what I wanted. I have been asked what I would settle for my whole life, and I did not have an answer ready."