Vahl the Weedking

Holds the deepest and most connected of the meres, which in a country of channels is what a throne amounts to. He runs the Goblin King's smuggling and most of his intelligence, and he has never been seen by any Faerie who was in a position to report it accurately afterward.

In Person

Descriptions exist and do not agree. Grindylocs describe him as unremarkable — old, long-limbed, patient — and are baffled that anyone expects otherwise. Undine accounts describe something considerably worse, and every one of those accounts was given by somebody who saw him at four hundred feet in the dark, dying of cold, and got out.

He speaks Faerie tongues well, having learned them from the traffic, and conducts his correspondence with the surface in a formal register that Lady Nerissa's clerks find infuriatingly correct.

History

He did not conquer the Meres; he cultivated them. The channel system — navigation lines, boundary hedges, nurseries, traps, shelter, all of it grown and maintained — is roughly two centuries of work, most of it his, and it converted a scatter of cold drowned hollows into a connected country with roads.

Whoever tends the weed decides where anyone can go. That is the whole of his claim and it has never needed defending, because the alternative to Vahl's cultivation is not a different king; it is nobody being able to get anywhere.

Method

Gardening, patience, and the Line-Walkers. His boundary in the abyssal deeps of the Manywaters moves north a little every few years — slow enough to be deniable, maintained by crews who are demonstrably just tending plants — and in three generations Tidewell has been unable to prove a thing. It is the most successful territorial campaign in either realm's recent history and it has been conducted entirely by horticulture.

His second instrument is the Chartmasters: two hundred people holding the routes in memory, twenty-year apprenticeships, nothing written. The Kingdom has been trying to buy or take one for a century and a half.

Household

The Cultivation. The crews who grow and maintain the channels: his government, in the only sense the Meres recognize.

The Chartmasters. Keepers of the memorized routes, and the most valuable body of knowledge in the Outer Wilds.

The Ferry Trade. Smugglers to the Chancery, the postal service to everyone else, and the pipe through which the Goblin King's best intelligence comes up — through water that lies underneath the Kingdom's own capital province.

Coldgate. The hold directly beneath the Undine border at the depth where their expeditions must turn back. Half garrison, half customs post, entirely deniable, and its commander keeps a courteous correspondence with her Undine opposite number that both governments would be appalled by.

Relations

The Goblin King's most useful servant and the one he sees least; Vahl does not travel and the Hunt does not swim. Publicly and permanently the enemy of Lady Nerissa, whose forty years of formal complaints his people are said to read aloud for entertainment and to have started quoting sincerely.

The Deep Holds — grindylocs who live below four hundred feet and rarely come up — are within his realm and not entirely under it, and he has never explained the arrangement.

Reputation

In the Meres: the man who grew the roads. In the Kingdom: officially, an animal, because the alternative is conceding that a foreign power's territory runs under the Undine capital — and the Kingdom's most persistent lie is maintained specifically to avoid conceding it.

Hooks

"He answered our note within the season, in correct form, with the courtesies observed. My clerks were sick about it for a week."