The Hedges
A lattice of hedgerow country, banks, ditches, and thickets threading between the Heartland and half the Kingdom's other provinces — less a territory than everyone's shared border. The Cait Sith hold it, which suits them: they are hunters, and the Hedges are one enormous ambush.
The Land
Linear rather than areal. The province's 12 km² are strung out along hundreds of kilometers of boundary, which makes it impossible to invade, impossible to administer, and impossible to avoid.
Structurally the Hedges are three countries stacked: the ditch, wet and dark and full of things with too many legs; the bank, dry and warm and honeycombed with burrows, where most people actually live; and the thicket, a dense tangle of hawthorn, bramble, and dog rose reaching two hundred feet up and locking overhead into a roof of thorn. Sunlight comes through in coins. Everything in the thicket has learned to move without shaking it, because shaking it is how you tell the birds where you are.
- The thorn. Not a metaphor. A hawthorn spike at this scale is a fixed lance eight feet long, and the standard Hedges injury is a fall onto one. Every settlement keeps a thorn-surgeon and none of them lack for work.
- Birds. The Hedges are the best songbird habitat in the world, which is a pleasant sentence until you remember what a sparrow is at this scale. Lookouts are a legal requirement for any party larger than four, and the whistle-codes are taught to children before they can read.
- The bramble tide. Bramble grows a full stride a week in spring. Roads close, doorways vanish, and a village that skips one season of cutting simply ceases to have a way in.
- Hedgefruit glut. Autumn drops haws, hips, and sloes in quantities that could feed a province, most of it left to rot because it belongs, technically, to whichever province's side of the ditch it fell on, and the Kingdom has never settled the question.
Subregions
The Briar Patch. Bramble, thorn and succulent on broken ground, the crossing to the Greenmantle. The Shah Gaz hunt it, and hunt for no reason but the hunting.
The Taiga. Boreal conifer forest, the crossing to the Rimeward and the busiest arm of the ring. Big game, and the proud Shah Hadiz who prefer dangerous prey.
The Pridelands. Savanna grass and scattered trees, the crossing to the Emberwaste. The Shah Numan hunt it in prides, the females leading.
The Tidal Wilds. Drowned mangrove creeks and tidal mudflats, the crossing to the Manywaters. The broad-jawed Shah Balam hunt beneath the waterline.
The Gutters. Not a place on any map: the alleys and backstreets of every city in Everdew, claimed by the Shah Mira, who compete ferociously among themselves and close ranks instantly against outsiders.
Flora and Fauna
| Feature | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Hawthorn | The structural species; spikes as fixed lances | Fortification, hazard, and the source of every Hedges proverb |
| Bramble | Grows a stride a week in spring | Closes roads; the cutting-gangs are a whole profession |
| Dog rose | Thorned climber with vast hips | Winter food, and the dye that colors half the province |
| Ditchwater cress | Bitter, abundant, grows in the wet | Nobody's favorite; nobody has ever starved in the Hedges |
| Songbirds | Large; sparrows, thrushes, jays | The apex threat; a jay will call you in using a voice you love |
| Mice and voles | Large; speaking people, and the horse | Both the province's transport and its legal game |
| Jumping spiders | Diminutive, eight-eyed, no web | Have already worked out the angle. Some run the courier lines |
| Tiger beetles | Diminutive; the fastest thing at this scale | Runs blind, stops to look, resumes. Terrifying in the ditch |
| Glowcap fungus | Blooms along the ditch after rain | The only reliable light down there, and it is not much |
Mousehold
A rowdy sprawl at the junction of the Nine Roads that functions as the Kingdom's inland port, its livestock market, and its rumor exchange. Because everything moving between provinces passes through it, the Cait Sith know more about the Kingdom's traffic than the Queen's own customs officials, and sell that knowledge cheerfully to everyone, including the customs officials.
Other Settlements
Thornwatch (4,000) — a bank-fort at the Hedges' widest crossing, where the cutting-gangs are quartered and the whistle-codes are set. Officially a road-safety station. In practice the closest thing the province has to a garrison.
Sloegate (3,000) — a hedgefruit town that presses, ferments, and sells the autumn glut, and is drunk from the first frost to midwinter as a matter of civic policy.
Underbank (uncounted) — a burrow-town in the bank below Mousehold, inhabited by mice, voles, and beetles who work the market above. Its population may exceed Mousehold's. There is no figure, because the surveyor sent to produce one came back and said he had been unable to find it.
The Nine Gates — not one place: the nine points where the Nine Roads pass through the thicket, each with a tollhouse, a Cait Sith toll-keeper, and a stated tariff that is not the tariff.
Factions
Tibbault's House. Old Tibbault runs Mousehold in the sense that everyone pays him and nobody has written it down. His people keep the peace, set the tolls, and sell information to all comers with a fairness that is genuinely admirable and completely amoral.
The Queen's Customs. Twelve inspectors for hundreds of kilometers of border, comprehensively outmatched, and reliant on Cait Sith informants who are also the smugglers. Most inspectors make peace with this in their first year. The ones who do not are transferred to the Rimeward.
The Unhunted. An abolition movement in all but name: Cait Sith who have stopped hunting, Basekin who have stopped pretending it is acceptable, and a growing pamphlet trade. They meet in Sloegate during the drinking season, when nobody can hear anything.
The Long Whisker. Old-guard hunters who consider the Unhunted a betrayal of what the Cait Sith are, and who have begun hunting demonstratively — publicly, in numbers, in places where the argument will be seen. Nothing they do is illegal. That is the point they are making.
The Ditch Runners. Underbank's own: mouse and beetle couriers who move goods and people through the ditch, under the tollhouses, for anyone who pays. They are the only reason the Kingdom's border is porous, and the Kingdom does not believe they exist.
Sites of Interest
The Nine Gates. Where the roads pierce the thicket, and the only places a wagon can cross a hedge. Each gate is a tunnel of woven thorn a quarter-mile long, dark, single-file, and absolutely indefensible from inside — which is why the toll is paid without argument and why nothing has ever successfully been fought over in one. What makes the Gates remarkable is that they are woven. Hawthorn does not grow that way. The Cait Sith say the hedges have always been like that. The Dryads, asked once, said something that took four days and has been variously translated as yes and as not by us.
The Larder. A stretch of thicket where a shrike has been storing kills for longer than anyone's records run: a two-hundred-foot wall of thorn with things impaled on it, in rows, some of them very old and some of them wearing courier livery. It is the single most avoided place in the province and the fastest route between two others.
Underbank Market. Held in a bank-chamber the size of a hall, below and slightly to the left of Mousehold's legal market, and dealing in everything the legal market cannot: unlicensed passage, Basekin contracts that no court will honor, Rustlands salvage, and news. A Faerie is welcome, watched, and charged double.
Tibbault's Ledger House. A modest building with an immodest contents: three rooms of tallies recording who moved what, when, through where, for four decades. It is not a criminal archive — it is the archive, more complete than the Chancery's, and Tibbault sells extracts from it at prices scaled to how badly the buyer wants them not to be sold to anyone else.
The Hunting Question
The Hedges teem with mice, voles, beetles, and songbirds — all of them speaking people, and all of them Low-Brood by the Kingdom's reckoning — and the Cait Sith hunt them, legally, as game. Nobody at court considers this a crime. Several Cait Sith, increasingly, do, and the resulting argument inside Mousehold is the closest thing the Kingdom has to an abolition movement.
Hooks
- A tollhouse at the Fourth Gate has stopped collecting. The keeper is still there, still polite, and is waving everyone through — including things that should not be leaving the Twilight Veil.
- The Long Whisker announce a hunt through Underbank itself. It is legal. Everyone knows what it is. The party has four days and no legal argument whatsoever.
- Tibbault will sell the party an extract from the Ledger House that proves who has been moving iron out of the Bloodmoors and into the Kingdom. His price is that they steal a different page first.
- Something is taking the shrike's kills off the Larder. The shrike has begun restocking it faster.
- A Customs inspector, three weeks from transfer to the Rimeward, offers the party everything he knows in exchange for passage out of the Kingdom. He is not a good man. His information is excellent.
Relations
Everyone's border and everyone's problem. The Hedges touch nine provinces and are administered by none of them, which the Cait Sith have converted into the most useful position in the Kingdom: they cannot be conquered without conquering everybody's boundary at once, and they cannot be ignored, because everything anyone owns has to pass through their thorn to get anywhere.