Baruush

Origin

They are bulbous, fat and frumpy, and they are a short species. They own the crossings. When the empire that bred them to build its roads fell, they retreated to the rivers and built fortress bridges, from which they charge passengers for the privilege of crossing, and they have been charging since. Their whole political method fits in one sentence, and the sentence is theirs: "Their influence is something that is forced upon, or they plug the water." They are the new money, backstabbers, thieves, rapists, and incestuously kept pure. A Baruush stands four feet high in a wet hide coat with orange teeth, and a valley of eleven thousand people drowns on his word, and he knows the number, because the number is in the ledger, and the ledger is the point.

The splice is Nu'uman, Irugaine and beaver, and they were the only WildKin their makers pronounced finished. The Alverians viewed them as perfect and locked their genetic code. No strain of Baruush has ever been bred and none ever will be. The lock is in the blood and cannot be undone by anyone now living. The Baruun, the Baruunmor and the Baruusha are castes of that one locked blood, told apart by feeding, by rank and by trade, and never by breeding. A Baruun kit fed as a Baruunmor becomes a Baruunmor. A Baruunmor's kit put to a ledger becomes a Baruusha. The three shapes come out of one genome and the houses know it, which is why the caste of a kit is decided in its first winter, by a baron, in a room with a scale in it.

Of the age of expansion, one builder's note survives: "DO'URSSAN BUILT PUMP, BEAVERS BUILT THE MIGHTY DAM." Those were the Great Works. Do'urssan pumps lifted the marsh water off a continent's worth of low ground and Baruush dams held what the pumps lifted, and where the two peoples worked together the Alverians got their roads through country that had been mud since the world began. The Works are the last thing either people is proud of, and the two have argued about the credit for six thousand years. A Do'urssan will say the water was already moving before a Baruush touched it. A Baruush will say that anyone can push water and the trick is stopping it.

When Alveria collapsed, the road crews found themselves standing on the only crossings in a continent that had suddenly stopped being one country, and they retreated to the rivers. The retreat took a single generation. The engineers went to the narrows, walled them, and started counting. Within eighty years there was no free crossing of any major water on three landmasses, and the peoples who had been carried over those bridges free for a thousand years learned the word tenth. The Baruush have never once been driven off a river they have held. They have been bought off, married into, besieged, poisoned and burnt, and the houses that did those things are gone, and the beam is still on the gate.

Body

A commoner stands two to three and a half feet. The nobles are bigger, and their size is the whole argument of the culture: the more noble are fatter, with more muscle, and range from three and a half to five feet. The palms are wide and five-fingered and built for gripping timber. The front teeth are snubbed and often rotten, which is a working hazard in a people that eats wood.

A commoner weighs sixty to a hundred and ten pounds. A noble weighs a hundred and forty to two hundred and sixty. A Baruunmor at full feeding weighs three to four hundred and moves like a door coming off its hinges. The body is barrel-built and low, the shoulders heavy, the legs short and thick, the feet broad and webbed to the second knuckle. The tail is flat, scaled, hairless and as wide as a shovel blade, and it is the first place a Baruush stores fat and the last place he loses it, so the tail is read the way other peoples read a face. A thick tail is credit. A thin tail is a question.

The fur runs brown through black, coarse over the back, dense and near waterproof beneath, and it is kept oiled with rendered river fat until it shines. The eyes are small, black and set high for swimming. The ears are small and close. The nose seals shut under water and so does the throat. What one notices first, always, is the teeth: two orange chisels in the front of the mouth, snubbed flat by timber, browning at the root, worn on purpose to a working edge. What one notices second is that the fattest person in the room is the one giving the orders, and that everyone in the room has already worked this out.

Inside, the whole animal is a furnace fed on the worst fuel in the world. Wood is a poor food and they live on it, so the gut runs most of the body's length: a fermenting chamber behind the stomach where the timber is rotted down by things that live there and nowhere else, and a Baruush who is purged of those things starves with a full belly. Digestion takes three days and never stops, which means a Baruush is warm to the touch, eats from waking to sleeping, and produces heat enough that the inner galleries of a dam need no fire. It also means weight cannot be faked. Wood alone will keep a Baruush alive at commoner size and will not carry him past it. To be heavy you must eat above wood: sapwood mash, marrow, oil, paid meat. A heavy Baruush is a Baruush who is taking a tenth off the world every day and converting it directly into his own body. That is the entire politics of the species stated as a digestive fact, and they are perfectly aware of it, and they have built their religion, their courts and their succession on it.

The incisors never stop growing. A Baruush who stops gnawing is killed by his own teeth within the year, as the chisels curve back and drive up into the palate and the brain, and this death is well known and is used as a threat to idle children. Gnawing is therefore not a custom that became a necessity; it is a necessity that has been dressed as custom everywhere the culture touches. The tooth-mark on the house-beam, the notch cut at the gate, the bite taken out of a treaty timber: every one of them is a man keeping himself alive in public. Capped teeth cannot wear, so a noble's copper caps and a baron's gold caps must be rasped down once a month by a Tallyman, kneeling, with a file, and the gold filings go into the toll-chest and are counted.

They swim fast and they hold breath for an hour. The lips close behind the incisors, so a Baruush can gnaw underwater without drowning, and a dam is therefore built as much from the inside and the underside as from the deck, which is why nobody who has not seen the work believes the speed of it. Underwater the heartbeat drops to a slow knock, the blood crowds into the chest and skull, the nostrils and throat seal, and a clear lid comes across the eye. A Baruush working a sluice gate is gone for forty minutes and comes up unhurried.

Their senses are built for water and are poor everywhere else. Beyond forty yards in air a Baruush sees a smear with a size to it, which is why every gate they have ever built brings the traveller up a ramp to arm's length and asks him to lay his hand flat on the beam, and why the whole of their diplomacy is conducted close enough to smell. What they have instead is the tail and the whiskers, which read pressure: the weight of water behind a wall, the tremor of a current changing, a body moving on the far side of a sluice. A Baruush inside a dam knows the state of the river the way another person knows the weather, continuously and without looking, and can feel a leak start three courses below him. The lodges have no window on the upstream side and nobody misses it.

They live thirty to sixty years, the shortest span of any WildKin in this class, and the short life is the engine of everything they do. A noble's whole career fits inside two Nu'uman generations, and a house that wants to be old must be greedy fast. A Baruush of forty negotiating with a Nu'uman lord of forty is dealing with a man who has half his life left, and he is aware of it, and he prices it in.

Life

The personality of the people includes bold and incestuous, and the people as a whole is incestuously kept pure. Each house breeds within itself, on purpose, as policy. The stated reason is the bridge: a crossing is held by a bloodline and the bloodline must not be divided, because a daughter married out is a claim married out. A baron takes his sisters and his cousins and, in the older houses, his daughters. A house that has married outside itself within living memory is called thin, and thin houses pay more at other houses' gates.

What this does to them over six thousand years is visible. The jaws shorten, the teeth crowd and turn inward, the litters carry more dead, and the barons of the oldest houses are frequently deaf, frequently sighted in one eye, and frequently brilliant. They regard all of it as the price of the beam.

A litter runs two to five kits, born blind and furred in the heart-lodge, the sealed chamber at the middle of the dam where the air is warm and the water can be heard through the wall on every side. Every kit is weighed within its first hour on the house-beam, against a green stick cut that morning. A kit that does not outweigh the stick goes into the water, and the house calls this the river's tenth, and the Tallyman enters it in the ledger under receipts rather than losses. The custom is not hidden and is not defended. It is the first toll a Baruush pays and the only one paid on his behalf.

Kits swim in a week and gnaw in a month. At three years a kit sets its first tooth-mark on the house-beam, the great upright timber at the heart of the lodge, and the beam of an old house is a ladder of a thousand bites climbing out of reach into the dark. Caste is set in the first winter. A kit chosen for the Baruunmor is fed sapwood mash and marrow until it doubles its litter-mates; a kit chosen for the Baruusha is taken out of the water, put to the ledger, taught to read three tongues and taught to wash. Work begins at five. Breeding begins at eight.

A Baruush is old at forty, when the teeth begin to fail, and the failing of the teeth is a public event: a commoner's are drawn and he is put to the trough to be fed pulp; a noble's are capped in copper; a baron's are capped in gold, and the gold caps of a dead baron are the first thing his heirs argue about. Death comes at fifty or sixty, and there is no burial and no burning. The Tallymen pack the body into the dam wall in clay and lay the next course over it. Every Baruushen Dam is a tomb with a road on top of it, and the oldest houses say, seriously, that their walls hold because of what is in them. A Baruush who dies in debt to his own house is not packed. He is thrown off the downstream face, and the river keeps him, and his name is scratched out of the beam.

The diet is wood, bark, root, cambium and river weed, and a house measures its wealth partly in standing timber. They take meat and fish only when meat and fish are paid to them, and then they eat it at the high trough in front of the commoners, slowly. The drink is sapwine, tapped from the toll-trees a house plants in rows along its banks and fermented in oak vats sunk in the dam where the cold is even. Good sapwine is thick, brown and sweet and will strip the enamel off anything but a Baruush. It is the one Baruush thing other peoples buy willingly.

Frailty

The teeth kill more of them than the water does. An abscess under a worn incisor tracks up into the jaw and from the jaw into the skull, and a rotten tooth in a people that eats with its teeth is a sentence with about eight months in it. Every house keeps a tooth-man, and the tooth-man's work is drawing, filing and packing with clove and clay, and it is the one trade a commoner can practise on a baron without being weighed first.

The inbreeding runs deeper than the jaws. Cleft palate is common enough to have a name that is also a common insult. Litters carry stillbirths at a rate no other people would tolerate and the ledger absorbs them under the same heading as the green stick. Deafness in the old houses arrives in the twenties and is concealed for as long as possible, because a baron who cannot hear the river through the wall is a baron who cannot rule, and there are three recorded cases of a deaf baron being walked calmly into an opening sluice by his own Sluice-Warden.

Fat is the other killer, and it is the one nobody may mention. A body built to store against a hard winter has been made to store against an election, and nobles die of it: the heart fails at forty, the joints go before that, and a Baruunmor at four hundred pounds cannot swim well and knows he cannot. Every Breaker drowns eventually. The house feeds him into that condition deliberately, since a Breaker who can outswim his own house is a problem for his own house, and the Breakers understand the arrangement and accept it, and nobody has ever written down why.

The water gives them their parasites. Gut worms out of standing pools, the scours that empty a heart-lodge of kits in a fortnight, and the flukes that come with slow water behind a new dam, which is one more reason the peoples downstream hate them and one reason the Baruush move their own creches upstream whenever they can. Crush injuries are the trade's own: a shifted course, a jammed gate, a log turning in the race. The sluice room takes a body a decade in every large holding and the bodies go into the wall like everyone else.

Country

The Surface Realm, on the water. Their settlements are the Baruushen Dams: strong, massive, fortified, intelligently built structures that hold within them whole Baruush cities and towns, and the larger the population or the body of water, the later the dam. The usual form is the bridge fortress, a bridge with two keeps on either side and residential lodgings built into the internals of the dam bridge. The people lives inside the toll it collects.

A dam is built in three skins. The outer skin is dressed stone and timber against ram and fire. The middle skin is the lodging, a warren of low warm galleries with no window on the upstream side, lit by fat lamps, smelling of oil and cut sap, where a thousand Baruush live within a hand's breadth of a hundred thousand tons of held water. The inner skin is the clay core, which is where the dead are, and which no one but a Tallyman may open. Beneath everything run the sluices, and the sluice room is the most heavily guarded room in any Baruush holding, because whoever holds the sluices holds the argument.

A century of Baruush tenure changes a river permanently. The valley floor above a dam becomes a shallow lake with a drowned forest standing in it, and the drowned forest is a crop: dead timber cures underwater for decades and comes up harder than anything grown in air, and the houses farm it. Below the dam the river runs clear, cold and starved of silt, the flood meadows stop being meadows within three generations, and the fisheries fail from the bottom up. The Baruush plant toll-trees in rows along both banks for sapwine and for gnawing, and those rows are the only planted thing they will not cut. When a house is finally broken and its dam goes, the valley does not return. It floods once, catastrophically, and then it is gravel, and the towns that hated the dam most spend the next century arguing about who will rebuild it.

The dams: Gnawstone, the oldest still standing. The Tollmouth, which spans a tidal narrows and charges twice. Blackweir, which was let out on its own people. Sixgate, six sluices and six houses' factors in one keep. Hollowfall, built over a waterfall that no longer exists. The Drowned Stair, which took a stepped hill town under it and kept the steps. Kettlehold. Nine Sluices. Barrowgnaw. The Grey Plug, which has never once been opened.

The bridges: Toothbridge. The Long Toll, a mile and a quarter of paid road. Widow's Span. Kingsgnaw, where a crowned man paid the tenth in front of his own army. The Beam of Oldtooth. Coppercross. The Slack. Fatman's Crossing. The Weeping Arch, which leaks and is famous for it and is not repaired, because the leak is a demonstration.

The rivers held by the houses: the Hollowith, the Mawl, the Tessane, the Orrow, the Cambrel, the Lourne, the Vesk, the Drennow, the Skell and the Grieth.

Society

They are toll barons and they are new money. Clever and conniving. Expert builders and structural engineers, always looking at how they might build stronger. Destructive: they build their dams and destroy other ecosystems and often flood towns and settlements in the process.

A house is ruled by the Baron of the Beam, who is the heaviest of it. Under him sit the Tallymen, who are priests and treasurers in the same person and keep one book for the toll and the dead together; the Gate-Keepers, who take the tenth and cut the notch; the Sluice-Wardens, who open water on a refusal and who are sworn never to speak the word open outside the sluice room; the Breakers, who are the Baruunmor and who are the house's war; and the Factors, who are the Baruusha and who live downstream among the payers and handle the coin, the bribes and the listening.

Weight is rank, and rank is weighed. Every gate carries the toll-beam, a great iron balance, and the beam that prices a merchant's cart also prices the people who own it. At the spring Weighing, on the first day the flood tops the third course, the house goes onto the beam one by one before the whole holding. A commoner is weighed against wood and must top a measured billet to keep his portion. A noble is weighed against copper, and the copper is added to each year, so a noble who does not grow shrinks in fact. The baron is weighed against the toll-chest itself, full, and if the chest goes down the house has a new baron before the next flood, and the old one is generally already dead by the time the chest has settled.

The three grades of the beam are Full-Beam, Half-Beam and Light. Light is the worst thing you can call a Baruush. It says he is losing, it says his house is thin, and it says, in the oldest reading, that he will float, and floating is what the drowned do. Nobles eat accordingly. A Baruush noble in decline is a visible thing, a man being audited by his own body, and everyone at his own gate can see the answer coming.

The toll is the Tenth. The formula is fixed across every house and has not been altered in four thousand years, and its fixity is the reason it is obeyed.

One part in ten of the load, taken in kind, chosen by the keeper and not by the traveller.

One beast in ten of the herd, chosen the same way, and a herd of nine is a herd of ten for the purpose, since the tenth is owed before the count.

One coin in ten of the purse, and the purse is opened at the beam and looked into.

For a traveller who carries nothing: a tenth of the day, which is a full shift on the dam, mud, timber or clay, ending when the keeper says.

The tenth of the tenth, which the Tallyman takes off the top for the book. The book is not free.

The standing tenth, levied yearly on every town that drinks, mills or irrigates from water the house holds, whether or not the town ever crosses. This is the tenth that causes the wars.

The dead cross free, and the coffin is opened at the beam, and this is not a courtesy.

Nothing is exempt: not clergy, not envoys, not soldiers under arms, not a lord on his own land. A house that grants one exemption has priced the next thousand crossings at nothing, and every Baruush knows that arithmetic before he can swim.

There is no credit at the gate, and there is credit at the keep. A traveller who cannot pay may take the loan, and the loan compounds at every flood, and the Tallyman writes it down with real pleasure.

The gate custom is the same at every crossing they hold, and travellers learn it before they learn the road. The traveller comes up the ramp and lays a hand flat on the beam, close enough for a short-sighted keeper to see him whole. The Gate-Keeper gnaws a notch in the beam's edge beside the hand, one bite, and speaks. The words do not vary.

"Whose river?"

"Yours."

"Whose crossing?"

"Mine, for the tenth."

"Then pay, and walk dry."

The tenth is taken, the notch is cut into a hazel tally-stick, the stick is split lengthwise, and the traveller keeps the thin half and the keep keeps the thick half. A matched pair of halves is proof of payment anywhere on that river and forged halves are a hanging matter on both sides. After payment the keeper offers a thumb-cup of sapwine, which is drunk standing, and which is the only hospitality in the culture. A traveller of rank is weighed before he is fed, and told his weight aloud, and the telling is a compliment or it is not.

Refusal is answered in three waters, and every house answers in the same order, because the order is the deterrent.

The Shut. The gate closes and the sluice beneath the near keep is opened, and the ford a mile downstream, which everyone was quietly relying on, ceases to exist within the hour. The refuser is not touched. He is simply now on the wrong side of a country. The Shut is lifted the moment the tenth is paid, plus the tenth of the delay.

The Turn. If the refusal is a town's rather than a traveller's, the house turns the water. The mill race dries, the drinking channels drop, the flax pits stink, the fields go pale in a fortnight. Nobody has been attacked. The Baruush simply cease to send something they were never obliged to send, and they send factors down to explain this, politely, in the dry market square.

The Plug. The sluices are closed entire and the dam is raised in courses, night after night, and the valley begins to fill from the top of the town's own river bank. The Plug is worked slowly on purpose. A town under the Plug watches the water come up the church steps over eleven days, and there is a moment, generally on the fourth or fifth, when the town's own people take the matter out of the hands of whoever refused. The waiting has never yet lasted a season. Twice in recorded history the Plug has run to the end, at Blackweir and on the lower Mawl, and both places are still under water, and both are shown to delegations.

Through all three the ledger keeps running, and the bill at the end is the tenth, plus the tenth of the delay, plus the cost of the flood, which is assessed by the house that caused it. Towns have been paying off a single week of Plug for four generations. The Baruush call these the good debts.

They dress in oiled hide, short and sleeveless, and go barefoot, and rank hangs on the tail: copper rings clamped along it, one for every bridge the house holds, so that a baron's tail rattles when he walks and the rattle is deliberate. The Baruusha alone wear cloth. Commoners eat wood at the low trough; nobles eat paid meat at the high one, above them, in view. The music is percussive and wet: the tail-slap on flooded planks, the gate-drum that sounds a crossing, the hollow knock of the beam-hammer on the day of the Weighing, and a body of work songs of which every single one, without exception, is about a toll. An oath is sworn "on my weight and on the water," and a Baruush who breaks one is weighed in public at the next flood and found Light regardless of what the beam says. It is taboo to cross any bridge, including one's own, without paying the tenth into one's own chest; to build anything downstream of one's own house, which is theft from oneself; and to give wood away.

Faith

The Baruush worship the Debt. The doctrine is short, and every Baruush can recite it at five. The river is a lender. Every dam is a loan taken against the river's own weight. The toll is the interest, paid by the world on the Baruush's behalf. The drowned are the principal, paid down a little at a time, forever, because the principal cannot be cleared and a debt that cannot be cleared is a relationship.

The lender is the Creditor Below, who is not depicted, not named further and not addressed by any other title. Other peoples looking at the rite say plainly that the Creditor Below is Orton of the ocean wearing river water, and the Baruush do not argue, and do not agree, and will not say the name. To name a creditor, in their thinking, is to invite him to the gate.

The clergy are the Tallymen, and the priesthood is the accountancy. A Tallyman keeps one book. In it, on facing pages, go the tolls taken and the dead packed into the wall, and the whole theology is the claim that these two columns are the same column. A Tallyman is castrated at his investiture, since a priest with heirs is a priest with a motive, and he is the only Baruush who may open the clay core, and the only one forbidden to be weighed.

The great rite is the Weighing at spring flood. The house goes onto the beam, the year's tenth is counted aloud before the water, the ledger is read from the crown of the dam so that the river can hear the figures, and one prisoner, bought or taken, is given back to the water as the year's payment on the principal. The lesser rites are the Notching of a newborn on the house-beam, the Capping of the teeth, and the Packing of the dead. The promise is this: a Baruush who dies with his weight paid is packed into the wall and holds the river forever, which is the nearest thing to heaven the culture has ever thought worth wanting. A Baruush who dies in debt goes off the downstream face, and the river keeps him, and keeping is not holding.

Other peoples call the faith greed set to a hymn. The Baruush have heard this and consider it a fair summary.

The wall holds nothing. Orton keeps no realm and no worldly god keeps one, and the Creditor Below keeps less than that. Every Baruush soul goes where every soul on Nu goes, to the soul auction of the star gods, and is sold, and the Tallymen, who keep the best books in the world, have no entry for the transaction and take no commission on it.

Tongue

They speak Common. They have no tongue of their own and never did. The Alverians gave them Common and gave them nothing else, and the Baruush read this as one more proof that they were finished when they were made, and are quietly vain about it. Among themselves they use the gnaw-cant, which is not a language: a run of clicks, tooth-taps on timber and tail-slaps used across a working site and inside a keep, capable of expressing quantities, water levels, sluice orders and one insult. It carries through a wall and through water, where speech does not, and a dam under construction is a building full of tapping. No outsider is taught it and no outsider needs to be, since the whole of it is numbers.

A Baruush carries a short blunt given name, a house name, and, if he is a baron, his bridge. The given names are one or two syllables and are chosen for how they sound shouted across water. Women's and men's names are not distinguished. A Baruusha factor working among other peoples will often soften his house name at the ends and is mocked at home for it. Eight names: Orrum Oldtooth, Besk Murkholt, Talla Vaskerel, Gorrun Drennath, Hessa Tullbarrow, Mott Skrell, Udda Ovvenreck, Karrow Palgrume.

The eight great houses, and the one line each is known by.

Oldtooth, the eldest, who hold Toothbridge and Gnawstone and who claim descent from a road foreman of the empire.

Murkholt, who took Blackweir by marrying into it and then let it out.

Vaskerel, who hold the Tollmouth and charge on the tide, and who are hated by every other house for the innovation.

Drennath, who lost a war to a Nu'uman crown, paid an indemnity for ninety years, and now own the crown's grandson's mills.

Tullbarrow, thin, rich, and led by a baroness, which no other house has managed twice.

Skrell, the Grey Plug, who have never opened their sluices and are therefore the most feared house on Nu, since nobody has seen what they would do.

Ovvenreck, who hire out Breakers to other houses and are consequently welcome nowhere and paid everywhere.

Palgrume, the newest, four hundred years old, who built a dam where there had been no crossing at all and then charged for the crossing they had invented.

Regard

"The Baruush Bridge Barons." "Greed mongers." The third thing commonly said of them adds an obscenity to the word backstabber and will not be repeated here. They are not a nice folk, and are very much in it for themselves, thus leaving many with a distaste towards them.

Downstream they are the wet lords. To a lord who pays them and hates them, which is every lord with a river, they are simply the tenth, as in "the tenth has been up again." Boatmen call them the orange men. There is a common curse, older than any living house, that runs "may you be owed to a Baruush." The peculiar thing, and the thing that keeps them alive, is that they are trusted absolutely within the terms of the deal. A Baruush who has been paid delivers, every time, and will keep a bargain against his own interest for the length of the bargain and not one hour past it. Merchants who despise them prefer them to honest men.

Their enemy is the world. Their rivals and counterparts are the Do'urssan, the pump-builders of the Great Works. Their victims are every settlement downstream, and the flooding of a town is a routine of business and never an atrocity. Their only warm relations are commercial. The Torgai river gamblers and barge merchants pay in advance and are welcome. The Mekuhlian buy sapwine and sell them the reading of water tables, and the two peoples get on because neither expects to be liked. Between houses there is no peace, only tariffs; a Baruush house at war with another fights it with sluices and with stolen teeth, and the countryside between them suffers far more than either. The Torkan they will not deal with at all, having learned that a people who eat their trading partners cannot be charged interest.

Harvest

Baruush tails. Used for torturing purposes. The tail is taken green, scraped, and dried flat on a frame, and it makes a paddle that will break bone through padding without cutting skin, which is why the trade exists and why nobody discusses it.

Baruush hide. Thick and coarse, used for surviving harsh climates, since it has heat-retaining properties. It is the best cold-water garment made by anyone, and the Ossurn of the frontier will trade wool for it.

Baruush teeth. A noble's capped tooth carries the toll-right of its house in law and in custom, and a gold cap presented at a gate crosses free. Stolen caps are therefore the currency of bridge feuds, and a house that loses its baron's caps will spend a decade and a fortune getting them back. Tail and hide are legal wherever the Baruush are absent and are death on any bridge they hold. A Baruush who sees his own house's tooth around a stranger's neck will follow that stranger for a year, and has.

The gut is taken too, by those who know, since the fermenting chamber of a fresh Baruush will start the rot in a vat of green timber and save a tanner a season. That trade is quiet, because a Baruush who learns of it takes it worse than the tails.

Remembered

Orrum Oldtooth, Baron of the Beam at Toothbridge, who plugged a town for a season over the tenth of a single cart and had the cart's owner packed into the wall while the water was still rising.

Hessa Tullbarrow, the only baroness in four generations, who ate her brothers' portions in front of them for six years until the beam declared for her.

Karrow Palgrume, the Breaker who let out Blackweir on his own cousins on hire to another house, and was made a baron for it by the house that hired him.

Besk Murkholt, called the Honest, who returned an overpayment of nine coins and thereby raised his house's credit across a continent, which was the entire purpose.

Mott Skrell, warden of the Grey Plug, who has been asked four times by four crowns what is behind his sluices and has answered, four times, "water."

Kin each has a page of its own

What divides the Baruush is not blood, since there is only one blood and it is locked. It is the trough. Three shapes are grown out of one genome by what a kit is fed and where it is put in its first winter, and every Baruush knows that the person above him is a litter-mate who was given marrow.