Bogenn

Body

Bright green, red-eyed, orange-footed and built for branches. The red of the eye is a startle-colour that buys half a second from a hunter, which is the whole of their defence and is enough more often than it has any right to be.

They carry the people's dome, thin as a fingernail and unfused along three lines, and the same fluid memory that must be kept wet; a Bogenn caught on dry ground loses the newest of what she went out to fetch before she loses anything else. Their eyes are the young eyes of the people, wide and taking everything in the dark and at the edges, which is exactly the instrument the work needs and exactly what the Whitened no longer have.

Life

A clutch set in a leaf-cup above the pool comes up Bogenn, and the leaf-cups are the easiest water a town has, which is why there are more of these than of anything else. They live two hundred years and more, like all their people, and most of a Bogenn's first century is the Gathering: the decades of going out and looking, which for this caste never really ends.

Society

Everything a Bogenn reads is carried back and handed up, to the Rememberers who hold it and the Whitened who decide on it. They are the one caste routinely outside the ward, which makes them the caste most often taken, and the Torgai know to hold a captive dry. They keep the Stillness, taught before swimming, and they do not sing the hunter's name.