Irugaine

Origin

The Irugaine are the forest given hands, made by Irus of the Wild as "guardians of life itself" and set "To Protect the Surface Realm, and All Life upon it." There is no single Irugaine shape, and that is the point of them: goat-folk for the high slopes, horse-folk for the plains, walking trees for the deep wood, fungus-folk for the dark under the roots, fur-covered giants for the snow. Sixteen kin, and one god who hunts them. They live in constant certainty that the gods exist, where other peoples worship or doubt, and they fear Irus above all things, because he is their emperor of sorts and holds court with them. They see themselves as engineers of life, the makers who came after the gods. The wider world, which cuts their forests for charcoal, sees them as something whose time has passed.

Irus, the fifth born, the Shepherd and the Hunter, made them deliberately lesser. He made them "severe and lesser in intellect, so that they might challenge one another in an ever reaching hunt," and he hunted them himself: "One would be strong in the way of mapping the forest, but weak in strength, allowing him to hunt his own children for sport. They were his purpose and amusement, until they became his prize possessions." His children "both loved and feared him." Irus was struck by Aezithis during the god war, "causing him to go insane, leaving him falling into mystery," and the two faces he wears since are the two doctrines his children argue over.

In the age of trust the Irugaine took the Alverians into their heads and gave them hands. "In an age of trust, the Irugaine moulded and created for the Alverians new bodies to possess," using the Holy Grail. The truth of it is uglier than trust: the inch-long air jellyfish burrowed into Irugaine brains and drove them to build machines from ancient magical materials, and with those machines the Alverians built the twenty-foot flesh constructs that made them lords. The Irugaine were the hands of their own enslavement.

The repayment was the Scourging. "They rooted up the trees, salted the forests, and sent foul rotting plagues to infect the sacred groves." "The first Mothertree of the Irugaine was burnt to cinders." Irugaine stock became the base of most of the WildKin splices, and the Boalden were bred "to be guards and stand watch over the Irugaine territories" while the Gidan were bred "to be mountain troops which could invade the Satyr societies." The Irugaine answered with biology. They grew the Bone Yews, which walk "like spiders" and feed off corpses, "created by the Irugaine to consume the dying Alverians so that they could not be resurrected," and Irus made the Shieken "so that the corpses of the Irugaine couldn't be stolen for scientific purposes."

Salt was chosen deliberately and the Irugaine have never forgotten why. An Irugaine takes in air through the whole of its surface, through bark pore, leaf, moss seam and gill-slit, and salt shuts a pore and keeps it shut. Salting a forest kills the trees over a season and kills the Irugaine standing in it over a week, from the outside inward, with the mind intact throughout. The Alverians did not choose it for the soil. They chose it because it worked on the people, and because it left a body whole enough to be carried off, and the Shieken were made in the years directly after.

Since the Collapse they have been a people at war with saws. "As the fires of industry consume their forests, the Irugaine grumble beneath their oppressive, and reluctant to get involved leaders, who defend what forests they care for, and not their people." They fought in the grand coalition of the Second War of Corbenese Succession alongside Great Hold Kazanoon, then "refused to participate in the treaty signing, fearing a united Eastern Reaches would see them extinct." They hold one treaty with Camelot, and it is a hunting licence written in blood.

Body

The question every physician asks about the Irugaine, and the one the Jakai answer most often, is what a Satyr and a Trena could possibly have in common. A Satyr is a furred goat-formed thing with a mouth, a stomach, hot muscle and a taste for fermented fruit. A Trena is nine thousand pounds of animated timber that has not eaten anything in twelve thousand years. They cannot interbreed, cannot understand each other's speech, cannot survive in each other's country and do not resemble each other in any organ a surgeon could name. They are nonetheless the same species, and the reason is one green knot the size of a fist.

Every Irugaine of every kin has a vaan. It sits where another people keeps a heart, it is the same in a Feefan and in a Trena and in an Oshma, and it is the only part of an Irugaine that was not decided by the ground. It is a dense coil of pale cambium, wet, warm, faintly green even in the dark kin, wrapped in a husk of the body's own material. It does not beat and it does not pump. What it does is hold the pattern: the whole instruction for a body, taken from the Irugaine who fused into the tree that bore the nut. Everything else about an Irugaine, the goat, the horse, the fungus, the petal, the beetle, the fur, the trunk, is what the vaan built after the nut cracked, reading the soil it landed in and growing outward to suit it. Sixteen kin is sixteen answers from one organ to sixteen kinds of ground.

From that follow the constants. The body is made of the forest and never merely dressed in it. Bark for skin, sap for blood, roots for hair, leaves for teeth, moss in the seams. Where a Nu'uman has fat and muscle, an Irugaine has heartwood, pith, hollow chambers and a running sap, and they bleed the colour of the tree they came from. The second constant is that they look old. Even the young look like something that has been standing in one place a long time.

Sap is the second universal and it governs more of their lives than the vaan does. No Irugaine has a heart, and sap does not circulate on a pump; it rises with warmth and light and falls with cold and dark, in every kin, including the ones with fur and hooves. An Irugaine is therefore strongest in the first hours after sunrise and slowest in the hour before dawn, and the difference is not slight. A Goalder that can pull down a wall at noon can be knocked over at fourth watch. Their courts sit at dawn because nobody can shout at dawn. Their wars are fought in the morning, their councils in the afternoon and their oaths at first light. And every people that has ever hunted them worked this out inside a generation: the Boalden were trained to move in the black hour, the Gidan come down the Satyr terraces before the sun clears the ridge, and the timber companies of the Eastern Reaches start felling at fourth watch and have their guards home by breakfast. The single most consequential fact about Irugaine biology is that they can be robbed before dawn.

Sap does not clot. It gums, over hours, hardening to a translucent amber seal that stays for the life of the body. An Irugaine bleeds a long time from a small cut and then never bleeds from that place again, and the seal remains visible, so that a grown Irugaine's skin is a legible record of every wound it has taken and roughly when. There is no hiding a history on an Irugaine body. Their language has no word that means a private past, their law takes a gum-knot as testimony without further argument, and an Irugaine that turns up in a grove with a fresh amber seal across the chest will be asked about it before it is offered anything to drink.

They have no lungs. Air is taken through the surface: pores in bark, the underside of leaf, the wet seams of moss, the fungal skirt of a Gourmun, the slits under a Satyr's ribs. They cannot be smothered, held under water or choked. They can be sealed, and salt, tar, pitch, varnish and a thick enough coat of ash will do it, and this is the one death that every one of the sixteen dies the same way.

Height runs from four feet in the Feefan and Gourmun to thirty in the eldest Trena; most kin stand six to eight. Weight runs from fifty pounds in the Feefan, Gourmun and Foigan, which are mostly hair, fungus and petal, to nine thousand pounds in a Trena. Colour is the colour of the ground they were sprouted on: a Trena's bark and leaf match its forest, a Sagee's sap varies by region, a Flosien is red because the Crimson touched its forest ages ago. What one notices first depends on the kin: the eyes on a Grekein, twelve of them, raw yellow sap in the gaps of a branch helmet; the light under a Feefan's skin at night; the face on a Rieken, which is a Nu'uman face "burned into the trees they chopped down, like a moment of captured time."

They emit a pheromone the forest recognises. Defensive vines will not attack an Irugaine, because "they created these vines as a defense for the forest." The pheromone is the smell of a new-cracked hazelnut, and the Boalden, bred to guard Irugaine country, can smell it at a mile. It comes off the vaan and passes out through the skin, and it strengthens when the vaan is under strain, which means a frightened Irugaine is easier to follow than a calm one and a wounded one can be tracked at three miles. Irus enjoys this. It is written into his hunt, and the Irugaine teach their children to be afraid quietly, which is a thing no other people has ever had to teach.

The sense they live by is the ground. Every kin reads the soil through whatever touches it, hoof, root, wide flat foot, or the white threading of a fungus, and what comes up is not vibration alone but chemistry: where the water table stands, where a spade went in last week, where a root was cut, how much weight is standing within a quarter mile and whether it is standing still. An Irugaine in its own forest cannot be approached on the ground without knowing about it, and this is why Irugaine country has no walls, no watchtowers and no gates, and why a Nu'uman surveyor is astonished to find himself met at the treeline by somebody who has walked a mile to be there. It is also why the one law binding their god is the one that matters: "because he is not a bird, or winged creature, he cannot hunt from the sky." Irus on the ground is a thing they can feel coming. Irus in the air would be the end of them, and every Irugaine knows it, and the tradition that holds him down is the thinnest and most precious thing in their world.

The converse is that nothing that comes from above registers at all. Bird, arrow, falling branch, a Boalden dropping off a rock: all of it arrives without warning, and the Irugaine word for a thing that comes from above is the same as their word for a god's decision. Their sight compounds the problem. Irugaine eyes are tuned to slow change, so that a Trena can watch a sapling thicken and a Rieken can see a root move, and fast motion smears. The rooted kin are close to useless in a brawl and know it. The knightly kin, the Flosien and the Grekein, were shaped by deliberate fusing over ages into the two kin that can see something happen at speed, which is the entire reason they exist and the entire reason they are called knights. In every kin-tongue on Nu the Irugaine word for quick is also the word for dishonest.

Smell is taken through the whole surface, the way a leaf takes it, and it reaches a long way. Smoke is the one scent the vaan responds to without being consulted. Charcoal burning forty miles off will bring a grove awake in the night, every kin at once, before anyone has decided anything, and the Irugaine have no ritual for this and no way to stop it. The fires of industry are not a political grievance to them. They are an alarm that has been going for two hundred years and cannot be turned off.

Life

The Irugaine are born from trees. Wise Trees, which the Irugaine themselves call Everflower Trees, are the birthing place. "When fused with an Irugaine, they constantly flower, their nuts dropping to the ground and hatching baby Irugaine." The young gestate on the branches as hazelnuts, hanging until they are so heavy they fall; the impact cracks the nut and the child is born. The Mothertree is the central sacred tree of a people. An Elder Tree can move, its roots "wisp up like snakes," and it speaks.

The stages have names and every kin uses the same ones, because the stages belong to the vaan and the vaan is the same in all sixteen. Riipuva, the hanging, is gestation: a nut on the branch with a vaan inside it and nothing else, taking sap from the tree, growing heavier for anything between four months in a Foigan and ninety years in a Trena. Halkeama, the cracking, is birth, and it is an impact; the fall must be hard enough to split the shell, which is why a Trena nut is dropped from a great height and a Foigan nut from a low branch, and why a nut caught by hand before it lands produces nothing at all. Juurivuodet, the root years, are the first years at the foot of the bearing tree, when the vaan is still building and the child is unnamed. Ensikevät, the first spring, is the naming, when the tree flowers again. Kasvuvuodet, the growing years, run until the body is finished and the kin-work can be taken up. Seisonta, the standing, is adulthood, and it is the long part. Yhtymä, the fusing, comes to those who take it and is described below. Maatuminen, the composting, is the end.

Fusing is how the kin are made and how the Irugaine make more of themselves. An Irugaine who wishes to be a parent goes to a Wise Tree of the right ground, opens its bark against the trunk, and lets the tree take it in; over a season the two grow together, and from then on the tree flowers without ceasing and its nuts hatch the kin of the one who fused. A Satyr fused to a mountain hazel drops Satyr; a Gourmun grown into the rot of a fallen Wise Tree drops Gourmun. The fused Irugaine does not die. It becomes the tree's mind, and an Elder Tree that walks and speaks is one who fused so long ago that it has forgotten it was ever anything else. This is the meaning of the title they give themselves: they engineer life. Every kin was shaped by an Irugaine choosing a tree.

What is actually grafted is the vaan. The bark is opened over it, the tree's cambium is opened to meet it, and the two run together over a season until the Irugaine's pattern is the tree's pattern and every nut the tree drops carries a copy. This is the whole of the Lifewright craft and the reason the word means the shaper, the grown thing and the debt at once. It is also why an Irugaine can graft into things that are not Wise Trees, which is a thing they do rarely and never discuss with outsiders, and why the Alverians wanted them specifically. Any people can breed. The Irugaine can decide what a body will be and then make it, and the Alverians took that hand and used it on everybody else.

The hazelnut is the most dangerous object in Irugaine country. Eaten normally it "heightens intelligence briefly and is highly addictive, like a steroid, your brain deflates slightly" afterwards. Consumed whole, an Irugaine grows inside the eater, fusing the body with tree qualities and developing a second consciousness over roughly fifty years. Nuts taken by force sprout weeds inside whomever consumes them, rooting across the nervous system. "Mages have used severed Irugaine hands to pluck hazelnuts from the trees, tricking the plant." What is being swallowed in every case is a vaan, and what a vaan does is build a body out of whatever it is lying in.

Childhood is short. An Irugaine falls from the branch already able to walk. The first years are spent at the foot of the tree that dropped it, in the care of whichever kin keeps that grove, learning its own tongue from the tree and the grove's tongue from its keepers. A child is not named until its first spring, when the tree that bore it flowers again; the name is the sound the bark makes when the child first presses its hand to it and the tree answers.

Ageing and death vary by kin to an extreme degree. Rieken "die at the bases of trees, composting within minutes, as to give life back to their source." Foigan release a healing pollen when they die. Trena feel pain only from "wooden chopping and fire." Shieken "nearly never die, and only do if they have had enough death for their lifetime." Sagee die when the soul sap stone is crushed. Gourmun regrow limbs and heal in the dark. The Oshma has no death date. She decides when she is needed to return to the soil, and then begins her de-ageing to a flower; from that flower she can regrow an entire forest. In this she is like the Omari elders, able to repopulate the wild with a single act.

The reason the spans run from sixty years to twenty thousand is that a vaan ages at the speed of the organism it built. A Foigan's vaan turns over in a season and is spent in eighty years. A Trena's turns once a century. Nothing about the organ differs between them; only the body it is running. An Irugaine that outlives its vaan simply stops being able to hold the pattern together, and the body loosens at the joins over a few months, and then composts. This is old age in every kin that has it, and the Irugaine call it the loosening and do not fear it in the least.

All Irugaine compost. Whatever the kin, the body goes back into the ground within hours of death, and the ground is richer for it. The vaan opens at death and floods the body with what it has been holding back all its life, and the body unmakes itself from the inside: a Rieken in minutes, a Foigan in an hour, a Trena over three days with the crown going last. This is why farmers once welcomed them, and why "within fifty years the Irugaine will reclaim the farm by the forest moving in." It is also the answer to necromancy. A dead Irugaine cannot be raised, animated or taken apart, because the only part that could be bound is the vaan and the vaan is the first thing to go. Everything the Alverians ever learned about the Irugaine, they learned from living ones on a table, and every people that has since wanted a piece of one has had to take it inside the hour. The Shieken exist to make certain the hour is not available. An Irugaine body carried away before the Shieken reach it is the one thing that will bring the whole of a forest out after a thief.

Diet is kin by kin, and the particulars are given under each kin below. In sum: the rooted kin (Rieken, Trena, Oshma, Sagee) draw from soil, rain and sun and eat nothing with a mouth; the grazing kin (Satyr, Satye, Goalder) eat the forest's leaf, bark and grain; the dark kin (Gourmun, Shieken, Feefan) eat rot, carrion and the small night-things; the hunting kin (Fould, Yeb) eat meat; the petal kin (Foigan, Jakai) take insects, pollen and nectar; the knightly kin (Flosien, Grekein) live on sun through the leaf and sap drawn through the feet, and eat by choice and never by need. No Irugaine eats a hazelnut. No Irugaine eats what talks.

Frailty

The forest sickens in ways a physician of flesh has no name for, and the Irugaine have sixteen vocabularies for it and one shared list underneath.

Gum-lock is the commonest and the most ordinary. The amber seal that closes a wound can set inside a sap channel rather than across it, and everything above the block dies and hardens and has to come off. Old Irugaine of the woody kin are missing fingers, branches and half-limbs for this reason and think nothing of it. In the Sagee, whose whole body is a chamber of sap, a gum-lock is fatal, and it is the second commonest Sagee death after the stone.

Wet kin rot and dry kin check. Rieken, Gourmun and Foigan get rot in the seams, which starts as a smell and ends as a hole; the Gourmun cure it by lying in the dark and the Rieken by standing in running water, and the Foigan usually die of it. Flosien, Grekein, Trena and Sagee split: a dry season opens fine cracks along the grain, they let in weather and weed, and an old Grekein is a mass of filled and refilled fissures. Every kin fears fire and only the Trena is honest about it, feeling nothing else.

The congenital fault of the species is the mismade. A vaan that misreads the ground at the cracking builds a body that is half one kin and half another, a Satyr with a Rieken's root collar and no gut, a Foigan with a Trena's timber and no way to lift it. Most cannot feed themselves by either kin's method and are gone in the root years. The ones who live are the only Irugaine on Nu with no kin, no kin-tongue and no grove obliged to keep them, and they are carried to the Petal Court, where the Oshma keeps them. The bowl of flowers at the foot of the Life Tree is full of the mismade, and has been for an age, and this, more than her flower and more than her pollen, is why there is no Irugaine alive who will hear a word said against her.

Their parasite is the strangler, a weed that gets in through an unsealed wound and reaches the vaan, where it grows a second pattern alongside the first. What comes of it is a body growing the wrong kin out of itself: a Goalder putting out petal-skin across the shoulder, a Satye growing bark down one flank. The two patterns compete and neither wins. There is no treatment. The Shieken take them, and the Shieken burn rather than bury, which they do for nothing else.

The Crimson is the old terror and the Flosien are the reason it has a name in Irugaine country at all. Everything the Crimson touches goes wrong; the Flosien "fought against it and remained pure of heart" and are the only lineage that ever has. A Crimson-touched Irugaine of any other kin is a thing the Flosien themselves are sent to deal with, and the Innermost Ring keeps that duty rather than delegating it, on the grounds that they are the only ones who know what they are looking at.

Their own nut is the death they refuse to speak about. An Irugaine that swallows a hazelnut takes a second vaan into a body that already has one, and the two patterns fight over the same material for fifty years while the Irugaine watches. That is why the nut taboo carries expulsion and why an Irugaine who feeds one to another people is put out of the grove: they are not protecting the eater's dignity, they are refusing to be the kind of thing that does that to somebody.

A bad year is a dry one. Sap thins, the rising and falling that carries their strength flattens out, the rooted kin go dormant and the grazing kin starve in a country that looks green. A grove in drought cannot come out at speed, cannot hold a line and cannot answer a fire. The timber concerns of the Eastern Reaches learned this within thirty years of the Collapse, and the great fellings are now scheduled for drought years as a matter of ordinary business, and the accounts say so in plain Common, and the Jakai have copies.

Country

The Surface Realm, in full. Every forest is nominally theirs. The Realm of Irus. The Mothertrees. A Druid circle forms where trees sprout around a founding tree, and that circle is the domain of whichever Irugaine rules there. Hollow Bone Forest holds the worst of the Bone Yew. Angun Oak is theirs, and "the Irugaine grow it into ships."

They have farmed nothing in the sense a Nu'uman means and have bred a great deal. The defensive vines are theirs, made as a defence for the forest and answering to the hazelnut smell. The Bone Yews are theirs, grown to eat the dying Alverians, and they are kept the way a dangerous dog is kept and never the way a crop is kept. The Angun Oak is grown into ships hull-first over forty years. The Everflower Trees are the species' own womb and are tended by every kin. Beyond that they have half domesticated a good deal of the wild without meaning to: the Satye's pack of small followers, the Feefan's moths, the Shieken's beetle hives, the Oshma's pollinators, the Satyr's goat herds on the terraces. In each case it is arguable who took up with whom, and the Irugaine do not argue about it.

What eats them is short and specific. The Bone Yews eat the dying and do not distinguish carefully between an Alverian and anything else that has stopped moving, which is a design fault the Irugaine have never corrected. The Boalden hunt them and were bred to. The Gidan come down on the Satyr terraces. The Crimson takes them. Everything else in the forest was made not to.

A century of Irugaine presence deepens the soil by a hand's width, raises the water table, closes the canopy and pushes the treeline outward. Farms at the edge are taken back inside fifty years, and the Irugaine do not do this deliberately and cannot stop it; it is simply what a country does when several thousand composting bodies a century go into it. A century of their absence is worse than the felling. The vines, with nothing recognising them, begin to take anything that moves. The Bone Yews stray out of Hollow Bone. The Everflowers stop flowering and become ordinary trees, and their nuts, which nobody will eat and nobody can use, lie on the ground until the weeds take them. The Salted Groves are the extreme case and the ordinary case is quieter: a wood with no Irugaine in it looks exactly like a wood for about eighty years, and then it does not.

The world holds thousands of places where the Irugaine live. Three hundred of them are known by name across Nu, with one or many kin calling each of them home, among them a grove city at or near the Life Tree. Names are given in the Irugaine's own rendering where the place is theirs and in Common where the Common name is the one the world uses. The greatest twenty-eight are these.

Vaalenkuu, the Life Tree. The second Mothertree, the greatest Everflower alive, grown from a nut carried out of the ashes of the first. Every kin has fused a parent into its branches; it drops all sixteen. Where the surface says "the life tree," this is what is meant.

Iruhaali, the Grove City. The city grown around and up the Life Tree, terraced through its lower boughs and rooted through its buttresses, the only place on Nu where all sixteen kin live together. The Petal Court of the Oshma is at its root; the Jakai keep the Hall of Remembered Ages in its crown; the Flosien and Grekein hold its edge. Irus holds his court here when he chooses to hold it anywhere.

Kaarnesto, the Ashen Circle. The cinders of the first Mothertree, still black after an age. Nothing grows in the circle. The Shieken keep it and the Irugaine come to it once in a life to put a hand in the ash.

Hollow Bone Forest. Where the Bone Yews walk. The Shieken tend it as one tends a kennel.

Saevelmaa, the Singing Terraces. Satyr country: high goat-slopes cut into terraces where the herds winter and the Horned Moot is sung.

The Running Ring of Tuulenkolo. Satye plains grove: a ring of Wise Trees a day's gallop across, with the open grass inside it where the bands run.

Ollenvaara, the Stand of Remembered Faces. A Rieken wood where every trunk carries the burned face of a feller. The Rieken come here to die at the roots.

Rhosenkaar, the Red Hold. The Crimson-scarred forest of the Flosien's origin, every leaf red, the soil still faintly warm. The Innermost Ring sits here.

Thornwake. The Flosien march on the Red Hold's border, a wall of grown thorn three miles deep that the Flosien walk through and nothing else does.

Lehvenkaar, the Green Barrows. Grekein country: a wet forest of moss-hills, each hill a hollow hall, where the Wayholders keep the maps.

Haalvenmoor. Goalder meadowland at the wood's edge, where the summer chiefs roar and the grass is trampled flat by autumn.

Ikivanhala, the Standing. A ring of Trena that has not moved in nine thousand years. It is a council, and it is still in session.

Lumenhalo, the Glow Garden. A Feefan night-wood, dark by day and lit by its people at night; the surface comes to look, and the Feefan let it.

The Kuhmuroot Warrens. Gourmun tunnels beneath a fallen Wise Tree, wet, black, and older than the tree above.

The Greener Fold. The hunting range of the Fould, from which they take their name. A long valley of orange-green grass where the Fould run on four legs and stand on two only when no one is watching.

The Petal Court. The Oshma's rooted seat at the foot of the Life Tree, a bowl of flowers thick with her pollinators. It is no building. She is the court.

Maatenkalma, the Quiet Rows. Shieken ground: rows of dead trees hung with the robes of the Matrons, where the beetle hives are kept and the corpses are brought.

Terhenlaakso, the Petal Vale. Foigan country, a valley that blooms every time one of them dies, which is often.

Sappenholt, the Carving Grove. Where the Sagee sit alone, each under its own tree, carving its robe one chip at a time for seven hundred years.

Hyyvenkaar, the Snow Hold. The Yeb's country in the far cold, a pine-wood under permanent drift, where the Farcaller's roar goes out a thousand miles.

Aaninhaali, the Hall of Remembered Ages. The Jakai's seat in the crown of the Life Tree, where four hundred thousand years of memory sit in a ring of shelled bodies and do not forget.

Kellenranta, the Angun Yards. The river-mouth grove where the Angun Oak is grown into ships, hull-first, over forty years a keel.

The Circle of Ehrenkehä. A Druid circle whose founding tree is an Elder that walks, so that the circle's borders move and the farms around it have learned to move with them.

The Circle of Solenkehä. A Druid circle ruled by a Grekein Wayholder who has not left it in six hundred years and will not defend anything outside it.

The Circle of Mirrenkehä. A Druid circle whose founding tree was salted in the Scourging and has never recovered; the Irugaine who rule it rule a graveyard and know it.

The Blood-Due Oaks. A line of ancient oaks on the Camelot border where the Knights of the Round Table hang the cattle they owe Irus for monsters killed in the wood. The oaks are fat with it.

Harrowfen. A Nu'uman farm reclaimed by the forest within fifty years, as all of them are; the farmhouse is inside a Rieken now.

The Salted Groves. The forests the Alverians salted, still dead after an age. The Trena walk their edges and moan for them. The Oshma has been asked, again and again, to give one of them her flower, and has not yet.

Society

They are "devout to life," "intellectual in all living things," and "standoffish towards lesser, destructive mortal races." Caste is by kin and by function: knights (Flosien, Grekein), shepherds (Trena), emissaries (Jakai), undertakers (Shieken), sages (Sagee), bards and singers (Satyr), scouts and children of the dark (Feefan, Gourmun). Their leaders are "oppressive, and reluctant to get involved," and they "defend what forests they care for, and not their people."

There is no single Irugaine crown. Each kin rules itself after the manner of the living thing it came from, and the structures are as different as a goat-herd is from a fungus; each is given under that kin below. What binds them is the grove. A Druid circle is ruled by whichever Irugaine founded it or holds its founding tree, of whatever kin, and the other kin within the circle keep their own order beneath that rule. Iruhaali alone has a council of all sixteen, called the Sixteen Roots, seated at the Petal Court and remembered by the Jakai, and it meets when Irus is not there and disperses the moment he is.

The one thing every kin's government has in common is that it is slow, and the reason is the sap. A people that is strong for four hours a day and useless for two builds institutions that never need to act quickly, and sixteen wholly unrelated forms of rule have all arrived at the same habit of putting a question off. The Trena take a decade to answer. The Sagee take forty years. The Jakai have changed their minds twice. This looks to the Nu'uman like arrogance and to the Do'urssan like decay, and it is neither; it is what a body that cannot be hurried does with power. It is also why the Irugaine lost an age to the Alverians and are losing another to the saw. Their leaders are reluctant to get involved because involvement is a thing their kind of body has never been able to do at short notice, and they have built a virtue out of it, and the virtue is eating them.

Above every leader is Irus, who holds court with them. The court is not summoned; it arrives. The wind changes, the animals go silent, and the god is standing in the grove in whichever face he has chosen, the Shepherd with his crook or the Hunter with his spear, and every Irugaine present is on its knees before it has decided to kneel. He hears disputes and settles them with a word. He asks after the forests and not the people. He names a quarry, sometimes an enemy of the wood and sometimes one of the Irugaine kneeling there, and the hunt begins when he leaves. A court of the Shepherd ends with a blessing on the trees. A court of the Hunter ends with someone dead. The Irugaine cannot tell which face is coming until it is there, and this is the root of the fear.

Hunting law binds their god as much as them: "because he is not a bird, or winged creature, he cannot hunt from the sky; ancient tradition dictates that he must hunt from the ground if he wishes to stay in favor with the God of the Hunt." The treaty with Camelot is the same law, sold: "The Knights of the Round Table are allowed to hunt monsters as they wish without Irus' interference, however if the monster resides in a forest, Irus must have his due. You must sacrifice cattle or other animals to a tree to appease Irus, the greater the kill the larger the sacrifice (in blood)."

Dress is grown and never made: the Rieken's root-collar, the Sagee's carved robe, the Goalder's leaf-skirt, the Shieken's robe of dead leaves and animal skins. To wear cloth is a Satyr affectation picked up in Nu'uman taverns. Food is taken where it grows; there are no kitchens in a grove, and the Satyr who cook are thought of as slightly ill. Drink is sap: the fermented sap of the Angun Oak, which the Satyr tap and the Nu'uman buy as "oak-wine" without knowing what tree it bleeds from, and the hazel-mead of the Satyr terraces, which is made from the flower and never the nut. Music is the Satyr's above all, the siren-song of the terraces and the tavern ballad, and every kin has a sound besides: the Yeb's call, the Feefan's night-hum, the Trena's moaning, the Oshma's harmonic soft-song. Fitoer the Bard performs a comic ballad in a Brenmor tavern in an archaic register: "What tale doth thy ears wishest t' become regaled by!?"

The oath is sworn on a tree, with the hand on the bark, and the tree remembers it; an oathbreaker's tree withers, and every Irugaine who passes knows why. The taboos are three. The nut: no Irugaine eats a hazelnut, and an Irugaine who feeds one to another people is put out of the grove. The corpse: no Irugaine body leaves the forest, and the Shieken enforce it. The axe: an Irugaine who fells a living tree for gain is no longer Irugaine, and the Rieken will wear its face.

Faith

The Irugaine Wild Faith. Its deity is Irus, in his two aspects of Shepherd and Hunter, together with the Elder Trees. Its clergy are the "Elder Trees as living clergy." Its doctrine is "Hunt law and grove rites." Its promised afterlife is "Composting into the source." The truth beneath it: "Their god is mind-split; doctrine depends on which persona answers." Two priests can quote scripture at each other in perfect good faith and be citing two different gods.

The Irugaine do not believe in Irus. They know him. He has stood in their groves and killed their kin in front of them, and their faith is the faith of a people who have met their god and would rather not meet him again. They fear him. Rite is therefore appeasement before it is anything else: the blood-due at the trees, the silence when the wind changes, the leaving of the first fruit of every Wise Tree uneaten on the ground for the Hunter to find. The Shepherd's rites are gentler and older: the grove-sung, the fusing, the planting of a nut where a forest was salted. Every grove keeps both sets, because no grove knows which face will come.

The certainty is the thing to understand about them. Other peoples argue whether the gods are gods, or merely very old creatures, or nothing at all; the Nu'uman build cathedrals on an argument and the Squeesh file the argument away. No Irugaine has ever had that argument. They live in the constant, daily, unremarkable truth that the gods exist, because one of them walks in their woods, and the rest of the world's theology strikes them as a kind of pleasant illness. It is also why an Irugaine will not lie about a god. To an Irugaine, saying a false thing about Irus is a description of the room that anyone present can check.

The Elder Trees are the clergy, and an Elder Tree is an Irugaine who fused so long ago that it has become the tree. They speak scripture in the kin-tongue of whoever fused into them, and the Jakai translate. There is no priest caste apart from them; the Sagee are sages and hold no office of faith, and the Oshma is something else again, a thing the Irugaine do not worship because she is present and kind and worship is for what might kill you.

The afterlife they teach is "Composting into the source," the body going back into the ground and the ground giving it back as forest. That is true of the body and false of the soul. Irus keeps no realm. Whatever soul an Irugaine has goes to the auction of the star gods, as all souls do, and the Irugaine, who know their god as well as any people on Nu, do not know this.

The Papillian worship the wood and the good half of Irus; the Bogish fear him. Both learned it from the Irugaine, and the Irugaine regard the Papillian's faith as a child's, because the Papillian have never seen the other face.

Tongue

Each kin has its own tongue, built from the sounds of the ground it lives on: the click and knock of the Grekein's barrows, the long vowels of the Satyr terraces, the near-silence of the Gourmun warrens. Common Tongue was their universal connecting language, gifted to them by Irus, and Common is a stepped-down form of the gods' own language. They were the first to speak it, and every other people learned it after them, whether from the Alverians' back door or from the Irugaine themselves. Fitoer's fluent tavern Common is the norm.

The kin-tongues are not dialects of one another and are not mutually intelligible. A Satyr and a Gourmun in the same circle speak Common to each other and each thinks the other is being formal. Sixteen tongues, then: Satyr and Satye of the open air, long-voweled and carrying; Rieken and Trena, spoken underground through root contact and unwritable; Flosien and Grekein, hard and clipped, built for orders; Goalder, loud and short-lived, a tongue that changes every century because nobody lives long enough to keep it; Feefan, hummed and pulsed; Gourmun, almost entirely silence and touch; Fould, spoken on two legs only; Oshma, the harmonic soft-song, which every kin understands without learning and no kin can reproduce; Shieken, a low clicking that the beetles answer to; Foigan, fast and gone; Sagee, carved and never said; Yeb, the call, which is one word at a thousand miles; Jakai, formal, ancient and exact, the tongue the Jakai use to translate all the others.

Above these stand High Irugaine, fused with Nuta'el, the Language of the Gods, and Low Irugaine, High Irugaine fused with Common. Trena "can speak any Irugaine language." Satyr "can listen to the plants and animals who cannot speak native common tongue; the trees are their guides." Rieken and Trena speak to trees. Fould "can speak various common and ancient languages." Beneath all of these lies the secret tongue of the Irugaine, a cryptic language of their own that even the gods could not understand at first and had to learn. It is the language of the Lifewrights.

In that secret tongue the Irugaine call themselves the Ehlivaanet, singular Ehlivaan, and the word holds three things at once: the one who shapes, the thing that grows, and the debt owed by the shaped to the shaper. In Common they render it the Lifewrights, and in the formal Common of the Jakai, when they wish a Nu'uman envoy to understand exactly what he is standing among, Those Who Make After the Gods. The Irugaine do not use the title in front of Irus. The organ at the centre of every one of them carries the middle syllable of that word, and no kin thinks this is a coincidence.

An Irugaine's name is given by the tree that bore it, at its first spring, and is the sound of the bark answering the child's hand, rendered into the kin-tongue. Names are therefore two or three syllables, front-heavy, ending on a vowel or a soft consonant, and every name means something in the kin-tongue of the grove and nothing in any other. A grown Irugaine adds the name of its grove after its own when it travels, and a Satyr who sings for Nu'uman adds a Common byname (Fitoer the Bard). The Oshma and the Trena do not carry personal names; an Oshma is called by the forest she mothers and a Trena by the stand it belongs to. Nine names in the cadence: Fitoer (Satyr); Ilvasse (Satyr, a singer of the terraces); Korveth (Grekein, a Wayholder); Maunikai (Jakai, the First Remembering); Sethvaal (Flosien, of the Innermost Ring); Aaliroe (Foigan); Ohnnuk (Gourmun); Teyvanni (Satye, a First Mare); Hurroskal (Yeb, a Farcaller).

Regard

"Wilder creatures." "Saviors of the soil." And, most often now, "They had their time, now it's time to get out of the way." Affection where it exists is rough and specific: Kamrock Bruber called the bard the finest Irugaine he ever knew, in language no grove would repeat. Contempt is casual and physical, and in the same scene Fitoer is beaten and dragged off by Angwood Men-at-Arms. The common Nu'uman word for them in the timber towns is "stumps," and in the mage colleges, where the soul sap stone is a known weakness and the severed hand a known tool, they are "the crop."

Their maker, Irus, is loved, feared and hunted by in equal measure. They were betrayed by the Alverians, who took their bodies and burned their Mothertree. They are the unwilling ancestors of the WildKin: Irugaine stock is the base of most of the splices, the Boalden, the Wolken, the Tusiva, the Eaven, the Librar, the Fathari, the Pikon, the Giafe and more. Their enemies are the Boalden, bred to guard Irugaine territory, who "detest the wild intelligent life, as there is no joy in taming creatures they view to be pathetic," and who have mostly forgotten they were bred for it; and the Gidan, bred "to be mountain troops which could invade the Satyr societies." Camelot is an uneasy signatory on a diet of sacrificed cattle. The Eastern Reaches were refused. Great Hold Kazanoon was an ally once, in the Corbenese war. Kin of a kind are the Foulen, the canine people built on Fould stock, and the Papillian, who worship the wood; the Fould do not acknowledge the Foulen, and the Feefan and the Papillian share the night-woods without a word between them.

Harvest

Satyr horns are the harvest the surface has always known. The soul sap stone, hardened sap from the head of a Sagee with a petrified amber core, is enchantment-grade: "astral mages carve astral runes and equations into bone or amber to channel their spells. On casting, the material is destroyed." Oshma's blessing is a flower plucked from her own head, carrying "a portion of her life and its healing abilities." Adjacent flora carry their own trade: the Wise Tree hazelnut, "the birthing tree of the Irugaine"; the Angun Oak grown into ships; the Bone Yew.

Every trade in Irugaine parts runs against a clock, and the clock is the composting. A body left alone is soil within hours, so nothing of value comes off a corpse unless somebody was standing there when it fell. This is the single fact that shapes the whole market: Irugaine harvest is a trade in ambush and in living bodies, and the mage colleges that want a soul sap stone do not rob graves, because there are none. The vaan itself is worthless to everyone. It cannot be kept, cut, dried or sold; it is the first thing to open at death and there is no record of one reaching a table intact, and the Alverians, who tried hardest, ended up taking the Irugaine alive instead and putting them to work.

The Irugaine are made of timber, sap, amber, fungus, petal, fur and pollen, and every kin yields something; each kin's harvest is given below. The law is the same for all of it. A thing shed, dropped or given by a living Irugaine is clean, and there is a small honest trade in shed horn, dropped petal, tapped sap and gifted flower at the forest's edge. A thing cut from a living Irugaine is a wound the forest remembers. A thing taken from a dead one is a theft from the Shieken, and the Shieken come for it. On the surface none of this is illegal anywhere except in Irugaine country, where it is the only law there is, and a Nu'uman caught with a Grekein eye in his pack is not tried; he is planted.

Remembered

Fitoer the Bard. A Satyr with a "furry exterior" and hoofs, a tavern performer with an archaic-poetic register and a comic ballad about "Poor old Lord Moskievesh." Keeps an Imp as a bonded companion. Beaten and dragged off by Angwood Men-at-Arms.

The Mother of Vaalenkuu, the Oshma of the Petal Court, who was born old before the Scourging and is now young enough to look forty, and whom the Salted Groves are waiting on.

Maunikai, the First Remembering of the Jakai, who remembers the first Mothertree burning and has described it, once, to a Nu'uman.

Sethvaal of the Innermost Ring, master of the Flosien, who defends the Red Hold to the last leaf and has not sent one knight to help a Satyr village in three hundred years. He is the model of the Irugaine leader.

Hurroskal, the Farcaller of the Snow Hold, whose call was last heard from end to end of the north when the ash winter came.

The First Matron of Maatenkalma, the Shieken who has kept the ledger of every Irugaine death since the Scourging and has not yet had enough.

Ohnnuk, a Gourmun of the Kuhmuroot Warrens who has been cut apart four times and is on its fifth body, and which regards this as unremarkable.

Kin each has a page of its own

Sixteen kin. What divides them is the living thing each was grown out of, and it divides them all the way down: a Satyr and a Gourmun share a god, a pheromone and a hazelnut, and share almost nothing else. Each kin has its own body, its own tongue, its own way of eating, its own way of dying and its own way of being governed, and each of those follows from the goat, the horse, the root, the fungus, the petal, the beetle, the flower or the tree that it came from. They meet in the Druid circles, they meet all together only at Iruhaali, and they kneel to the same god in sixteen different postures. What they share is the vaan, the sap and the hour before dawn, and every kin knows which of the other fifteen it would not survive a week as.