Iziakotie

Body

The dewlap under the chin is a heat vane, thrown wide to dump warmth and folded to hold it, and it is also the strain's whole vocabulary of mockery. An Iziakotie can insult a room without opening its mouth and frequently does.

Their mineral comes out of leaf and is poor, so the strain is firm-scaled at best and has never ruled anything. Their hide grades firm and makes coats and saddlery.

Life

The plant diet requires a hindgut the size of a bucket, fermenting leaf for three days at a temperature the body cannot make for itself. That is why an Iziakotie must bask or starve, and why a captive one dies in a cold cell in a month without a mark on it.

It is the cleanest illustration in the species of what the Cold Country does to them. Every Iziaka in a cold kingdom is losing something slowly. An Iziakotie is losing it in weeks.

Society

They live in the trees and come down to the towns to sell, and they pick pockets while they are there because they enjoy it, which the record states without excusing. It is a hobby, not a trade, and the distinction matters to them.

Their stock founded a caste. The Iziakaen, the Ink Scales, are drawn from Iziakotie green iguana stock, taken at the First Shedding when an elder finds the scale soft and the eyes too steady for a pickpocket, so the strain that has never ruled anything supplies the scholars every ruler consults.

Faith

Nunamnir in her leaf face, Otie'nun the Leaf-Mother, who grows what the Iziakotie eat and, they say, grows the pockets they pick. The Hardening runs under it, but a strain that cannot harden on a leaf diet holds the doctrine at a certain distance, and the mockery in the dewlap is not always aimed at strangers.