Sael'mundae
The Sael'mundae are the common kin and what a river town means when it says Sael'mund: five feet, black-skinned with bright yellow marks that are the same on no two of them and are recorded at the Marking. They carry the ordinary accords, fishing rights, tolls and marriages between houses, and they are the arbiters a village can afford.
The marks are how a house knows its own dead, which is a sentence worth reading twice in a people whose flesh regrows and comes back paler each time. A Sael'mundae who has served in a bad region for fifty years is a patchwork of fourth-growth flesh that can hold a pen and cannot hold a sword, and the marks survive all of it.
Body
Five feet and a hundred and forty pounds, on the people's frame: smooth moist cool skin, a broad flat face, a wide lipless mouth, long unwebbed fingers, and dark round eyes under a fixed clear film with no lid worth the name. They live a hundred and fifty years.
The yellow marks sit over glands that weep a bitter fluid under pressure, which is the only chemical defence anywhere in the people and is why a Sael'mundae is unpleasant to take alive. No two patterns are alike, every pattern is entered at the Marking, and a body brought back to a house is identified by it.
The regrowth is the species': a finger in a month, a hand in a season, an eye in a year, paid for out of the spinal bank at a quarter of the body's weight, and coming back paler and a little worse each time. So is the wound that will not close, and so is the Stillness at the end, when the bank empties and an old knight's cuts stay open and the house asks the Question.
Society
They carry and they enforce, alongside the Sael'mundmor, and the difference between the two is scale. The Sael'mundae is the one who walks into a village quarrel about a weir, hears both sides with both hands on the table, writes it down, and comes back every year to read it aloud.
The accord-sash is the whole of their standing, sewn with the seal of every word they carry, so that a knight with a heavy sash is one to be careful of. When the count of regrown limbs gets high a house moves them from enforcement to witnessing, and they take the move badly every time.
Regard
"A salamander's word" is, in most markets, the name for a promise that will be kept, and it is the Sael'mundae that most markets have actually met. They are trusted by everyone before a judgement and despised by half of everyone after it.
Mend-flesh, the pale regrowing tissue cut from a stump and pounded to a paste, is taken from the living by people who know a Sael'mund will grow the hand back. It is illegal within a day's ride of any Accord House and sold everywhere else, and it is the Sael'mundae, being the one that travels to the small places, that the cutters can reach.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How many Sael'mundae a house keeps, and how far one will travel
- What the bitter fluid actually does to whoever takes hold of one
- Whether a mark pattern has ever been forged
- How a knight is chosen for enforcement over witnessing