Varrow

Varrow is the heartland of the Reach and the seat of what the old records call the Sundered Empire, though no emperor has sat the throne in fifteen years and the empire, in any honest reckoning, fell the night the Cathedral did. It is a broad land of river valleys, oak copses and stubble-fields, crossed from the Whitefells to the southern shore by the river Sull, whose barges still carry grain, wool, salt-fish and news. Before the Sundering its laws ran from the fjords to the steppe; today its writ runs where the Regency's riders can reach, which grows shorter by the year.

Geography

The country divides naturally into three. The lake-country of the centre, once the Empire's granary and the site of the Cathedral of the Hymns, is now broken by the Glassmere, twenty miles of black glass where the lake and the farms about it used to be; the roads around it carry a surcharge, and travellers pay it gladly. South and west of the lakes the land rolls in fat farmland towards Thornwick, Harrowgate and the coast, a country of market towns, watermills and slow rivers. The north thins into moor and birch, hard winters and harder neighbours, where the border lords keep their own courts and answer Caldmere when it suits them. Winters have lengthened since the Sundering, as they have everywhere; the old almanacks in Caldmere's archive no longer match the frosts.

History

Before the Sundering, Varrow was the Empire whole and entire, ruled from Caldmere under the old gods, whose priests worked the Hymns and whose word ended argument. All of that closed on one night in 0 AS. The Cathedral fell, the Wound opened, the gods fell silent, and the Sundered Crown itself broke; its pieces have never been found, though pretenders have claimed a shard often enough that the Regency keeps a drawer of them. The Grey Years that followed — famine, the first risings of the Unquiet, the burning of villages against the cold — thinned the countryside by a third, say the tax-rolls, where tax-rolls survive.

The Empire recovered, but as a lesser thing. In the second century the southern cities bought their freedom with loans and became the Tidebound League; in 236 AS the Hollowed general Maera Tor burned the whole of her life at Hollowfield to stop a Khaddan army, a victory Varrow celebrates and cannot repeat. When Emperor Corvan IV died without an heir in 297 AS, seven great houses — Vane, Ardent, Corrow, Mallory, Sethe, Dunmore and Halloway — declared a Regency 'until the Crown returns'. The Crown has not returned. The Council has, by most accounts, stopped expecting it to.

The Regency and its troubles

Lord Regent Edric Ardent is old and, as of this writing, dying, and the question of the succession is the great unresolved matter of the age. The Council is deadlocked between houses that would elect one of their own, houses that would find some distant imperial blood, and at least one house whose letters to the League's banks the archivists have seen copies of and prefer not to describe. The roads fail for want of the stone-tax; the border marches are raided in bad years by the Khaddan of Khagan Oraq Sayle; the Pale Choir presses, year on year, for the Glassmere to be given over to it as holy ground, and the Council's refusals grow shorter and less courteous. The League, meanwhile, is calling in its debts, and Varrow owes more than it mints.

Life there today

The Varrow of ordinary folk is a country of stone towns and river wharves, of rye bread, eel pies, small beer and turnips, of wool undyed against the dye-tax and saints' shrines at the crossroads where lamps are lit for gods who no longer answer, lit anyway, because the alternative is to admit the dark. Barge-masters on the Sull still reckon in imperial rods and pay their tolls to whichever house's men are standing at the lock. In the towns, a cobbler's day and a magistrate's day both end at the same alehouse; the talk there, this winter, is of the Lord Regent's health, the price of grain, and whether the risings in the north after the Long Winter were truly as many as the chapmen said.

Ashcraft is legal in Varrow and mistrusted in the way a well is mistrusted in a dry year: nobody loves the Hollowed, and everybody knows where to find one. Most market towns keep a licensed practitioner for wound-closing and lost-things, paid in coin and avoided at weddings. The Lantern-Wardens work here by contract, unwelcome until the night they are needed, and the chapter at Caldmere is the largest south of the Lamphouse of Hrafnvik.

Rumours

• That a shard of the Sundered Crown surfaced in a Harrowgate pawnshop last winter and was bought by an agent of no house anyone will name. The archive has no record of such a sale, and pawn-brokers lie for a living.
• That House Sethe has been taking the measure of the northern lords' loyalties, by letter and by gift.
• That the Grey Pilgrims have been seen on the western roads in greater numbers than living memory, always walking west, and that no parish priest can now be found who will say plainly what they are.

The Empire is like an old house in rain. Everyone is arguing about whose it will be, and nobody is mending the roof.