what you know and how · player background

Three Times You Were Taught

how anyone in the Borderlands comes to know what they know

Nobody sat you down and explained the world. It arrived in pieces, from three people who happened to be passing through, and you were young enough for all three to stick.

I. The Chronicler's Field

you were nine, or eleven, or whatever age you like — the summer Old Mainard came through

He came every third or fourth year, walking, with a satchel of paper and a stick for the dogs. An itinerant chronicler: he collected what each village remembered and wrote it down, and in exchange he taught, which is how such men eat.

He held the lesson outdoors, in the stubble of the near field, because the hall was for grown business and because he liked the light. He sat the children in a half-circle and let anyone else stand at the back, and by the second morning half the village was standing at the back — the smith with his arms folded, three grandmothers, a girl who should have been at the weirs. Nobody admitted to attending. Everybody attended.

He sat on a milestone. You remember that because he made a point of it.

Chronicler Ivo Mainard, on the first morning "What am I sitting on? — No. Not a rock. Somebody cut this. Somebody carried it here and set it upright and cut letters into the side of it, and the letters say how far it is to a place that isn't there anymore.

Now. Who cut it?

Wrong. The hobgoblins ordered it cut. Your people cut it. Somebody's great-great-great-grandmother broke her hands on this stone because a soldier told her to, and she was not paid, and she was not asked, and she could not leave.

That is the first thing. Everything else I tell you sits on top of it."

Over four days he gave them the rest, and he gave it in order, and the order was the point.

First

The Empire. Hobgoblins soldiered and commanded; everyone else worked. Human, elf, dwarf, orc — serfs, bondsmen, slaves, and also traders, administrators, civil engineers, and the like, all of them, for longer than anyone can count. It gave the land roads, forts, bridges, aqueducts, and drainage. It gave the land no gods, no letters, no songs, nothing anyone would want to keep. "An occupation," he said, "is not a civilization. Do not confuse good stonework for a gift."

Second

The Breaking. One man out of the fen country would not kneel, and men followed him because he would not kneel, and that was the whole of Theud's claim to rule. He broke the legions at a ford and drove them to the edges. Theud was king because nobody was left to say he wasn't. "Your kingdom," Mainard said, "does not claim to be the Empire's heir. It claims to be the thing that killed it. That is a different sort of pride and a better one."

Third

The Musters. Every spring the horns went out and the lords came down with their hundreds and the king came down with all of them, and they rode to the edge of the ploughland and pushed it back a furlong, and gave the furlong away. For generations. That is what the word marches means, he said — the edge, the boundary, the ground you have to go out and hold. That is what a Marker is asking for when she says the words.

Fourth

The Stopping. A hundred years ago the last column passed. The crown divides its lands among all its children, sons and daughters both, and has done for five generations, so there is always a cousin to fight and always a portion to lose. Queens hold and scheme the same as kings; dowagers worst of all. "They are not wicked," he said. "They are busy. A borderland cannot compete with a brother." Since then: retreat. An outfield gone back to scrub. A hamlet gone quiet. Nobody alive remembers the push. Everybody alive has watched the losing.

Fifth

What is underneath. He walked them out to the old bridge and made them look at it properly. Elven work at the bottom, grown rather than cut, following the land instead of crossing it — most people never see it at all. Then Dwarven work, from under the hills, still sound. Imperial on top of both, still carrying carts. The king's mark cut over the imperial mark a century back, already crumbling faster than what it sits on. And the village houses on the top, with just room for one cart to get by, timber and thatch, the only layer anyone maintains. "Four hands," he said. "One bridge. Learn to see them separately and you will never be lost in this country."

He also said, on the last morning, that there were elven holds still standing further in than any map goes, and dwarven halls sealed from the inside and not empty, and that the hobgoblins deal with both. And beyond these, the pure chaos of unbounded magic. Then he said he had no evidence for any of it and had written it down anyway, under the heading of things people swear to.

he never came back. somebody else came, four years on, and taught it differently.

II. The Carter, at Market

market day, the year you were old enough to be sent with the cart

His name was Semp and he drove between six villages on a circuit, which meant he knew everything and about a third of it was true. You were minding the trestle and he was drinking somebody else's ale, and he told you about the Marked because you asked him what the two-finger sign meant, which he had just made at a stranger's back.

Semp the carter, who has never once been in a fight "That one? Marked. You'll know them — edge of the village, never the middle, never the good room. Village puts them there and the village keeps them there, and pays them on the day and not before, and wants the head or the hide brought back before a coin changes hands.

Because it's said the work marks you. Go into the wood after that sort of thing often enough and something comes back out with you. My gran believed it flat. I believe it Tuesdays.

Here's the thing nobody says, though. When the mill-lane went bad at Combe Deeping — three gone in a fortnight, and the lord six men and no notion — who came? Not the crown. Not the Countess. Them. Two of them, and one didn't walk out.

So we make the sign at their backs and we pay them short and we tell them the road's good this time of year. And next time it happens we stand in that doorway hoping to God somebody's marked comes down it."

Then he told you the other thing, the one every marked hunter will tell you unprompted within a minute of meeting: they don't go alone. Not because it's forbidden — nothing is forbidden, that's rather the point of the life — but because everyone in the trade has buried somebody who did. He sang you two verses of a bad ballad about a man named Corin Ashe, who knew the trade, and would not wait for the others, and went in at first light.

They found his boots. They found his coin. They never found the man.

III. The Woman at the Stag and Sickle

later. old enough to be in the tavern on your own account.

She had the corner table and the seat with its back to the wall, and had travel stained robes of a mage, and piercing blue eyes. She'd been there two days waiting on enough hands to answer a bounty three valleys over. Marda Quist. Ledger, though you didn't know what that meant yet. She bought the second round when she worked out you were asking seriously rather than for the story.

Marda Quist, of the Ledger, who was fair about the others and not generous "Three halls. I'll give you all three straight and you can weigh my bias yourself, since I've got one.

Mine's the Ledger. A guild. Founded by a quartermaster who noticed her company weren't dying to monsters, they were dying to going in hungry and blind and cheap. So she wrote down what killed people, and we've been writing ever since. The most evenly balanced among the Marker professions. Best bestiary in the Marches, and rates, and a register with your name in it and whether you came back. The others call us tradesmen. A tradesman knows the cost before he buys. I'll take it.

The Iron Vigil. Brotherhood, up in a dwarven gate-hall they hold on nobody's permission. Old muster-men and women who kept riding out after the crown stopped, then their sons and daughters, then theirs. Lean to the martial weapons. They drill. They hold ground when holding ground is stupid, and they bury every corpse they find — theirs, ours, and the ones nobody claims — which is both righteous and, as it happens, the single best thing anybody does about the carrion-kind. They're rigid. They're also who I'd want beside me against a warband, and I'd not say that where they could hear it.

The Thornwake. Sisterhood, predominantly, deep wood, in an elven ruin that gets harder to find every year on purpose. Started as nine hedge-healers, magic users who'd each been run out of her own village by her own neighbours. They know the terms — the pacts, the bargains, the undoings, the exact words, and the exact words are the whole of it. Everyone needs them. Nobody trusts them. Ask yourself which of those two facts is their fault.

And there's the fourth road, which is most of us in truth, and how most of us started out: no hall at all. No archive, no roof in winter, nobody to write your name down after. Some prefer it. Some were never offered.

Now the part that matters, and every hall will be slow to tell you: not one of them hands you work. Not one. You'll still be standing in a room like this one waiting on a Marker to say her piece, order or no order. What a hall gives you is somewhere to go when it snows and somebody who'll notice you're gone.

That's worth something. I never said it wasn't. I said it was worth that."

She finished her drink and said the thing you have heard from every marked hunter since, in the same flat way, as though it were weather:

"You drink with whoever answers the call. You go in with people whose names you learned an hour ago. And you come out. That's the trade. Everything else is embroidery."

Why you took the road after that — maybe with hopes of joining the Ledger's register, the Vigil's oath, the Thornwake's long memory, or none of them — is the one thing here nobody taught you.