The Asking — Faces and Proof in Valdenmoor

This one is written to you, not to your character. Everything else in here is in-world.

What this is. A feudal kingdom running on one rule: a face proves nothing, so nobody is identified by their face. Shapeshifters are real and always have been, so Valdenmoor authenticates people by what they can answer instead. Every household, guild chapter, regiment, ship's crew and marriage keeps a private challenge and a private answer — the word — rooted in something only those people lived through. Demanding it is the Asking. Everything else in this world is machinery bolted onto that one fact.

What is fixed. The Asking, and that it is the only proof most people will ever accept. The changing — a house replaces its word after a death, a betrayal or a suspicion, and anyone absent must be re-admitted afterwards by somebody who was there. Attestors, the licensed neutrals who hold proof in sealed keeping and vouch for a fee. Counter-marks instead of signatures, because a hand can be copied and a body can be worn. The Church of the Eternal Flame and its Rite of True Name, the one thing that genuinely reads a body, rationed and expensive and months deep in petitioners. The Inquisition, which audits proofs rather than hunting monsters. King Edran III, aging with no clear heir, and three great houses positioning around that. Ashenveil Forest to the east, the dungeon at its edge, and the Adventurers' Guild that delves it.

What is yours. Three things are deliberately blank, and nothing in this world contradicts you if you fill them:

• How many shapeshifters there actually are. Every institution here is built as though the answer were "a great many". No entry says that it is.
• Whether the rite is honest. The Church holds that the Flame reads a body and cannot be deceived. Nothing in this world confirms that from outside the Church.
• What the six generations before the Asking were like, and who first proposed it. The rule is always dated and never explained.

Using it with a character card. This world assumes nothing about who you are. A physician who travels between houses, an attestor with a warrant and a bad month, a magistrate's clerk, a courier carrying counter-marked letters, a delver back from Ashenveil with a party word and no household, a servant who has been asked twice this week and is starting to wonder why — every one of those is supported without editing a line. It is also written to hold a shapeshifter wearing a life, which is the case the whole rule exists against.

Everyone in scope is an adult. This world is about proof, trust and the cost of being known, and it writes intimacy as the thing that both saves you and exposes you, at the level of restraint the setting itself uses. Cards laid on top of this world may go further than it does. The world itself does not.

Forking is on. Move the capital, make the rite a fraud, give the Inquisition a second circuit, decide the attestors' Roll was sold twenty years ago and nobody has checked since. A worked example you cannot take apart is not much of an example.

Nobody in Valdenmoor is identified by their face, and nobody has been for six generations. A face is a thing that can be worn.

So the kingdom identifies people by what they can answer instead. Every household, guild chapter, regiment, ship's crew and marriage keeps a private challenge and a private answer — the word — rooted in something only those people lived through. Demanding it is the Asking, and it is the only proof most people will ever accept. Being recognised across a street is worth a nod.

The Asking works because a word cannot be researched. It is written nowhere. It points at an afternoon, a quarrel or a debt that nobody recorded, and no amount of watching from outside will produce it. There are two ways to hold one: live into it, or take it from someone who has it already.

Everything else here is machinery built on that. Proof is a service you buy, a favour you are owed, or a sentence you carry in your head. It is never a thing you simply are, and it can be taken away from you in an evening.

An adult in the Crown holds four or five words at once — the household they sleep in, the trade they work, the parish they were vouched into, a marriage, sometimes a regiment or a standing party. Losing one costs a door. Losing several costs a life, and there is no office anywhere that will issue replacements.

Nobody native to the kingdom finds any of this strange. Travellers from further east, where faces are still trusted and a man's word is his own, are regarded roughly the way a man who leaves his purse in the street is regarded: not wicked, merely unserious.

A word is two halves and both of them are private: a question the house agreed on, and the answer to it. Neither half is written down anywhere, ever.

That pairing is what makes it proof. Overhear the answer and you still do not know which question it belongs to. Overhear the question and you have learned nothing you could not have guessed. The pair exists only in the heads of the people who were standing in the room when it was set, and it points at something that happened to them — an afternoon, a debt, a bad joke, the thing the dog did to the miller's cart.

Words are short, spoken aloud and never repeated where a stranger might hear. A large house keeps several: a door word, an inner word for the family rooms, and something narrower again for money. The money word changes most often.

Who administers it depends on the size of the thing. In a small house, whoever is at the door. In a merchant family, the steward or the cook, which is why servants are the most dangerous people in the kingdom and are paid accordingly badly. A guild chapter keeps its word with the desk clerk. A regiment's sits with the serjeant and is changed on a schedule.

A word is also a house's memory. Each one is a small private monument to an event, and a family that has changed its word eleven times in a decade is telling anybody who counts that something inside it is wrong. Attestors count.

Asking somebody for the word of a house they belong to is ordinary, constant, and nobody takes offence at it. Asking somebody for the word of a house they do not belong to is either a joke or a crime, depending entirely on how the magistrate feels that morning.

A house changes its word after a death, a betrayal or a suspicion. The event is called a changing, and it is the most dangerous night in a household's year.

Everyone who belongs to the house is meant to be standing in the room. The old word is asked of each of them at the door, the new one is spoken in front of all of them, and after that the old one is dead — answering with it is itself a confession that you were not there. Anybody absent must be re-admitted afterwards, in person, by somebody who was present: asked the old word, vouched for, and only then given the new one.

That gap is the seam of this world. Servants travel. Sons are away at the front. Physicians spend eleven days buying supplies. Nobody sends word ahead of a changing, since the point of one is that it happens at once.

A changing is also a message. Houses do not announce them and the neighbourhood always knows within a day, and everyone reads the announcement as either "we buried somebody" or "we found something out". Attestors are often called in to witness one, partly so the change can be proved later, partly because a neutral in the room makes it harder for whoever caused the changing to hear the new word.

Re-admission is where the cruelty lives. A servant of nine years standing in a doorway with the wrong answer in his mouth has no recourse but the goodwill of whoever opened it. Some houses re-admit on sight and a handshake. Some require an attestor, and a fee the servant pays. Some do not re-admit at all, and a woman three weeks away discovers on a Tuesday afternoon that she has no home and no way to prove she ever did.

The law says nothing about any of it. A changing is the private act of a private house.

Failing an Asking is not a crime. It is a fact, and its consequences are entirely social, immediate and severe.

You are not arrested. You are simply not admitted — the door closes, and every claim you had on the far side of it is suspended. No wage, no bed, no goods held in your name, no standing to be heard. The household owes you no explanation, no second attempt, and no word to anyone about why. Most do not even call the watch. They just stop opening the door.

What happens next depends on where you failed. Fail at a door you have never been through and you are a stranger who tried it on. Fail at your own door and you are one of two things, and the house will assume the worse of them until somebody vouches. The house has no obligation to tell you which of the two it has settled upon.

Refusing to be asked is worse than failing. A person who declines the Asking where they plainly have business has, by custom and increasingly by the magistrates' reading of it, admitted the thing the Asking exists to catch. Watchmen are trained to treat a refusal as cause enough to hold somebody overnight.

There is a middle path everybody uses and nobody likes. If you cannot answer, you name somebody who can vouch for you and you wait in the street while they are fetched. It costs the voucher something real, it costs you a great deal of face, and it works about half the time.

The term for a person turned out of a house on a failed Asking is unhoused, and it is not a soft word. An unhoused adult in the Crown has perhaps four days before the practical problems become desperate ones: no bank will pay them, no decent inn will take an unvouched stranger, and any trade they present themselves to will ask them the word of the last house they worked in.

A good word points at a small, dull, private event that nobody had reason to write down and no outsider was present for. The dullness is the security.

Houses are taught to avoid three things when choosing one. Anything a servant could have seen from the corridor. Anything that happened in public, however briefly. And anything a patient stranger could assemble after a month of study — birthdays, the names of the dead, the road the grandfather came from, the colour the door used to be. All of that is available to patience, and patience is the cheapest thing a shapeshifter has.

What survives is small: which of them was sick the week of the flood, what was said over the broken clock, which one lost at cards to the other and would not admit it afterwards. No outsider was there for any of it.

The best words are also faintly embarrassing, and that is not an accident. A house that picks something shameful gets a word nobody in it will repeat casually, at an inn, or to a lover. The Church disapproves of the practice. Every attestor recommends it.

Length is a matter of taste. Two or three words is usual at a door. Money words run longer and are often a whole sentence, because a long answer is harder to guess and harder to get right by luck if you have only heard a fragment of it.

There are people who sell advice on this. They are not licensed, they are not attestors, and roughly half of them keep notes.

The failure everybody warns against and everybody commits anyway is the sentimental word — the one chosen because it is beautiful, or because it commemorates somebody the house loved. Those are the words that end up in letters, in poems, and eventually in other people's mouths.

When a person cannot be asked, somebody who can be asked stands for them instead. That is vouching, and it carries real liability.

The voucher answers their own word to whoever is doing the Asking, then states that they know this person and will stand surety for them. If the vouched party later proves false, the voucher answers for it: a fine at the magistrate's discretion, forfeit of whatever the false party took, and — for anybody who has done it twice — the loss of the right to vouch at all. An attestor who vouches falsely loses warrant and livelihood in the same afternoon.

So a vouching is a favour with weight in it. Nobody grants one lightly and nobody forgets being asked for one. A voucher wrong once is unlucky, and a voucher who is wrong twice is assumed to have been paid for it.

Children are the ordinary case. A child is too young to hold a word, so a child is vouched for by a parent, a nurse or a parish, and stays vouched until old enough to be admitted to a household word — usually around fourteen, in a small ceremony that most families take more seriously than a wedding.

Travellers are the other ordinary case. Arrive in a strange town and nobody there holds a word you know, so you are unproved until somebody local stands for you. Inns of any quality will not take an unvouched stranger. Inns of no quality will, and charge for it.

Vouching is also how the poor prove anything at all. A labourer with no household and no trade chapter has exactly one asset, which is being known in a parish, and parish clerks who will vouch for a shilling are common enough that the Crown has legislated against them twice and enforced it never.

An Asking belongs at a door, quietly, with as few ears present as possible. Demanding one in the open street is a serious act, and everybody watching reads it as an accusation.

The reason is mechanical rather than delicate. A word spoken where strangers can hear it is burned: it has to be changed, the whole house has to be gathered, and everyone absent has to be re-admitted. So a public Asking costs the house whether or not the person answers, which is precisely why it gets used as a weapon.

Custom has an answer and it is rigidly observed. The challenged party does not speak the word aloud. They step aside, out of hearing, with the challenger and two witnesses who hear nothing at all. The two witnesses attest that an Asking took place, and that they themselves heard none of the answer.

Refusing to step aside is treated as refusing to be asked, which is worse than failing. Insisting on an answer in the open is treated as an attempt to burn the word, and a magistrate will fine a man for it if the house complains, which houses usually do.

Guild halls, courtrooms and temples all keep a small side room for the purpose and call it the same thing everywhere: the asking room. In a poor district it is a doorway and a turned back.

The Inquisition is bound by none of it. An Inquisitor may ask in the street, in the open, in front of whoever happens to be there; the house may not complain and gets nothing for the burned word. This is the single most resented power the Church holds, and it is defended on the grounds that a thing wearing a face has no claim on the protections of a house it does not belong to.

An attestor is a licensed neutral who holds proof for other people and vouches on demand, for a fee. It is the closest thing the kingdom has to an identity office, and it is a private trade.

You lodge with them: a sealed statement of who you are, together with a question and an answer only you could give. That is sealed keeping. The attestor never learns your household words and does not want to — what they hold is a separate proof of their own making, so that if a house turns you out or a word is burned, there is still one person alive who can stand up and say you are who you say you are.

They are licensed by the Crown's Office of Warrants and listed on the Roll. An attestor without a warrant is a forger with better manners. An attestor may not hold proof for anybody they are akin to.

The trade does four things and charges for each. It witnesses changings, so a house can prove afterwards that its word was properly set. It holds lodged words for the dead, which is the entire basis of inheritance. It vouches for travellers and the unhoused. And it counter-signs correspondence between houses that have never met.

In the Crown they cluster in Alderhouse, in narrow offices with two doors, and the good ones are booked three weeks out.

The obvious problem is the obvious problem. An attestor is one person holding a great many people's only proof, paid by the very people they are supposed to be neutral about, and the Roll is audited once a year by clerks who are also one person each. There is an attestor scandal running somewhere in the kingdom at any given moment. Everybody knows this. Everybody uses attestors anyway, because the alternative is nothing at all.

Signatures prove nothing here and never have. A hand can be copied and a body can be worn, so correspondence is authenticated by counter-mark instead.

A counter-mark is a small agreed defect. Two houses intending to write to each other settle it in advance and in person: a letter of the alphabet always doubled, a comma in a fixed wrong place, a stroke through the third line of the seal, a figure written out in words where it ought to be in numerals. Anybody can copy a seal. Only somebody who was in the room knows the seal is supposed to be slightly wrong.

A letter arriving without its counter-mark is not treated as a forgery. It is simply unauthenticated, and the receiving house reads it as an anonymous note. A mark that has never once been changed is worth more to a thief than the seal.

Marks change on the same occasions words do — a death, a betrayal, a suspicion — or for the ordinary reason that a clerk has left. Long-standing correspondents change them yearly out of habit.

Couriers carry the letter and know nothing of the mark, which is deliberate: a courier who could authenticate would be worth robbing. What a courier carries instead is a road-word for the stages, and a good courier house prices itself on how rarely its people are stopped.

The trade term for the whole apparatus is a letter of hand, and the phrase turns up in every contract in the kingdom. It means a document that will be honoured because it is counter-marked, as against one that merely says the right things in the right order.

Banking houses, unusually, refuse counter-marks above a modest sum and insist on a person at a window instead. They have their reasons.

A bank does not know what you look like and does not care. It holds your question, and the money moves when you answer it.

The depositor's question is set when the account is opened, in person, and it is not quite the same species of thing as a household word: a bank wants an answer checkable against its own books as well as your memory, so it is usually a fact about the account itself — a sum, a date, the name the first deposit came in under. A small withdrawal needs one question. A large one needs two, put by different clerks. Anything above the house's threshold needs an attestor standing at your elbow.

Banking houses rotate their questions on a schedule nobody outside the house is told. Clerks are drilled to put the question before looking anything up, so the search cannot be read.

A letter of credit is the travelling version, and it is counter-marked rather than signed: the issuing house writes the letter, agrees the defect with the paying house by separate courier, and the traveller carries a document they cannot themselves authenticate. Which is why a letter of credit is safe to steal and useless to spend.

The four old houses on Wool Quay hold between them a working monopoly on anything above a merchant's scale, and Halloway's is the oldest of the four by two generations. House Tessavar's money sits behind at least two of them, a thing nobody says aloud on Wool Quay.

Nobody in this kingdom paints a portrait for identification. Portraits exist and hang in halls, and everyone understands them to be about ancestry, wealth and taste. Producing one as proof of who you are would be received roughly the way producing a poem would be received.

The dead cannot be asked. That single fact makes inheritance the hardest legal problem in Valdenmoor, and it is why the legal profession exists in the shape it does.

A word dies with the person holding it. So a man who dies without lodging one leaves an estate nobody can prove was his and heirs nobody can prove are his, and the courts have a standing remedy everybody hates: the estate is held for a year and a day, claimants are asked by the court's own attestor, and whatever is unclaimed at the end of it goes to the Crown. A great deal goes to the Crown.

The remedy people actually use is to lodge a word in advance. You go to an attestor while healthy and leave a sealed statement — your heirs, your bequests, and a question only you could have answered. An estate cannot speak for itself.

Probate is then a matter of opening the keeping in front of a magistrate and comparing what is inside against the will. The attestor swears to when it was lodged and that it has not been opened since, and the seal is inspected by two clerks who do nothing else all week.

A lodged word can be replaced but never edited. Changing your mind means lodging a fresh one, and the attestor keeps both, dated, because the interesting cases are always the ones where a man lodged a second statement eleven days before he died.

This is the crack in the kingdom's floor and everybody knows exactly where it runs. A creature that can hold a dying man's shape for a fortnight can answer for him, and there is a whole family of cases on record where an estate went to somebody who arrived, answered correctly, and was never seen again once the money moved. The Crown's answer has been to require the Rite of True Name for any inheritance above a threshold, which covers the largest estates and none of the rest.

Words are bought and sold, and there is a whole quiet economy in it. Buying one is a felony. Selling one is a felony. Both are common.

The trade has three ends. Servants and clerks sell what they hold, usually once and usually on the way out of a place. Thieves take words the slow way — by courting somebody, by patience, by working a year in a house — and sell them on to people who want a door. And there are craftsmen at the paper end of it: false warrants, forged counter-marks, attestor seals cut from memory, names added to a chapter roll for a price.

A word is worth what its door is worth. A servant's door word in a middling house might fetch a month's wages. A money word fetches a great deal more than that. Everything in this trade is priced upon how long the word is likely to last.

The buyer's problem is that a stolen word is perishable and there is no way on earth to test one. You are buying a sentence from a criminal, and if the house has had a changing since — or if the seller is running the second half of a very old swindle — you find out at the door, standing in front of whoever opened it. Sellers know this and price the risk in.

Sentences are heavy and wildly inconsistent. A magistrate will hang a word-thief who used one to take money, transport one who used it to get in out of the rain, and fine a servant who sold one and repented of it. The Church would prefer all three hanged and says so annually.

The trade's own name for the business is dealing in doors. Its practitioners think of themselves as tradesmen and are not, as a class, especially frightening. The frightening ones have no need to buy.

The Church of the Eternal Flame is Valdenmoor's dominant religion and the only institution in it that claims to prove anything by itself. It worships a god of light and ordered civilisation, and an eternal fire burns in every temple in the kingdom.

Its doctrine on the Asking is precise and slightly insulting. The Asking is a worldly expedient, a thing men do because they cannot see, and it proves nothing whatever about a body — only about a memory. The Flame proves the body. That claim is the Church's entire political position, and it is backed by the Rite of True Name and by Truthfire, which burns a false form and leaves a true one unharmed.

Priests are everywhere in this kingdom and move freely across every class. The Church runs the orphanages, the hospitals and most of the schools.

That last fact matters more in practice than the theology does. A parish priest vouches for children with no parents to vouch for them, keeps the register of who was admitted to what, and is frequently the only person in a poor district who can be asked and will be believed. The Church is the identity office of the poor, and it does not charge them for it.

Temples keep an asking room, a petitioners' book for the rite, and a fire that has not been allowed to go out since the building was raised. The fire is tended in shifts, and letting one die is the worst thing that can happen to a parish's reputation.

Relations with the Crown are cordial and wary. The Church licenses nothing and taxes nothing. It simply holds the one proof the Crown cannot manufacture, and both parties conduct themselves as though this were not so.

The Rite of True Name is the one procedure in Valdenmoor that reads a body instead of a memory. Two priests, a witness, a morning, and Truthfire.

The petitioner holds a hand in the flame. A true body comes out unharmed but for a small permanent burn on the inside of the wrist — the flamemark — and is said to have burned true. A false form cannot hold in it. It is rationed and it is expensive: granted for capital trials, for inheritances above a threshold the Crown sets, and for succession, at a fee and a donation named by different people.

What the rite cannot do is tell anybody who you are. It proves the body is real flesh with no shape over it, and where the petitioner already carries a flamemark it proves this is the same body that was marked. It says nothing about your name or claim.

There is no ambiguous outcome and no appeal, and it is the only proof in the kingdom that cannot be bought, vouched, forged or inherited. It is not granted because a household has become nervous, and it is not granted quickly: a working family raises the cost once in a lifetime and generally spends it on an inheritance.

The limit on names is poorly understood outside the Church and understood very well inside it. Somebody who has burned true and is lying about their name is a problem the rite cannot touch, which is exactly why the courts pair it with an Asking and an attestor instead of treating it as a verdict on its own. A body that has burned true and a name that has been vouched for are separate proofs, and courts want both.

The flamemark is the nearest thing to a document anybody in this kingdom carries, and it attests to exactly two things: that on some morning, in front of two priests, this body was real, and that any later rite performed on a body bearing it is being performed on that same body. The morning is in the register, not in the mark.

Petitions for the rite go into the temple's petitioners' book in the order they arrive, and the book runs months deep in every city in the kingdom. In the Crown it is closer to a year.

The order is supposed to be absolute, with two exceptions written into the Church's own rule: a capital trial goes to the front, and a death in an estate moves the heirs up. Everything else waits. A petitioner is told a season rather than a date, and is expected to present themselves within three days of being called or fall to the bottom of the book.

Petitioners with money do not wait. This is not a secret, it is not quite legal, and it is not quite illegal either. The book is public, kept at the temple door, and anybody at all may read how many names stand before theirs and how long the line has moved.

The mechanism is a donation to the parish fabric, offered by the petitioner and accepted by a priest with the discretion to reorder the book for grave cause. Whether a large donation constitutes grave cause is a question the Church has ruled on twice and enforces unevenly. Every few years a priest is removed for it very loudly, and the practice carries on quietly.

The consequences are the ordinary consequences of rationing something people need. Estates sit unprobated for a year while heirs eat the capital. Accused men wait in cells. Marriages that require the rite are postponed past the point where anybody still wants them. And a brisk secondary trade exists in the petitions themselves — a place in the book is transferable if the parish is willing, and there are people in every city who join the queue on speculation and sell their place near the front of it.

The phrase for it is jumping the list, and it is one of the two or three grievances that will reliably start a fight in a Crown tavern.

The Inquisition is the Church's investigative arm, and its ordinary work is not hunting monsters. It audits proofs.

An audit arrives in a town without notice and takes a district at a time. Households are asked their own words in front of an Inquisitor, attestors open their keepings and are checked against the Roll, and lodged words compared to the registers. It finds things — usually a corrupt attestor, sometimes a sold word, occasionally something wearing a face.

Serath Bale holds the eastern circuit, which runs from Ashenveil to the Crown and takes a season to walk. He is the name people mean when they say the Inquisition is coming, and he is at Ashenveil now, three weeks into the dungeon's unusual quiet.

Inquisitors may ask in the open street, may ask twice, and may compel the rite.

Refusing an Inquisitor is treated as an answer in itself, and there is no appeal from it. They carry Truthfire, and they are trained to spot impersonation without it: the gap between what a body ought to know and what it does, a memory a week too shallow, a habit performed correctly and for the wrong reason. An audit takes days, it is deeply unpleasant, and no magistrate will obstruct one.

Bale is not a fanatic, and that is what makes him difficult. His stated view is that the kingdom's proofs are far worse than anybody admits and that most of what he turns up is ordinary human fraud — which is true, and which he says in front of priests who wish he would not. At Ashenveil he has made himself unpopular by treating the dungeon's quiet as a question of identity rather than a question of monsters.

The Inquisition is small. Nine circuits, perhaps forty Inquisitors in the whole kingdom, every one of them worked past exhaustion.

Consecrated ground is anywhere the Church has laid a flame: temples, graveyards, hospital wards, the older orphanages. It is warm in a way that has nothing to do with the weather, and fell things are uncomfortable standing on it.

The discomfort is faint and non-specific — a pressure, a wrongness, worse the longer you stay and worse again near blessed silver, which priests and some watchmen carry and which every temple threshold is set with. It proves nothing on its own, and the Church says as much. A great many entirely human people find temples oppressive, and anything that can hold still can hold still on holy ground.

Sanctuary is real and narrowly drawn. Reach consecrated ground and the watch may not take you off it for a day and a night. The watch waits outside and counts the hours.

What sanctuary is not is a defence against the Church. The day and the night are the Crown's obligation, not the parish's, and a priest may ask you at any point inside them. If the priest is unsatisfied the next step is the rite, and there are men in this kingdom who walked back out to the watch on reflection.

Graveyards are consecrated for a specific and practical reason that nobody in Valdenmoor regards as superstition.

The etiquette is that you do not ask anybody for a word on consecrated ground. It is a courtesy rather than a rule, on the reasoning that a temple is the one place a person ought to be able to stand without proving anything. Inquisitors ignore it. Everyone else observes it, including — notoriously — most of the criminal trades, which is why every third negotiation in the Crown that ought to happen in a warehouse happens in a side chapel instead.

Valdenmoor is a mid-sized feudal kingdom of roughly two million souls, ruled by King Edran III from the capital, Valdenmoor's Crown — called the Crown by everyone who lives in it. Stable, prosperous, deeply conservative.

The King is old and has no clear heir, and in this kingdom a succession is an identity problem before it is a political one. A claimant must prove descent, which is a matter of registers and lodged words, and must prove body, which is a matter of the rite. Both are contestable. Both have been contested before, and the last disputed succession is why the Rite of True Name is written into the coronation at all.

The court runs on words like everything else. The royal household's word is changed at each coronation and administered by the Chamberlain and never written down.

The Crown's practical instruments in all of this are three. The Office of Warrants licenses attestors and keeps the Roll. The magistracy and the Assizes hear the disputes. And the Church holds the one proof the Crown cannot make for itself, which is a standing irritation nobody in the palace discusses in front of a priest.

The shape of the kingdom: fertile central plains, dense forest east with Ashenveil among them, cold mountains north. The dungeon sits at the forest's edge, three days' ride from the Crown, and the Crown taxes what comes out of it.

There is a Dungeon Warden's post in the royal establishment and it is currently unfilled, the last three wardens having disappeared. The salary has been raised twice.

Edran himself is spoken of with real affection and no confidence. He has been a careful king for a long time, he is visibly failing, and the expectation in the city is that the succession will be settled by whichever great house holds the better proofs when he dies.

Three noble houses are quietly positioning for the succession, and each keeps agents in every city in the kingdom. House Mourne deals in information, House Caldrath in soldiers, House Tessavar in money.

Mourne is the one people are afraid of. Its business is knowing things, and in a kingdom where proof is a private sentence held in somebody's head, a house that collects sentences is collecting keys. Nobody has ever proved that Mourne keeps a written record of other people's words. The rumour is old, specific and persistent, and Mourne has never troubled to deny it.

Caldrath holds the regiments. Army words are changed monthly by the serjeants, far more often than civilian practice, and that is Caldrath's answer to the same problem everyone else has. None of the three trusts the other two.

Tessavar is merchant wealth, and its money sits behind at least two of the four old banking houses on Wool Quay. The counter-mark trade between the great commercial houses runs largely through Tessavar's clerks, which means Tessavar authenticates a great deal of correspondence it has no other business reading.

None of the three is a villain and all three are dangerous. They are old, rich, patient organisations doing what their kind always does before a throne changes hands, and each has independently concluded that the deciding factor will be proofs rather than swords — which is probably correct, and is why the last two years have been so quiet.

The lesser nobility is a hundred families who have all worked out that they will have to choose, and have all decided to choose late.

What none of the three can do is manufacture the rite. That belongs to the Church, and all three have spent the past decade being remarkably generous to parishes.

Petty matters go before a magistrate and capital matters before the Assize, and both courts have the same first problem: before a witness can be believed, the witness has to be proved.

So every court keeps its own attestor, and testimony from an unasked witness is void. You are asked at the door of the court, never in the room. The attestor records that you were asked, by what and by whom, and that record is part of the case file; a conviction resting on a witness the attestor did not clear is overturned as a matter of course.

Documents are handled the same way. A paper with no counter-mark is not evidence, it is an assertion, and the court will say so out loud. The rule is old, it is absolute, and it means that in Valdenmoor the first hour of trial is spent establishing who is present.

The Assize may compel the Rite of True Name on a capital charge, and does, which is the main reason the Church's waiting list has a front door reserved for the courts. It is compelled of the accused rather than of the witnesses, on grounds of cost.

Impersonation is a separate offence from whatever the impersonator actually did, and it is the heavier of the two more often than not. The reasoning given from the bench is that a theft injures a household while a false Asking injures the whole arrangement, and Valdenmoor's judges take the second one personally.

Perjury is difficult to prosecute and rarely tried. Proving that a properly asked, properly attested witness lied requires a second properly asked, properly attested witness, and the courts have broadly decided they would rather not.

The magistrates' great weakness is that they will not go inside a house. Four times in the last century a turned-out servant has asked a court to overturn a changing, and four times the court has declined to interfere in the private act of a private household.

The Adventurers' Guild is the dominant monster-hunting, dungeon-delving institution in Valdenmoor and the kingdoms beside it.

Ranks run Copper, Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Mythril, and rank decides which contracts you may take. Registration is a bound contract whose binding detects a false form, which makes a Guild card the hardest document in the kingdom to forge.

The Guild's Asking is stricter than anybody's. Every chapter house keeps a word, every standing party keeps a party word, and parties ask at the mouth of a dungeon and at the exit.

Three parties work Ashenveil. The Ironbound Three, Iron rank: Captain Valeria and her two younger brothers, one a cleric, short of money. Sable Company, Gold rank: six professionals, deep floors. The Hollow Seekers, rank unrecorded, new.

They ask at the exit because of what the Guild deals with. A party that went in six and comes out six has still not established that it came out the same six, and the exit Asking is old enough that nobody argues about it and grim enough that nobody jokes about it either.

The Guild is politically neutral in theory and thoroughly compromised in practice — every great house has Guild contacts. Registration is done in person at a chapter desk, and the binding is what catches a false form there. Higher-rank parties carry detection gear as well: a Silver-rank party might have a Truth Lens that reveals illusion, which is a different problem from a worn body and is constantly confused with one. The Ironbound Three know the upper floors well; Sable Company is methodical and dangerous; the Hollow Seekers do not delve much and ask a great many questions.

The Guild is also the largest employer on the surface of people with no household, which makes it the natural home of anybody who cannot answer for where they came from.

Valdenmoor's Crown is the capital, and everybody in it calls it the Crown. Ninety thousand people on a ridge above a bend in the river, three days' ride west of Ashenveil.

The city walls are old and kept in repair for reasons of dignity rather than for war. Four gates pierce them. The Crown gate faces east onto the Ashenveil road, taking the freight, the delvers, the Inquisition and most of the trouble.

No gate asks. Nobody is ever asked their word to enter the city, because a gate cannot ask ninety thousand people and nobody has ever proposed that it try. The watch counts the carts, looks for weapons and waves the rest through. Every question about who you are happens later, at a door, indoors, in private.

The Crown is trivially easy to enter and nearly impossible to live in unproved.

That is the fact the whole place is built on, and it is why the city is always full of people in the four days between arriving and needing something. The lodging trade is enormous and finely stratified: houses that want an attestor, houses that will take a vouching, houses that take coin and ask nothing and are watched by the watch for exactly that reason.

The city taxes the dungeon road, the river freight and the wool trade, in that order of importance, and the King's revenue depends on all three staying dull.

High town has the palace, the cathedral of the Flame and the Assize. Low town has everybody else, the money, the noise and the smell — river in summer, coal in winter. It is louder than anywhere else in the kingdom by a wide margin, and people who arrive from the Vale say so for a week and then stop noticing.

The Crown is read as two halves and a handful of names. High town is the ridge — the palace, the great houses' town seats, the cathedral and the Assize. Low town is everything downhill of it to the water.

Alderhouse is the proof quarter. The attestors cluster there in narrow offices with two doors, and more of the kingdom's sealed keeping sits behind that one street than anywhere else.

Wool Quay is money: the four old banking houses, Halloway's the oldest of them, and the counting rooms of the merchant companies behind.

The Shambles is the meat market and the crowded lanes around it, cheap and loud, where a person can be nobody in particular for a week.

Lamplow is the low ground by the river — oil works, tanneries, tenements — and it is where the unhoused go when the four days are up.

Those five names cover most of what anybody in the Crown means by an address. The rest is trades: the Street of Chandlers, the horse market outside the Crown gate, the Guild's city chapter house on the low-town side of the ridge, the physicians around the old hospital, the lawyers spilling out of Alderhouse into every alley beside it.

The districts matter because proof is local. An Alderhouse attestor will not be believed in Lamplow, where the parish priest is believed instead, and a Lamplow vouching is worth nothing at all on Wool Quay. People carry their proofs uphill with difficulty and downhill with ease, which is a sentence Crown lawyers use about a great deal more than districts.

The Verrow runs west out of the Vale, under the Crown's ridge, and reaches the sea four days below the city. Everything heavy in this kingdom travels on it and almost nothing heavy travels by road.

The riverfront below Lamplow is a mile of wharves, and at the busy ones the barges tie three deep and unload across one another. Freight is timber and stone down out of the Vale, wool and cloth out to the coast, coal and salt fish and iron up. The docks work from an hour before dawn and stop when the light goes at night.

A barge crew keeps a crew word the way a household does, changed at the turn of the year, and a bargeman who cannot answer it is put off at the next wharf and left to walk home.

The wharves are also the one place in the whole Crown that hires without asking anybody anything.

Dock gangs take day labour by the hour, pay by the hour, and want nothing from a man but a back and a name to shout. That makes the docks the first employer of the unhoused and the last employer of the disgraced, and every attestor in Alderhouse has at some point sent a client down there to eat while a matter is sorted out.

The river companies run on counter-marks like everybody else, and the paper moves faster than the cargo: a bill of lading is settled at the Crown before the barge carrying the goods has cleared the third bridge. Halloway's does most of that clearing.

Wherry-men take passengers across and up and down for coppers, know every face on the water, and will tell any of it to anybody who buys them a drink. House Mourne has employed river men for a hundred years.

The Vale is the farmed country east of the Crown: a day and a half of orchard and grain either side of the high road, ending under the trees at Ashenveil.

There is a market town every half day's walk, six of them between the capital and the forest, and each is the same shape: a square, a temple, an inn, a magistrate who sits twice a month, and an attestor who is also the schoolmaster.

The villages are smaller, older and far more numerous, and most of them have no attestor at all.

Asking in a village is constant and entirely casual. Everybody knows everybody, which is worth precisely nothing here, so the word gets asked at doors four and five times a day out of pure habit and nobody thinks about it.

Ashenveil village is the last of them and is no longer a village in anything but name.

It has doubled in thirty years on delving money: a Guild chapter house, three inns of very different quality, a temple with a resident Inquisitor's lodging, and a permanent population of people waiting for a party to need a fourth.

The Vale's real vulnerability is the opposite of the Crown's. A village changes its word once in a decade, if that, because nothing ever happens that requires it — and a word ten years old, known to sixty people who have all been drunk in the same inn, is not much of a secret. Attestors say so, at fees the villages will not pay.

Village re-admission is a handshake. Every attestor in the kingdom disapproves and every village has always done it that way.

The high road runs east from the Crown through the Vale to Ashenveil: three days' ride, and four or five at a cart's pace. It is the only paved road in the kingdom and the Crown maintains it out of the dungeon revenue.

Tolls are taken at the three bridges and at the Crown gate, in coin, by men who ask nothing of anybody.

Travel is where the Asking breaks down, because a traveller stands at doors whose words he does not hold. So the roads run on road-words instead. A road-word is held along a route rather than inside a house: a courier company or a caravan master settles one with the stage inns, the toll keepers and the wayhouses, and everyone on that route honours it for a season. Caravans keep their own, changed at either end.

A road-word proves you belong to the road, not who you are.

That distinction is the whole of it, and every wayhouse keeper understands it perfectly. A man with the road-word gets a bed, a meal, a change of horse and no questions; he does not get credit, he does not get a bed in the family wing, and if he is found in the wrong part of the house he is asked properly and the road-word will not help him.

A large caravan is a small mobile household with all the same machinery — a master who administers the word, a changing if a man is dismissed on the road, and a great deal of suspicion about anyone who joins halfway along.

Road-words are also the most stolen words in the kingdom, being the cheapest to buy and the least dangerous to use. Nobody hangs for one. The toll keepers are the one office in Valdenmoor that takes money without proof of any kind, which is why the bridges are robbed twice a year.

Humans are about four in five of Valdenmoor, and every institution in it was built by them, the Asking included.

There is no single human type. The Vale runs shorter and darker, the north taller and fairer, the Crown is all of it mixed, and ordinary human build covers most of what anybody could want to be.

A human body is the least remarkable object in the kingdom, and that is its entire value. Nobody looks twice at one.

A copied human form brings that body's own calluses and teeth. An invented one brings none. What no human form brings is what people actually read: the accent of a district, the way somebody's hands sit when they are not in use, how a family holds a cup. Those are learned, not worn.

Nor does a human body arrive with a memory, which is the whole reason the Asking works.

The gap closes with time and study, and everyone who thinks about this at all knows that it does. An accent is a month. A trade's hands can be worn straight off the man who earned them, but they do not bring the trade with them — the hands know the shape and not the work, and another member of that trade finds it out in an afternoon. Habit is the hardest of all of it, because nobody can list their own habits to copy them and nobody notices somebody else's until it is missing.

Human lifespan makes households turn over fast compared with elves and dwarves, which is why human words are changed most often, why human re-admission is the most casual, and why human families lose track of cousins.

Physicians in the Crown will tell you they can distinguish a body of forty from a body of thirty by the hands and the knees and nothing else. They are also the profession most often asked to look at a stranger and give an opinion, and they hate it.

Elves live three or four centuries. They stand a little taller than humans and a good deal lighter, see well in near dark, and hear better than a human by a margin that matters in a quiet house.

Most elves in the kingdom are city elves and have been for generations. The wood elves are the Ashenveil communities, who keep to the forest and provide the Forest Wardens, the ranger companies on its edge. A wood elf and a city elf are the same people and say they are not. A half-elf is common in the Crown and quite unremarkable.

An elven body buys night sight and reach and costs mass, speed and obscurity. Elves are few enough in a city that a strange elf is asked more often, not less.

Longevity does something to the Asking nothing else does. An elven house's word can be two hundred years old.

It will point at an afternoon nobody outside that house has been alive to see, which makes elven words the hardest in the kingdom to take and the most catastrophic to lose, since there is no living person to re-admit anybody against. Elven changings are correspondingly rare and correspondingly solemn, and an elf who misses one may wait decades for the next.

A wood elf's word is often not a sentence at all. It is a bar of a song, a place in the forest named the way that family names it, or a gesture — all of which travel badly into a city court, and all of which the Forest Wardens prefer for exactly that reason.

Half-elves inherit neither the lifespan nor the standing, and a half-elf raised in an elven house frequently outlives the human half of a family and finds themselves the only person left who holds the word.

Dwarves come from the cold mountains north and most still live there, in clans, in halls older than the kingdom. Clan Stoneheart is the largest, and the name turns up all over the Crown among smiths, engineers and Guild delvers.

A dwarven body is dense and heavy — a dwarf outweighs a tall human — with dark sight, enormous grip and no ground speed worth the name. Beards and hands are read the way faces are read elsewhere, and a dwarf can name a stranger's trade across a room.

Clan words are the oldest words in the kingdom. A clan changes its word on a death in the line and on almost nothing else, so a word may be four hundred years old.

That makes them the most valuable words in existence and the worst of all to lose. One Stoneheart branch lost its own in Ashenveil: Lost Clan Stoneheart.

The story is old and the legal position is not. That branch took its whole line down into the dungeon four generations ago and did not come out, and every dwarf who held its word went down with it. The ones left at home — away on contract, or too young to have been admitted — came back to a hall none of them could answer for. There was nobody left alive to re-admit them. The clans would not invent a remedy, because a clan word that can be granted out of sympathy is not a word. So the survivors were unhoused, and their descendants still are, and are found scattered through the Guild and the caravan trade where nobody needs a clan.

Stonehearts still take Guild contracts into Ashenveil looking for sign of them, and the clan in the north is careful to say that a branch was lost and not the clan. Nobody has ever brought that word back out.

Dwarven halls do not use attestors, and dwarves in the Crown use them constantly and complain about the fees. The clans' own view is that a word held for four centuries by people who see each other daily does not need a licensed stranger to witness it, which is true in the mountains and useless anywhere else.

Three more peoples share the kingdom, each a different body to wear.

Beastkin carry animal traits — fur, ears, a muzzle, a tail — and in most lines a sense of smell far past anything human. Some beastkin say they can smell a wrong body. No court admits it, and the claim at its best answers whether flesh is right, never whose flesh it is.

Halflings are small, quick and easy to overlook, and a halfling household is enormous: three and four generations under one roof. They keep more words than anybody: a door word, an inner word, one for each branch.

An orc stands heavier than a human and scars visibly. Orcish clans in the north keep a spoken oath where the kingdom keeps a word. Orcs are rare south of the mountains and a half-orc is common in the Guild.

What each body costs is the point.

Beastkin are conspicuous and remembered, which in a kingdom that does not trust memory only means being asked more often. Halfling form buys you the ability to be unnoticed in a corridor and hands you the hardest household in the kingdom to infiltrate, because a halfling house has forty people in it and all of them are bored. Orcish build buys you doors nobody argues with, and costs you every room where a big scarred stranger is a thing people mention afterwards.

The kingdom is not equal about any of this. Beastkin and half-orcs are asked more often than they should be, in worse tempers, and by watchmen who have decided in advance. The Church says plainly and repeatedly that a body's shape says nothing about what is inside it, which is doctrinally awkward for the Church and true anyway.

Ashenveil Forest lies three days east of the Crown: old, dense, unlogged for two centuries, with wood-elf communities inside it and the Forest Wardens patrolling its edge.

The dungeon is at that edge — a stone stair down into worked rock that nobody built and nobody has mapped past the middle floors. The first level is the Entry Warren, shallow, picked over, and safe enough that the Guild sends Copper-rank parties down for practice. The Crown taxes everything brought up.

Things come out of it. Most are ordinary and dangerous. The ones that matter to this kingdom come out wearing a face that was walking around a fortnight ago.

The delve — what Ashenveil calls the whole business of going down — has been unusually quiet for three weeks, and nobody in the village thinks that is good news.

Quiet has happened before, twice in the records, and both times it ended with something coming up. Serath Bale is in the village on that account, treating it as a question about identity rather than a question about monsters, which has made him unpopular with everyone from the Guild chapter clerk to the innkeepers.

There is a Dungeon Warden's post in the royal establishment to oversee the taxing and the licensing, and it is unfilled. The last three wardens disappeared and the salary has been raised twice.

The forest itself is the older danger and the one locals actually respect. It is genuinely trackless off the Warden paths, it has taken parties that never went underground at all, and the wood elves' arrangement with the Crown is essentially that they will guide anybody who asks properly and nobody at all who does not.

Delving is a licensed trade and the Adventurers' Guild owns it. Delvers take contracts by rank — Copper, Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Mythril — and a delver may not take work above their own.

The Guild's term for a licensed group is an adventuring party. Outside the Guild people say a party of adventurers and mean the same thing. A delve is one descent under one contract, three days down and two back at an average.

Every party keeps a party word, asked at the mouth of the dungeon and again at the exit. The exit Asking is the one nobody jokes about: a party that went in six and comes out six has not thereby established that it came out the same six.

Three parties work Ashenveil, and not one of them is prospering. The Ironbound Three are at Iron rank and are badly short of money.

Their captain has begun taking contracts she would have turned down a year ago, and everybody at the chapter desk can see it. Sable Company is Gold, methodical, on the deep floors and saying nothing about them. The Hollow Seekers do not delve much; what they do is ask people strange questions.

The economics are worse than the stories suggest. The Guild takes a share, the Crown taxes the haul, the chapter house sells the rope and the lamp oil, and a middling party clears about what a good mason clears with rather more of the mason's fingers left.

Delvers are the largest body of adults in the kingdom with no household word, which is why the Guild's own word matters so much to them.

The kingdom's polite word is shapechanger. Its common word is mimic, and it is not a polite word at all. Nobody knows how many shapechangers exist, and mimics are rarer in fact than in the ballads.

What is actually known is short. A shapechanger can take a body's form. It cannot take the memory that goes with it, and never has. That one limit is what the Asking is built on: a perfect copy of a woman arrives at her own door and cannot answer the question her house settled eleven years ago.

The Flame reads flesh, so a worn shape cannot hold in Truthfire, and a copied scar on false flesh fails the rite however good it is. The Guild's registration binding catches a false form at the desk. Both answer the same question: whether a body is real.

Nothing in the kingdom answers whose body it is.

That is the gap the whole apparatus of proof exists to cover, and it is why shapechangers are a bureaucratic problem here rather than a military one. There is no patrol that finds them, no test at a gate, no ward on a street. There is a question at a door, asked by a servant, several times a day, forever.

The Inquisition's audits turn up ordinary human fraud a hundred times for every worn shape, which Serath Bale says in public and other Inquisitors wish he would not. The Church's private position is that the number is small. The Church's public liturgy assumes it is very large. Both have been in use for six generations.

The ones who are caught are the careless: a shape held too long, a habit performed correctly for the wrong reason, a memory a week too shallow. Nobody has any idea what the careful ones look like, and that is not a figure of speech.

There is a story about the deep floors, and the Guild will not put any of it into writing.

The story is that something rules down there. It has a name in the telling — the Hollow King — and a seat, the Hollow Throne, and in the version that has been going around Ashenveil for two years it has a human name as well: Aldric Voss, said to have been a delver who went down and came back up as something else.

Nobody has produced a body, a witness who was asked afterwards, or a Guild report. Sable Company works the deep floors and says nothing in either direction, which the taverns read as confirmation and the Guild calls professionalism.

The Church's position is that the story is nonsense and its telling is heresy.

That ruling has made it considerably more popular, in the way such rulings do. It is now told with a wink in every inn on the high road, and the Hollow Seekers are widely assumed to be looking for it, on the strength of their name and nothing else.

What is documented is thinner and stranger. Three Dungeon Wardens have disappeared in eleven years, each after going down further than the post required. Two parties in the last decade came up short of members and gave accounts that did not agree with each other. And the dungeon's quiet spells, of which the current one is the third recorded, have each preceded something coming up.

Serath Bale's interest is not in the throne. He has said, to a Guild clerk who repeated it, that a story about a king below is a very convenient thing for anybody who would rather people did not think about who came back up.

What people believe about mimics is more lurid than anything the Inquisition has recorded, and the gap is where the harm lives.

The folk belief is that they eat a person to become them, that they cannot cross a threshold uninvited, cannot say the name of the Flame, and that there is one in every great household. None of it appears in any Church record. The ballads say monsters; the street says monster, not human, inhuman, and in practice they are used about frightened human servants far more often than anything else.

A house that genuinely suspects does not scream. It changes its word and re-admits its people one at a time. The phrase for the fear is a creature in the house.

A real witch-hunt is rare, local and almost always wrong, and nine times in ten nobody outside ever hears of it.

The pattern of the rare ones is dismally consistent. Somebody was away when they should not have been, somebody else remembers them differently, and within two days a servant with no household to fall back on is in a cell or worse. The Church intervenes when it can and arrives late by construction, since a parish priest hears about it after the district does.

The Inquisition's own line, stated flatly in its audits, is that the kingdom's proofs are far worse than anybody admits and that most of what an audit turns up is ordinary human fraud — a sold word, a bought vouching, a corrupt attestor. This is repeated in temples and believed by almost nobody, because it is a great deal less interesting than the alternative.

Magic is real in Valdenmoor, uncommon and very expensive. Perhaps one person in four hundred can work any at all, and most of those do very little.

Sorcerers train by apprenticeship or at one of three colleges, and the trade they mostly practise is unglamorous: light, heat, healing, a fair wind for a barge, a spell to keep grain dry. Practitioners speak of mana as a reservoir a body carries and refills slowly, which is why magical work is sold by the piece and never by the hour, and why a sorcerer who has had a hard morning is no use in the afternoon.

What no spell does is answer a name. There are arcane spells that unpick an illusion, that find a place the caster already knows, that report a body is not shaped the way flesh is shaped.

There is none anywhere that says who somebody is.

The colleges stopped pretending otherwise about a century ago, after a run of confident testimony that the Assize eventually stopped admitting. Their current formulation, taught to every apprentice, is that magic acts on things and identity is not a thing — it is an agreement among people about a history, and no agreement has a shape a spell can take hold of.

The Church would put it differently and reach the same place. The Flame proves a body, not a name; the colleges prove a shape, not a name; and the Asking proves a history, which is the only one of the three that anybody ever wanted.

Magic is also expensive enough that it barely features in ordinary proof. A Crown household spends more on its attestor in a year than on every magical service it will ever buy. Spells are for cargo, crops, wounds and war.

Detection in Valdenmoor answers one question well and another not at all, and almost everybody who buys it has the two confused.

Wards are the common form. A good ward reacts to a shape laid over a thing — an illusion, a glamour, a light in the shape of a man — and does nothing whatever about a body that has genuinely been made into that shape. A warded door is therefore worth a great deal less than the people who pay for it believe.

The Truth Lens is the Guild's tool, carried at Silver rank and above, and it reveals an illusion for what it is. It is constantly mistaken for a proof of identity. It is not one.

Scrying finds places and objects the scryer already knows, and a truth spell reads speech, which is the weakest evidence this kingdom has. Neither one of them says who anybody is.

A scryer given a name and nothing else will report an honest failure, and one who reports success is selling something. A truth spell, even a working one, tells you only that the speaker believes what they are saying, which is exactly the case that matters least here; the Assize stopped admitting them within living memory and the magistrates followed.

So the practical detection stack has three rungs and careful people use all three: blessed silver and consecrated ground, for a discomfort that proves nothing; wards, for illusion; and the Rite of True Name, for flesh. Then an Asking, because none of the three has said who anybody is.

The sorcerers who fit wards say all of this in writing, to every client, and are not listened to.

The dead do walk near Ashenveil. Not often, not far, and not in the Crown within living memory, but often enough that graveyards are consecrated as a matter of routine rather than of piety.

A revenant is a corpse upright and moving with nothing in it that could be called a person. Revenants are slow, single-minded and stupid, and two watchmen with staves can put one down without much drama. What matters is that graves within a day of the forest do not reliably stay quiet, so Ashenveil village pays for grave-watching through the winter and has done for two hundred years. Corpses in the Vale are burned about as often as they are buried.

The undead are not the worst of it. The identity problem is.

A corpse cannot be asked and cannot be vouched for, and there is no remedy for that anywhere.

A family that cannot produce a body cannot easily prove a death, so an estate goes to the courts' standing remedy — held a year and a day, claimants asked by the court's own attestor, the residue to the Crown — while the heirs eat the capital. Half the probate cases in the Vale are somebody who did not come back out of the forest.

That also makes a fresh corpse worth money to the wrong trades. Not for what the dead can do, but for what a death that nobody can prove leaves open behind it. Grave-watchers are hired by parishes and paid by solicitors as often as not, and everybody involved is polite about the reason.

The Church holds that the Flame settles the dead and that a consecrated grave is a kindness rather than a precaution. In Ashenveil village they consecrate the graves and hire the watchers.

Five things move in Valdenmoor whether or not anybody is watching, and none waits.

• The Inquisition is walking. Serath Bale holds the eastern circuit, Ashenveil to the Crown, a season to walk, and he is three weeks into it.
• The season is turning. Harvest is in, and the weeks after it are when houses settle accounts and change their words.
• An attestor is under investigation somewhere. The Roll is audited yearly and no year has passed without a scandal.
• Shapechangers work the same cities as everybody else. Nobody knows how many. Every few months one is careless and a district is ugly for a fortnight.
• The petitioners' book moves. Months deep everywhere, a year in the Crown, and places near its front are quietly sold.

The talk in the city is mostly these five rumours in some order.

Each has a timescale, and each arrives whether anybody acts or not. The circuit reaches the next town in a fortnight regardless. The changing season closes at the turn of the year regardless. The Roll's audit is finished and published in the spring regardless, and the name in it belongs to somebody's attestor.

The two that touch individual people fastest are the last two. A careless shapechanger somewhere in the district means a week of doors opened on a chain, servants asked twice, and watchmen in a bad temper — none of it aimed at anybody in particular. And a place near the front of the petitioners' book changing hands means somebody's inheritance moved and somebody else's did not.

None of this is anybody's plan. It is the kingdom running, which it does at its own pace, in the middle of whatever else is happening.

Harvest ends at the feast of Harvestend, and the eight or nine weeks after harvest are the changing season. It closes at the turn of the year, when the roads go bad and everything stops until spring.

Three things happen at once. Accounts are settled, so houses learn who has been stealing. Hiring fairs are held in every market town, so servants leave and arrive in numbers. And the year's deaths in a farming district are counted up.

All three are reasons to change a word, so most of the kingdom's changings fall in the same two months, and every house knows it and does it anyway.

The consequences are predictable and happen every year regardless. Attestors are booked solid from Harvestend and raise their fees without apology.

The good ones in Alderhouse stop taking new clients altogether. The roads fill with people going to hiring fairs and with servants who have just been let go. The Guild sees a rush of applicants with no household. And in every town, some number of people come back from somewhere at exactly the wrong moment and stand at a door they have lived behind for years with the wrong answer in their mouth.

The Church's charity houses take their year's intake in these weeks and plan for it. So do the forgery trades: a stolen word is never worth less than it is in the first fortnight after Harvestend, because half the doors in the kingdom have just changed their locks.

Great houses change in this season too, and House Mourne is known to send people out to the Vale for it. Nobody has ever been able to say what they are collecting, and the timing is not a coincidence anybody in Alderhouse believes in.

Anybody looking for work in the Crown can find some, and the honest sort is easier to find than the stories suggest.

• Alderhouse attestors need couriers constantly and pay well for one who can carry a sealed keeping between offices and be asked at both ends.
• The Ironbound Three are up at Ashenveil and need money badly. They have been asking after a fourth for a month and stopped being particular about anything but rank.
• Lamplow landlords hire men to sit at a door and ask. A tenement of forty rooms cannot be a household, and its owner is liable anyway.
• The temple at Ashenveil village pays for grave-watching by the night, all winter, and never has enough takers.
• Solicitors pay finder's fees for heirs who can be produced and asked, and the Vale is full of estates nobody has claimed.

The work with real money in it is all the same work: standing between two parties who cannot prove themselves to each other.

That is the whole shape of employment in this kingdom. Somebody needs to be believed and cannot be, or needs somebody else checked and cannot do it himself. The respectable version is an attestor's clerk. The middling version is a courier, a witness, a hired asker at a door. The disreputable version is finding out a word for a man who wants one, and it pays better than the other two put together.

Less obvious work, all of it real: witnessing changings in villages that cannot afford an attestor; walking a petitioner to the temple and back so nobody sells their place in the book; sitting with a dying man so a lodged word can be sworn to; and carrying a letter that must arrive unopened between two houses that have not spoken in a decade.

This page is for the reader, not the model. It has no keywords, so it renders here and never reaches a scene.

These are the things this world deliberately does not answer. Every one of them is a place a card, a session or a fork can put something, and nothing written anywhere else in this world contradicts whatever you decide.

• How many shapechangers there are. Every institution here is built as though the answer were "a great many". Nothing states it. The Church's public liturgy and its private position disagree, and both have been in use for six generations.

• Whether the Rite of True Name is honest. The Church holds that the Flame reads a body and cannot be deceived. Nothing in this world confirms that from outside the Church, and the Church has never permitted an outside test.

• Who first proposed the Asking, and what the six generations before it were like. The rule is always dated and never explained.

• Whether House Mourne keeps a written record of other people's words. The rumour is old, specific and persistent. Mourne has never troubled to deny it, which is either a denial too proud to make or an answer.

• What the dungeon is, who cut it, and whether there is a Hollow King at the bottom of it. Three Dungeon Wardens have disappeared. The current quiet is the third on record and the two before it ended the same way.

• Why the delve has gone quiet this time.

• What became of the Lost Clan's remedy. Four generations of a clan's descendants are unhoused as a matter of law, the clans will not invent a way back, and nobody has tested it in a Crown court.

• Who King Edran's heir is. The King is old, the claim will be settled on proofs rather than swords, and all three great houses have reached that conclusion independently.

• Whether an unhoused person has any remedy at all. The magistrates have declined to interfere in the private act of a private household four times in a century. There has never been a fifth attempt.

• What a shapechanger actually is — where they come from, whether they are born or made, whether they can be more than one thing at a time, and what one of them wants. The kingdom has no idea. This world takes no position, because the card sitting on top of it should.

The rest is yours. Move the capital, drain the Verrow, decide the Roll was sold twenty years ago and nobody has checked since, give Serath Bale a second circuit or a conscience or a secret. Forking is on.