Aethras Kingdom

The crimson griffon¶

Aethrassia is a court before it is a country. Land, office, judgement and pardon all move through the same chancery at Vaurmont, and every one of them has a price a careful man can learn.

Knighthood is purchased. A magistrate's verdict is purchased. A governorship overseas is purchased, though the seller prefers the word granted. Chivalry survives as an aesthetic, observed scrupulously at tournament and abandoned without embarrassment at the counting table, and Aethrassians are not hypocrites about this so much as bored by the accusation. Everyone knows. Knowing is not the same as having an alternative.

None of it makes the kingdom weak. It makes it liquid. Aethrassia can raise an army faster than any realm in the settled world, because every debt owed to the crown is a soldier who has already been paid for.

Go, and be worth what you cost us.

Chancery formula, spoken at the granting of a colonial charter

Who actually sails¶

The men Vaurmont sends overseas are, with very few exceptions, men who could not afford to stay.

A colonial charter is the cheapest title the chancery sells, and it is sold to the sons of houses that have run out of room: third heirs, ruined creditors, officers whose regiments were disbanded under a cloud. They buy a governorship on credit, against the yield of a place they have never seen, and they arrive owing the crown more than the settlement will earn in a decade.

This produces the characteristic Aethrassian colony. Well supplied, well documented, closely watched, and run by a man whose personal solvency depends on the harvest, which is a form of motivation the other powers have never quite been able to counterfeit.

Why the old victories still matter¶

The griffon on the banner is genuinely old and the battles under it genuinely happened. That history is not decoration, it is working capital.

A charter sealed in Aethrassia arrives overseas carrying the assumption of victory, and assumptions of victory win skirmishes that were never fought. Envoys who would haggle with Lyaud for a month settle with an Aethrassian in an afternoon, on worse terms, because somewhere behind the seal is a field four centuries old that everyone's grandfather knew the name of.

The crown is entirely aware of what it is spending. There is a standing chancery office whose whole function is the maintenance of that reputation, and its budget is larger than the navy's.

The same building prices everything else, too. What it once cost to keep one starving province quiet for a year, worked out on paper and ruled and totalled, is in The Rule of Grenave.

The feud that came with the seal¶

Aethrassia stands eighty points below neutral with the Sintari, and it did not get there by accident or by principle. It got there by a specific sequence of chancery decisions about the halfling question, taken over three generations by men who each considered themselves to be tidying up after his predecessor.

The kingdom's position today is that the matter is closed. The Sintari's position is that it is a schedule. A governor inherits both positions with the seal, and neither cares in the slightest what he personally thinks about it.

Governing under this flag¶

Well supplied, closely watched. Crown mandates arrive often, reward promptly, and are recorded permanently, and the record is read by people who will still be reading it after you are dead.

The support is real and so is the debt. Aethrassia does not abandon its colonies, because a colony is collateral, and collateral is not abandoned. It is foreclosed on.

What that pressure does to a careful man is set out, column by column, in The Yield at Bruchen Vale.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.