Five families raise nearly every practitioner in the Dominion. Each holds a region and has a job the others acknowledge, and each trains its children differently enough that you can usually tell where someone came from within the hour. They govern by tradition, seldom by decree. You'll find no villain or hero among them, and anyone who tells you otherwise belongs to one of the other four.

Vaulin · the Turtle-Groves · Provide

Forests growing on the backs of creatures big enough to carry them, moving slowly across the west.

Vaulin feeds the Dominion. They supply Heartwood, medicine, resins, and most of what the other four Houses build with. They train by watching, and they'll watch a child for six years before deciding anything, and the other Houses have never agreed whether that's wisdom or dawdling.

Dealing with them. They're slow and warm, and the unhurried manner is real. Pushing them gets you nowhere, and they take it badly. If you need something from Vaulin, arrive early and expect to eat with people first.

Sablemire · the Lowlands · Inform

Bayou, river delta and mist in the south, where the channels serve as roads.

Sablemire knows things before anyone else does and sells what it knows, quite openly. Every child is trained identically, on purpose, so that two operatives who have never met can work together in the dark without a word.

Dealing with them. They're direct and unsentimental, and quicker than you'll expect. They'll name the price straight away and won't dress the deal up as friendship. A number of people have told me they find that refreshing, and about as many have told me it unnerves them.

Ironvale · the Chiming Snow · Protect

Crystal falls out of the sky and rings without pause, from every direction at once. Ironvale lives there by choice and has for a very long time.

They hold the frontier. Two or three times a year something comes down off the void-touched edge, and Ironvale deals with it. They train children by pushing them up against difficulty, where Vaulin would sit and watch. They aim high and miss more often than any other House, and reckon the misses worth it.

Dealing with them. They're blunt and cheerful, and they'll answer a question the first time you ask it. Of the five they have the least interest in seeming mysterious. If someone from Ironvale tells you a thing is dangerous, believe them, because they grade on a harsh curve.

Saltmarch · the Shimmering Expanse · Connect

Desert where reality wears thin, and where a mirage sometimes turns out to be something more. Saltmarch crosses it for a living.

They carry messages, goods and people across a dominion that would otherwise be a scatter of regions out of touch with one another. Their couriers are bound by a Code about what they carry and whether it's true.

Dealing with them. They're charming and playful, and a good deal more precise than the charm lets on. They love a conversation and they'll still deliver exactly what was agreed. To them the joke and the accuracy sit together comfortably, and it takes outsiders a while to stop waiting for the catch.

Hollowglass · the Whispering Deep · Remember

Caverns of memory-stone beneath the central basin, with entrances scattered across the surface.

They keep records, and those records reach back further than the Houses themselves. They train by measuring a child under controlled conditions for the best part of a year, which gives them the lowest failure rate of the five and, as they admit themselves, the fewest surprises.

Dealing with them. They're generous with detail and far more forthcoming than their reputation would have you believe. What they won't do is narrow an answer, and when they're declining to, they'll tell you so outright instead of pretending ignorance. That difference matters enormously to them.

How they actually govern

There's no Vaulin law and no Ironvale magistrate. What a House has is a region it's understood to hold, a body of doctrine its people grow up in, and centuries of everyone else behaving as though that's settled. Disputes between Houses get settled by precedent, and failing that by letters with long silences between them. I've never come across a single case of one House giving another an order.

The Crown sits above all five, and the arrangement is older than anyone now alive.

What this does to the Boundary Lands

A Boundary Lands district near a House is thoroughly shaped by it, without any formal contact at all.

Nobody in those parishes is Vaulin or Ironvale. They pay the Houses nothing, answer to them for nothing, and mostly haven't laid eyes on one in years. Even so, the villages west of the Groves plant by Vaulin's calendar and talk about patience the way Vaulin does. The holdings south of the Chiming Snow keep a winter duty rota and would be baffled to hear it's an Ironvale habit. Districts near the Expanse take a person's word more seriously than districts elsewhere, and can't tell you why.

It's proximity, worked over centuries, and it gives the map of the Dominion five soft edges where you'd expect hard ones.

A caution

You'll read those five descriptions and pick a favourite, as everyone does. I'd ask you to hold it loosely.

Every one of these Houses has produced people I'd trust with anything I own, and every one has produced people I've turned down for a second interview. They disagree with one another constantly and in good faith, about old, real things that won't ever be settled, and each of them is right about something the others haven't properly thought through.