The Verge Stair

The Verge Stair crosses the canopy-mountain threshold between The Ironspine and The Crownboughs. It is a stone stair of Dwarven building that climbs from an Ironspine gate hold to a gate grown by the High Elf Crownbough Courts, and it is the one place where the oldest rivalry between Elves and Dwarves stands face to face. Envoys of the courts and of the Ironspine Holds meet on its landing, and most of what passes between the two civilizations is handed across there.

Each region page describes the half its own people keep. Neither half explains itself: the stone and the gate were made to answer each other, and the landing where they meet belongs wholly to no one.

The stair climbs the flank of the last rock spur on the forest side of the mountains, where the outermost great trees of the Crownboughs stand close against the stone. It starts in the outer yard of the gate hold at the spur’s foot and rises in long dressed flights, walled on the drop side, to a landing level with the canopy. The stonework is plain, close-jointed, and heavy. By hold standards it is fine work. By court standards it was never finished.

The gate stands above the landing between two great trees whose limbs were trained, over more lifetimes than anyone counts, into posts, lintel, and leaves of living wood. Beyond it the first boughway runs into the canopy. The gate moves in wind as the trees do, and its roots have spread out across the top of the stair. The uppermost course of stone, which the Dwarves call the Root Course, now lies half under root, so the line where the stone half ends and the grown half begins can no longer be seen, only argued.

The landing is the top of the stone: a broad floor of dressed slabs, vaulted over the drop, with a long table-stone at its centre that both sides call the Laying Stone. A visitor from below swears gate oath to the hold’s wardens at the first step and climbs the whole stair in view of the gate. A visitor from above needs the leave of the court that holds the gate and steps out onto the landing level, having climbed nothing. By old custom either side may stand on the landing without the other’s leave. Neither goes further without it, and few ever ask.

The stone half belongs to the Ironspine gate holds, which keep it under the gate oaths of the Held Covenant, and in practice to the hold whose gate opens at the stair’s foot. Its wardens guard the flights, its masons keep them, and a Covenant custodian comes up to the landing whenever business is done there. The hold has sworn under Kerrund the Stone-Warden to keep the stair standing, and among the other holds its word weighs partly on whether it does.

The gate belongs to the court whose growth carries it, as every boughway in the Crownboughs belongs to the house or court that grew it. The court keeps it trained and pruned like one of its own halls, decides which envoys and goods may pass, and sends its own officers to every reception on the landing.

The users are few and senior. Envoys of the leading holds that speak for the Ironspine meet envoys of the courts. Hold traders bring up worked metal and dressed stone; court houses send down shaped wood, grafts, and seedlings, which are given and never sold. Almost no one else climbs the stair. Humans reach the courts by the basin road, and the Human traders who come to the gate hold from the foothill side are not taken up.

Exchange is seasonal. The stair opens in late spring, once the masons have reset what the winter loosened, and closes with the autumn storms, when the gate’s limbs move too much for anyone to trust the landing beneath them. On an exchange day both parties time their arrival with care, because whoever waits on the landing for the other is read as having come to ask.

Goods are set out on the Laying Stone, and every gift is weighed twice. The custodian records weight and worth, as at any hold bargain, and witnesses the terms under Kerrund’s question, will you hold? The court’s officers record rank: who laid first, how near the gate each party stood, and whether a gift came in the hands of a house of standing or a dependant. A bargain that satisfies one record and slights the other is ordinary, and both sides spend more care on the second record than they admit. Court envoys sometimes come out with their faces painted gold. The wardens have long since stopped remarking on it.

The courts take more Dwarven stone and metal up through the gate than they acknowledge, and they carry it through themselves, so that no Dwarf is ever seen passing the gate with a load.

For some years now the masons' spring resetting has not lasted the summer. The failure is worst in the upper flights and the Root Course, where the roots work between the joints, and the hold has begun hiring Kobold crews for the narrow work in the vaulting under the landing, on terms it does not discuss with the court.

No one can date the stair. Hold archives record it as Dwarven work older than the gate; court memory holds that the gate was grown first and the stair built up to meet it. In each telling, the other side came asking. What both accept is that the halves were made by rivals already judging each other, in the contest of refinement against structure described in The Courts of Stone and Canopy.

The stair’s oldest custom follows from that judgement. Neither side has ever dressed or finished the other’s half, because doing so would say aloud what each already believes: to the courts the stone is unfinished, and to the holds the gate is unsound. The rivalry has never been settled by conquest, and the stair is where it is carried on instead, one reception at a time.

When the courts later turned to the Human world in the Crownbough Embassies, they brought the same spirit but not the same footing. Human envoys are received below the canopy at the Understorey Courts, the receiving grounds on the basin side, and are seldom taken higher. Dwarven envoys are met level, at the top of their own stair. Courtiers call that courtesy; the holds call it the least the courts could do. Both readings belong to the Elder and Young thread.