The Snaglings

The Snaglings trade with those they take in as kin — Bolas, Catch Bundles, ore concentrate and opaline, Reckoner Records and Flux Pebbles — and let their kin into the Catch Heap in the middle of the camp. They pay and take not in emeralds but in craving: each band craves one Spring, and only things carrying that Spring are worth anything to it. The Loupe over a Snagling names its band's craving, and the beads on its ears glow its color.

How to become kin: bring the band gifts to its craving — drop a thing nearby (they will pick it up) or hand it over. A gift is worth the number of the craved Spring in the thing's currents, for the whole stack: Tide 2 for a cod, Ember 3 for coal, Strata 2 for cobblestone, Gale 1 for bamboo. The band takes you in for 32 of its craving; twice that while it holds a grudge, half with a Kin Knot in your inventory — the first band to take you in gives you one. From your hand a Snagling takes only what carries the craving, but from the ground it picks up anything, so mind what you drop. The band pours back at your feet whatever it took from you that was not a gift, and never touches your things again.

Grudges: strike a Snagling, kill one, or open or break the Catch Heap as a stranger, and the whole band around holds a grudge for 10 minutes, 20 for a killing. A band with a grudge fights. A Gleaner's hook snatches one thing from the stack in your hand and it runs — catch it and strike it, and it drops it. A Charmer ties a knot over your hand: switch the slot and the knot has nothing to hold, or the thing slips out toward it. A Snarer whirls Bolas over its head — step aside or into cover: Bolas slow you for 2.5 seconds and stop you jumping. The band never touches its kin.

Trade: for kin, a right click opens trade, and each kind has its own goods. The Gleaner — with a huge creel and a hook pole — sells what the river brings: Silt, ore concentrate, opaline, glint wisps, Catch Bundles, Records and a Flux Pebble. The Charmer — in a tall twisted cap, with a rattle — sells the Knotted Cord (the Reckoners' knot-script came from the Snaglings), Current Seeds, Bloom Tonic and glow ink. The Snarer — in a bark mask — sells Bolas, a Ford Wolf Tuft, a rabbit's foot, spectral arrows and a Pike Pole. The stock comes back by dawn. They take payment in things carrying the craved Spring: the costly goods in shards of that Spring.

The peddler: every three to five days by day a Snagling Peddler comes out to you on his own — under a creel taller than his head, in a wide straw hat, with a staff, and a laden Driftback on a lead behind him. He is the only one of his folk who trades with strangers, without gifts: saplings and herbs of distant places, one rare find (a Current Hank, Glowsilk, Catch Bundles) and one map to a ruin — a Snagling camp, a Reckoner Lock or a Fallen Gauge Stone, marked with a red cross as a cartographer's map is. He takes things carrying his craved Spring (the Loupe names it under his name), the costly goods in shards; with a Kin Knot in your inventory, at half price. His stock does not come back. He stays a day where he came out and slips away into the reeds; strike him and he takes offense and leaves at once.

Where to look: the Snaglings' home is the Rustling Fens, where most of them live; wandering bands of two to four also walk the Weeping Floodplain, jungles, swamps and mushroom fields by day, but never a murky chunk — murk is a catch gone bad to them. Snagling camps stand in clearings: three shelters, a catch pole with lanterns, a fire, and in the middle the Catch Heap, the band's hoard, which opens like a chest for kin. Camp dwellers do not stray far from it.

In the Rustling Fens stand the Snaglings' stiltholds, and there is all you need for a hut of your own: Osier Rods cut with shears from the heads of pollard osiers (they grow back in the light) for the Wicker Block, Wicker Mat, Wattle Fence and Wicker Lantern; Tall Sedge for Reed Thatch; lightrush, whose fluff smolders with light; peat for fuel; bog oak, a black wood found only in the world; pebblework from the shoals. The fens are a delta where the mangrove swamps were, where flux runs thick and wild; whatever broke off upstream settles here in the reeds. The stiltholds stand over the channels on bog-oak stilts, the Catch Heap on a deck. The Reckoners measured the fens with weirs, and the Snaglings took them apart for stone — by a dismantled weir a coffer still lies under the water.

"What flows is no one's," the Snaglings say. Everything in the world is a current gone still, and everything chips off: a splinter, a feather, a fish, a dropped thing — a current drifting to whoever catches it. The Snaglings took against the Reckoners, who came to measure the currents: what is measured is no longer a catch, it has an owner. Thieves they call only the Tollkeepers, who take a share of every current. And the Snaglings' fearful tale is the Stillness, where nothing drifts and there is nothing to catch.