The cradle has two famous answers to peoples who come of age on different clocks, and neither satisfies anyone completely. In the Headwater Marches young people swear twice, working right at the settlement gate and, years later, oath-right. On the Lower Serath the Oath of Layers gives Protection to everyone a town takes in, Stewardship to many, and the full oath to fewer, most of them the rich. Wherever Humans and Dwarves share a hall they argue the age of binding: Human custom names a child within days and expects it to count early, and Dwarven and Elven neighbours think that premature. Human families ask why their children should wait on another people’s clock; their neighbours ask why Humans let anyone swear so young.

The thresholds bite hardest at the moment someone must swear: a marcher lord’s fosterling heir who holds working right but not oath-right when the dying lord’s valley needs an oath, or a Reedfolk pilot house asking Pellith’s great houses for the full oath by the Oath of Layers' own logic, and so for the right to swear guarantees on the river (both are told in The Basins and the Marches).

Elven reckoning adds its own delay. Human-Elf children are named early in Human and frontier towns, then counted slowly, unevenly, and sometimes never by their Elven kin, and whose reckoning decides a mixed adult’s inheritance is settled place by place, usually by whoever holds the house. In the Crownboughs the place of Human-High Elf children is settled house by house, and the old Heir Controversy, with its poisoned milk and its guardians who never slept, is remembered as a warning. A girl of an embassy household has reached the age at which her Human father’s town would name her and count her among its people; her High Elf kin, and the tender they consult, say she is not yet ready; the embassy’s scribe is ready to write the name down, and the seat in charge would rather nothing were written at all.

Where a place is granted on paper, it can be torn up. The Goblin Iron Compacts hold their ground because they are needed and armed, and a lord’s warrant marks the bargain: holding a road outlaws prey on, keeping a ruin and whatever lives in it from spilling onto a town, watching a ford by night. Any lord who wants a ruin stripped can take back the warrant of the compact keeping it, and every taking-back drives a warren into hiding. The Compacts have never agreed whether to plead with the lord, fight, or quietly shelter the people it displaces. This spring a lord’s clearance gang went into a warrened storework and only half of it came out; the lord is hiring sellswords, and the warren has sent to every other warren on the circuit.

Behind every warrant stand three older losses, seams taken in the Enclosure, warrants struck in the Unlisting, ruins taken under the waste-ground doctrine, and no hall honours a claim older than its own holders. The Underwall households in the Dwarven holds keep naming theirs anyway. One has learned that its hold means to widen the seam it has lived in since the Enclosure, and has asked an Iron Compact to stand with it while it demands gap-right of hold-elders who have never heard of such a thing and will heed it only if refusing would cost more than listening. Hobgoblin spears have been seen in the service passages, and the wardens have begun to carry theirs below.

The written word fails in plainer ways too. Records are always being lost, so careful scribes keep a second copy somewhere else, and when an oath-house’s entry and a family’s second copy disagree, both sides hold a sworn text, and the side with more friends and more spears usually keeps the field. When a record-house fire in the basins took the only boundary roll for a whole valley, the one memory of those boundaries left was the Reedfolk flood-roll, spoken and never written, and two lords are riding the old line with armed men (The Basins and the Marches). Under that quarrel lies an older grudge. It runs under the whole cradle: the oath-craft of the river towns came by way of Reedfolk house custom from the archive-law keepers, and Reedfolk houses hold that much of what the towns swear by was theirs first. Some scribes know it. Fewer say it.

The Wrought are the youngest people to be accepted as people, and acceptance is uneven, and its edges are where the fights are. Uncertified frames sit at the blurred edge between object and person: the Mending Orders hold a Wrought to be the same person through any repair, but no custom says what is owed to a frame whose waking nobody saw. Each frame found upright in a sealed working of the Stonewake is old metal to the delver, hold property to the hold above, and perhaps a person left behind to the Wrought, who have begun sending their own people down to reach the frames first (Stone and the Deep). A delver who finds one still on its feet in the dark decides alone, and quickly.

The far side keeps its own version of the question. The Human hamlets of the Tidelace live under the sounding houses' harbour rule and have no hand in making it; they have no Accord to bring to it and no memory of any other order. Counted, as the coast puts it, but not consulted, and a hamlet whose cove a tide hall has closed for resurvey while the fish are running has no seat in the tide hall to say so (The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads). Whether the hamlets will be drawn further in, as wards and families of the sounding houses, or keep their weather-lore and the little say they have apart from it, is undecided.

At Greyford, where the Broken Marches meet the Headwater Marches, the Greyspan is failing while the river shifts around it, and the quarrel over it is told in The Basins and the Marches: Highbank’s lords take the toll, Lowbank does more and more of the work, and the lord’s Greyspan Toll Quarrel meets Lowbank’s Maintenance Reckoning, if Highbank takes the money, Highbank owes the bridge.

The quarrel reaches far beyond one valley. Underneath it lies a question both banks have found it safer not to ask: whether Lowbank stands on a lord’s ground or on waste. Meanwhile a raider band works the side fords, a salvage crew is hiring sellswords against the night it goes under the third pier, and the rival crossings up and down the river gain for as long as the Hearing runs.

Across the cradle-web the same question is asked of older works. A Troll bridge fee may be robbery, or the pay of the people who keep the road from failing again; the Crossing-Oath Houses hold to the second, and back it with their bulk, though the road-keepers their oaths were sworn to withdrew a hundred and sixty thousand years ago. A caravan that has paid the Troll house at the Sallow crossing can still be turned back at a Thornbound hedge (The Forest Heartlands), and when a gate hold keeps its stretch of the Long Tread closed after the rockfall is cleared, the kindred whose kept culverts fail beyond the closure has only its keepright to set against the gate oath (Stone and the Deep). The hold has the wardens. The kindred has only its marks.

Older still are the colossal works, which the quarriers hold are theirs to use because no one has tended them in living memory, and the Giants hold are still bound by obligations that outlast their keepers' absence; now and then a quarrying crew on the high roads does not come back (Sealed and Silent Places). In the Broken Marches heirs of failed frontier settlements still arrive with old deeds to "abandoned" holdings and find Kindred keep-marks and Goblin households already there. The waste-ground argument cuts both ways: if the land was empty when their ancestors left it, it was empty for everyone. One heir has come with hired swords instead of a deed.

The far side asks the same question in its own forms, forced on the weaker side long ago and sworn ever since. On the Windscar a stronghold may narrow access to its water, but a sworn escorted party is still owed one of three answers, and every answer is argued on the ledge: a captain offered redirection across the Whetgap in the windy season calls it refusal dressed in Pact words, and the Oath Cistern’s count of what it can bear leaves out a sealed chamber nobody can explain (both are told in The Windscar). One night this season someone was caught at that seal with a pick.

On the Soundchain Roads the stations may close what they like as long as they say each closing aloud, and the escorts may add the closings up, for what little it gets them (The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads). The Lantern Reaches keep their good name by taking only light traffic, and every heavy convoy they decline goes on to Turnwater; Orc captains have begun to add the declined loads up, though nobody has yet called the Reaches' calm a closing aloud, because nobody wants to spoil the corridor’s best stretch. At Turnwater one kind of heavy load closed in the closure years is shut out again every season on reasons word for word those of the season before, and a captain has asked the Answerward officer whether a reason nobody looks at again is an answer or an echo. Everywhere on the far side, the line between a declared delay and a refusal with its reason missing is where the quarrel lives.

On the Serath a Reedfolk keeper’s memory is one voice among many, and weighs only what the keeper’s house can back it with. A barge sinks on a reach whose roll shows every repair written and sworn; the carrier says the roll is false, the guarantor says the river moved overnight, only a Reedfolk pilot can say which is true, and the great houses have never given a pilot’s word full weight against one of their own. They also hold that a guarantee is owed to League carriers first, and basin traders, who now carry much of the grain, ask why they pay the same dues for second place; some have begun calling on Ostrin. After a great flood two Reedfolk houses remember the same reach differently, and a Human town has already sworn a guarantee on one of the memories. Upstream League towns want new weirs for their mills, and their flood-keepers say the weirs will move a channel and drown ground the downstream towns think safe; the upstream towns are the richer, and Serovan, asked to settle it, would have to admit whose knowledge he needs. In the basins a march-town wants to embank a reach of the Reedmere for new fields, and the warning that the spring rise will go to the next village downstream is heard and ignored. The next village has begun sharpening its scythes. Those who keep the memory of Hesserin the Shattered Saint ask whether service was the price of surviving beside Human towns or the moment the houses gave the river away.

On the far side the question is everywhere water moves. In the Tidebound Reaches every redirected Thaluren return carries memory-debt towards the closed First Nesting Confluence, and only the Sanctuary Custodians may judge that water recoverable; until someone does, nobody can say whether the debts can end. At the Naming Reach an Open-Run circle has begun saying that the Second Channel has carried its debt long enough, and the young on both sides have started counting old killings again (The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea). The Gravel Oath taught the Thaluren to share a water with a resident people without settling whether a run may ever be refused a water it needs: Kavari councils hold that a dwelling-water’s closure is final, and back it with spears in the shallows, and Thaluren escorts hold that a burdened return is owed a say at the circle. At the Split Reed Mouth a channel kept closed without a reason given is, under the Estuary Terms, an offence of its own, and the Gnome pilots who hold the soundings can make an offence cost.

In the Leeward Folds the quarrel is over reserve. Hard years bring armed Orc escorts, travellers, and neighbouring folds to the cistern halls asking for more than a fold has declared it can spare; the askers call bounded hospitality an excuse, and the folds answer that a reserve opened for every real need is no reserve. An escort could take a fold’s terraces in an afternoon, and each hard year tests whether the memory of what a raided fold becomes is still stronger than hunger. With the cisterns falling for another year, the cistern halls are split over whether the long-cycle reserve is for now (The Leeward Folds). On the Rimward side Rakhal’s followers want the cisterns kept closed under forgotten reserve-right opened or broken, and one band has already broken a seal by night and found the cistern full of something other than water (The Windscar). And near some Tidelace river mouths the water is turning black and sour from something carried down from inland, and the hamlets that fish closest inshore are the first to haul up empty nets (The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads).

The deep past keeps its own gaps, and the peoples who might fill them each have reasons to share what they hold or not.

The named map is the cradle-web, the far side from the Windscar to the Tidelace and the Tidebound Reaches, the Glassbelt between them with the Hushvale at its cradle-facing edge, and the Unrun Sea off the far-side coasts. The rest of the planet, any other continents, polar lands, and climates not yet placed, is left unmapped, and the Unrun Sea’s unknown far shore keeps that room open. Other far-shore Humans may live on coasts nobody has charted; the Tidelace hamlets are only the ones known. Nothing below the lowest guaranteed town on the Serath is fixed either: whether the river reaches the sea through an estuary, spreads into further wet country, or does something else entirely is undecided.

The largest open space is the outcome of every quarrel above. The world describes how things stand in c. 1,350 CR. Nothing in it says whether the Greyspan falls, whether Lowbank wins its share and its say, whether the Second Channel’s debt is ever called paid, whether anyone opens the sealed chamber at the Oath Cistern or looks behind the Undrawn Seal, whether the Deep Stair’s bar is broken, or whether a Reedfolk house ever swears a guarantee on the river. Who wins is for the story to decide, and in this era it is usually decided by whoever turns up with the most spears, the best friends, or the nerve to go into the dark first.