Nursery-Water Sickness

Overview

Nursery-water sickness is what the Kavari fear for their young. A grown Kavari bears a winter tributary without complaint, but the young in the gravel beds die of small changes that an outsider would not notice: a little more warmth, a little more silt. Every nursery custodian learns to read for it, and much of Kavari nursery custom, including the closing of a channel to passing runs wherever the Kavari can hold it, rests on it.

Cause

Kavari young are born in the water and nursed for a season in their mother's nursery pool; after that they grow in cold, clean, moving water over gravel, and need it to stay that way. Silt from a flood, from a slumped bank, or from gravel churned by many passing bodies settles in the beds and smothers them. Water that warms in a low summer, or stills because a cold inlet is choked or a rootbank has grown over the flow, grows stale around them. The young weaken, and weak young take the rots and fouling of still water. Nothing else is needed. The Kavari know these causes better than most peoples know the causes of their sicknesses, because they can see the water.

Who It Strikes

Only Kavari young in nursery water are struck. Grown Kavari are not, and neither are the young of other peoples. Thaluren clutches held near the braids suffer their own dangers of water, and their eggs have the Egg Blight, which is another matter.

Signs and Course

A custodian sees it first in the water: cloudy over the beds, warmer at the hand, slow at the inlet. Then the young grow sluggish and keep to the bottom, stop feeding, and lie still where they would dart. A grey film may form on the skin of the weakest. If the water is put right within a day or two, most recover. If it is not, they die over a few days, and the dead foul the bed further for those who are left.

Contagion

The young do not pass it to one another. A failing water takes all of them together, and a dead bed left uncleaned fouls the water below it.

Treatment and Its Limits

The cure is the water. Custodians turn and clean the gravel after a flood, clear the cold inlets, trim the rootbanks so that shelter does not choke the flow, and shade the beds in a hot season. Where one bed is failing, they move the young to a sound one, and where many channels are under strain they close them all to passage. No healing working is spent on a whole bed of young; the custodians' work is cheaper and does more.

Mortality

A single bad day seldom kills. A flood season or a hot, low summer can take most of a bed, and a broken nursery can take generations to restore. Young who recover grow on without lasting harm.

Lore and Belief

Kavari households keep small shrines to the unnamed water-powers of their own pools and nursery reaches, and a bed that fails is said to be a water that has drawn back. Custodians count a bed lost to passage as harm done by whoever passed, and a debt that lasts for generations.

In the Medieval Era

The sickness stands behind much of the custom of the Tidebound Reaches. At the Gravelbraid Nurseries the custodians of the Bankright Circles watch the cold inlets for the small changes in warmth or silt that can kill young, and in a season of high sediment and unstable inlets they may close whole side channels to Thaluren passage. Whether such a broad closure guards the young or merely blocks the runs is argued under the custom of the Late-Closure Terms (c. 147,000-c. 146,000 BR).

Where It Appears

• The Gravelbraid Nurseries (the medieval present)
• The Late-Closure Terms - rough date range: c. 147,000-c. 146,000 BR (the broad closure)
• Kavari
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea