The Second-Channel Feud

Overview

The first great Thaluren feud over a turned-aside run came after The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence.

It was fought over The Second Channel, a spawning water inside The Tidebound Reaches that took in redirected clutches after the oldest confluence was poisoned. It set The Blightward Keepers and The Open-Run Concords against each other in earnest for the first time: could a new water be accepted before the poisoned source had been answered for?

The New Water

The Second Channel begins as a desperate refuge, not a proud new sanctuary.

After the clutches failed and the First Nesting Confluence was closed, some run-watchers and sea-settlement speakers began sending clutches into a lesser channel farther along the return. It was too young to be holy by memory, but it was clean, sheltered, and the young lived. Families began to treat it as more than a stopgap.

That success started the feud. The Open-Run settlements said that young who live under watchful eyes are no lesser return. If clutches live, if their descent can be sworn to, and if the route is remembered openly, return has not been broken. It has moved.

Blood in the Channels

The feud was fought in the water. Blightward bands blocked the approaches to the Second Channel and drove clutch-bearers back towards the sea; Open-Run escorts broke the blocks by force. Runs on both sides lost clutches to the fighting as well as to the blight, and egg-takers fed well on the beds that were left unguarded while the guards fought. Thaluren laments of these years tell of an escort who held a narrows alone against a Blightward band until the clutch-bearers behind her were through, and of a Blightward keeper who swam the whole length of the channel naming the dead of the old confluence aloud, with spears around her, and was let pass. The feud left its haunts. The narrows where the hardest fighting fell are still swum in silence, and Open-Run escorts say that on the climbing tide a second escort keeps pace beside the living one there, the way the Unreturned keep pace on the far roads.

The Bargain at the Channel

The bargain that ended the fighting did not make the Second Channel equal to the First Nesting Confluence.

The Open-Run settlements held the channel and kept it. The Blightward side could not take it, but it could make the channels bloody every season, and that bought it terms. The channel is accepted only on sufferance, and only while four conditions hold, sworn again at every after-season gathering: the gathering itself, a count of the clutches that survive, a named tie to the poisoned source, and a lasting debt of care towards the closed water that made the turning-aside necessary. Full acceptance is never given. The channels stay dangerous: raiders still cut the nets now and then, and every escort who swims the Second Channel's approaches carries a spear.

Historical Significance

The Second-Channel Feud turned the split after the closure into a bargain both sides still invoke. Before it, Blightward guarding and Open-Run redirection were two instincts after a disaster. After it, each side has words to fight with: the Blightward debt of memory, the Open-Run claim that a water that keeps the young alive must be accepted on sufferance.

Later quarrels over tributaries, estuaries, lesser sanctuaries, and shared waters start from the old bargain rather than from shock each time. Its next great test comes in The Gravel Oath Accord, when a turned-aside run meets water the Kavari already live in. It also explains why outward-facing contact in The Estuary Terms already treats every kind of return-water as a matter of blood and honour.