The Tidelace Answering Custom

Overview

The Tidelace Answering Custom carried the hard lesson of the Answering Sound along the whole coast: a harbour that makes a party wait must say why, for how long, and whether the answer is really no.

After The Answering Sound Crisis, the Gaugeward Leagues and the escort-bands of the Windscar Pacts stop arguing over one storm season. The leading harbours carry the settlement from roadstead to roadstead, and the smaller harbours take it because they must.

Every Shore a Sound

The settlement at the Sound said who had been more honest there. It did not say how any other harbour should make a party wait.

Three Plain Answers

A harbour may still delay, hold, send a party elsewhere, or refuse inner entry. What it may no longer do is leave the party guessing which.

First comes the declared outer answer: the harbour says whether it is holding the party, supplying it, sending it on, piloting it in, or refusing it. Then comes bounded delay: a party kept waiting must be told why and on what day the answer will be given again. Last comes truthful refusal or truthful admission: in the end the harbour must either admit that it will not take the party in, or let it in once the reasons for keeping it out are gone.

Who Keeps It

The custom holds because both sides can still hurt each other. A harbour that breaks it finds convoys going to its rivals and burned beacons on its headlands; an escort-band that defies a plain answer is treated as a war-band, and finds every harbour on the coast shut to it for a season. The custom later gains a keeper of its own in The Answerward Pilotage, the order of pilots that carries one word from harbour to harbour.

Historical Significance

The Answering Custom turns one bloody settlement into the way the whole Tidelace speaks to strangers. Later memory counts the coast grown-up not because it made itself safe, but because it learned to say its dangers aloud where outsiders could judge them.