The Understorey Courts

Overview

The Understorey Courts are the terraced receiving grounds at the foot of the canopy on the basin-facing edge of The Crownboughs. The embassy road from the forest edge of The Confluence Basins ends here, and for most Humans so does the High Elf world. Envoys, traders, and supplicants are received on these terraces, often for seasons at a time, and few are ever taken up into the trees.

The border between canopy and basin is drawn in rank rather than ground, running where the High Elves stop meeting visitors and start receiving them. These terraces are the one stretch of it with a floor. Most of what Humans believe about High Elves, and much of what the canopy believes about Humans, was learned here, at a height the canopy chose.

The Place

The embassy road is the first danger. For days it runs through ordinary woodland where grey wolves follow lone walkers in hard winters and outlaw bands wait for envoys coming home with Crownbough gifts; a graft or a gold-painted mask is worth more in a basin market than a farm. For its last stretch the road leaves the wild wood and runs through the cleared and planted understorey the canopy keeps beneath its trees: orchard rows, herb beds, swept paths. Ahead the ground rises in broad terraces edged with trained roots, stepping up towards the trunks of the great trees. Far above, the galleries and garden-walks of the canopy are plainly visible and out of reach.

Keepers and Users

The grounds belong to the great seats of the Crownbough Courts in common rather than to any one of them. The keeping passes from seat to seat in turn, and the seat holding it keeps order with its own wardens, gives out the terraces, and sets the calendar of receptions. Whom an embassy meets, and whether it ever climbs, is decided by the great house that hosts it, which is why every envoy spends the stay courting that house. Tenders of the Ordered Bough serve on the grounds too, keeping the gardens and advising the seat in charge. They decide nothing about rank, but their word on whether a guest is ready carries weight.

• Envoys of lords and of towns run by their richest houses, sent to be seen, to bring a gift home, or to learn the manners that raise their sender's name in the basins.
• Traders with basin goods, who seldom leave the lowest terrace and do not expect to.
• Supplicants seeking a graft, a teacher, a healer's working, or a word with someone above.
• Scribes and oath-keepers, who travel with every serious embassy because by basin custom nothing agreed here binds until it is sworn and written under the Sworn Accord.
• Swords for hire, who walk the embassies up the road and back, and spend the long waits between drinking and dicing on the lowest terrace.
• Wrack-pickers, basin foragers who live in the wild wood beyond the planted ground and go out after every storm for what the canopy drops, racing its wardens and each other.

The Medieval Present

Most days on the grounds are spent waiting. Envoys pay calls on the terraces above their own, send small gifts upward, and study the High Elves who come down. A long stay is not always a slight: to the canopy, an embassy received in a hurry has not really been received. Basin envoys know this and complain anyway.

On festival nights the canopy lights its walks with workings of light that need no lamp, and the whole lower terrace stands looking up at a forest lit from within. It is the sight envoys write home about first, and the one that makes the long wait bearable.

Two kinds of memory are kept side by side. Basin scribes write down everything said to their embassy, by whom, and from which terrace, so that their lord can hold the High Elves to it. The canopy remembers each reception in its own way and does not put its name to the scribes' rolls.

History

The grounds keep the habits of two older ages. The First Confluence-Crownbough Contacts (c. 18,000-c. 10,000 BR) were display before ceremony; The Crownbough Embassies (c. 16,000-c. 8,000 BR) turned display into ceremonial reception, and the graded terraces are that ceremony laid out on the ground. The canopy still runs them as if Humans might be patronized safely and knows that it cannot.

The Crownbough Heir Controversy (c. 14,000-c. 13,000 BR) is the story every embassy household knows. It settled nothing for good, and its warning that a clear line of heirs and a ripe heir do not come together is repeated on the terraces whenever a mixed child's place comes up. The wider argument belongs to the Elder and Young thread.

Tensions

• The climb alone. A basin lord's envoy is at last offered the Leave Stair, on condition that she climbs alone.
• A name before its time. 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.
• The dead graft. A Crownbough graft given to a basin lord has died in basin soil, and the lord's envoy has come to ask for another.
• A limb on the lowest terrace. The last storm brought down a whole outer walk, and with it a carved door of a canopy hall.
• The road home. Three embassies in two years have been robbed on the embassy road on their way home, and the last lost its envoy as well as its gifts.