The Verge Stair

Overview

The Verge Stair crosses the canopy-mountain threshold between The Ironspine and The Crownboughs. It is a stone stair of Dwarven building that climbs from an Ironspine gate hold to a gate grown by the High Elves of the Crownbough Courts, and it is the one place where the oldest rivalry between Elves and Dwarves stands face to face. Envoys of the canopy houses and of the Ironspine Holds meet on its landing, and most of what passes between the two peoples is handed across there.

The stone and the gate were made to answer each other, by rivals who would not finish each other's work, and the landing where they meet belongs wholly to no one. The stair has run with the blood of both.

The Place

The stair climbs the flank of the last rock spur on the forest side of the mountains, where the outermost great trees of the Crownboughs stand close against the stone. It starts in the outer yard of the gate hold at the spur's foot and rises in long dressed flights, walled on the drop side, to a landing level with the canopy. The stonework is plain, close-jointed, and heavy. By hold standards it is fine work. By canopy standards it was never finished.

Keepers and Users

The stone half belongs to the Ironspine gate holds, which keep it under the gate oaths of the Held Covenant, and in practice to the hold whose gate opens at the stair's foot. Its wardens guard the flights, its masons keep them, and a Covenant keeper comes up to the landing whenever business is done there. The hold has sworn under Kerrund the Stone-Warden to keep the stair whole, and among the other holds its name rests partly on whether it does.

The gate belongs to the High Elf house whose growth carries it, as every boughway in the Crownboughs belongs to the house that grew it. The house keeps it trained and pruned like one of its own halls, decides which envoys and goods may pass, and sends its own officers, and its sword-champions, to every meeting on the landing.

The Medieval Present

Trade is seasonal. The stair opens in late spring, once the masons have reset what the winter loosened, and closes with the autumn storms, when the gate's limbs move too much for anyone to trust the landing beneath them. On an exchange day both parties time their arrival with care, because whoever waits on the landing for the other is read as having come to ask.

The canopy takes more Dwarven stone and metal up through the gate than it admits, and carries it through itself, so that no Dwarf is ever seen passing the gate with a load.

For some years now the masons' spring resetting has not lasted the summer. The failure is worst in the upper flights and the Root Course, where the roots work between the joints, and a mason fell from the vaulting last autumn when a slab turned under him. The hold has begun hiring Kobold crews for the narrow work in the vaulting under the landing, on terms it does not discuss with the canopy.

History

No one can date the stair. Hold tallies name it Dwarven work older than the gate; canopy memory holds that the gate was grown first and the stair built up to meet it. In each telling, the other side came asking. What both accept is that the halves were made by rivals already judging each other and already skirmishing over the verges, in the contest of refinement against strength described in The Courts of Stone and Canopy.

When the canopy later turned to the Human world in the Crownbough Embassies, it brought the same spirit but not the same footing. Human envoys are received below the canopy at the Understorey Courts, the receiving grounds on the basin side, and are seldom taken higher. Dwarven envoys are met level, at the top of their own stair. High Elves call that courtesy; the holds call it the least the canopy could do. Both readings belong to the Elder and Young thread.

Tensions

• The Root Course. The gate hold has offered to rebuild the failing stone, as the canopy well knows (see The Crownboughs), but the work cannot be done from the stone side alone.
• Basin goods at the Dwarven door. Traders from the Headwater Marches want to carry Human goods up the stair and sell them on the landing, past the embassy road.
• The envoy's chain. An understorey hunter in the hold's pay has come up the lower flights with a gold chain set with hold-garnets, found under a bear's den.
• A tree tallied as a tree. A canopy house lays on the Laying Stone a sapling grafted from its own family grove, the highest gift it can give.