Anyone who has sold a cart of grain in a market square has dealt with the Coin, whether or not they used the word. It is the merchant network of Feldia: traders, shipping factors, bankers, brokers, and the clerks who keep the books that make all three possible. There is nothing to join and nothing to sign. A woman who owns two barges and a warehouse is in the Coin because she does what the Coin does, and because the people who matter to her business already treat her as one of them.
How it holds together
At the top are the great merchant houses, most of them seated in Kronstadt, where the Grand Market serves as something between an exchange and a parliament. Matters that touch every trader — a duchy raising tolls, a road gone bad, a currency slipping — get argued out there, or by letter between houses that have been corresponding for generations. Nobody votes. Weight is a matter of how much cargo you move and how many people owe you.
Below the houses is everyone else: a factor in a market town, a carter with three mules, a moneylender working out of a back room. They use the network without belonging to it in any formal sense, and the network tolerates them because volume is volume.
The rules
Three, and they are not written down anywhere. Keep the roads open. Honor the contract. Help another trader when it costs you little, because next season it will be you.
The second rule carries teeth. A house that defaults or reneges finds its mark struck from the rate board at the Grand Market, and the news travels by the same post that carries the prices — faster than the goods, as the saying goes. A struck house can still buy and sell, but it buys on cash and sells at a discount, and that is usually the end of it inside two years.
What it trades in
Goods first: grain out of Kornfeld, wine from the Kronstadt country, iron, salt fish and salt out of Seehaven, timber and fur from Waldheim. Then credit, which is the real business — a letter of credit written in Kronstadt is honored in every port on the northern shore of the Sea of Coin, and letters weigh nothing.
Then introductions. A merchant house can get a stranger in front of a duke’s steward, or keep him out. Then information, which the Coin does not sell so much as bleed: prices, harvest reports, which bridge is down, which lord is borrowing, which garrison has stopped paying its suppliers. Merchants talk, constantly and to each other, and by the time a rumor reaches a market square it has usually been priced.
Where it is strongest
Kronstadt above all, then Seehaven and Grenzmark, where the routes converge. Kornfeld’s grain towns keep Coin factors the way they keep a miller. Kirchberg has fewer of them than its size suggests and is rather pleased about it.
Reputation
The Coin is reliably accused of having no principles, and the accusation is not quite fair. Its members hold one very firmly: commerce should continue. War, banditry, closed borders and sudden edicts all interrupt it, which makes the Coin an enemy of chaos and a friend of whoever is currently keeping order — a position that has looked like courage in some decades and like collaboration in others.
In practice this means a merchant house will fund a bridge, underwrite a militia, and buy grain at a loss to keep a town from starving through a bad winter, all while trading cheerfully with the people who caused the problem. Ask a factor about it and you will get a shrug and a figure. They will tell you that a road nobody can use feeds nobody, and that somebody has to be willing to talk to everyone.
The closure of Eisenmark’s borders has cost the network more than it likes to say aloud. An entire trading partner has gone quiet, and no explanation has been offered that satisfies anyone who was owed money.