Eisenmark is the easternmost of Feldia’s duchies — a long north-south country pinned against the Spine, running from the Korn in the north down to the sea, and the richest source of iron in the charted world. It is also, at present, the least visited. The border has been effectively shut since last winter. Merchants who traded there for twenty years now conduct their business by letter, when the letters are answered at all.
The land
The mountains here are higher and colder than Steinmark’s, which Steinmarkers concede grudgingly and only in private. Snow holds on the peaks the year round and reaches further down the valleys each winter. The valleys themselves are narrow and poor, their villages built low and heavy against the wind. Rivers run fast and cold and freeze at the edges by early autumn.
Eisenmark holds the mountain. Its western boundary with Grenzmark is the one border in Feldia that is not a river: it runs down the Spine’s western foot, roughly where the grass gives out and the ground starts climbing, and both duchies have found it convenient to leave the exact line unargued. Northward the country narrows to a point at the Korn’s spring, where Eisenmark meets Steinmark — the two iron duchies, sharing a mountain and very little else. Eastward the ground climbs into the Spine, and past the Spine is the Wastes, which is the end of every road in this duchy and the reason nobody minds that the roads end.
What Eisenmark has, in quantity that no other duchy comes close to, is ore. The seams are thick, shallow enough to work, and by every account far from exhausted.
Eisenstadt and the forge towns
Eisenstadt, the ducal seat, is a fortress and a foundry sharing one set of walls. Its population is not a matter of public record and never has been. The few outsiders who have been admitted in the past year came back describing new walls going up outside the old ones, new forge halls, and a pace of building that struck them as strange for a duchy at peace.
The rest of the duchy is mining and forge settlements strung through the valleys, each attached to a working or a furnace. There is very little in Eisenmark that is not there to get metal out of the ground or turn it into something.
Trade
Weapons, mail and armor of exceptional quality, and iron by the ton. That was the duchy’s business for as long as anyone has kept records of it, along with an unusually large trade in plain chain — Eisenmark chain rigs ships in Seehaven and hauls stone in half the duchies.
Most of that has stopped moving west. The forges run — travelers on the Grenzmark grass say the eastern sky carries a glow on clear nights — but the iron stays. Seehaven’s harbormasters record no Eisenmark vessel in a year. Grain still goes in from Kornfeld, paid for in gold, promptly, without haggling, which grain factors find pleasant and merchants find worth remarking on.
What has grown instead is the southern trade. Eisenmark’s dealings with Kretavia have expanded considerably in the last two years, and diplomatic contact between the two has become routine. Neither party has offered an explanation, and none of Eisenmark’s neighbors has managed to extract one. Between a Feldian duchy and a power the rest of Feldia regards with three centuries of cold suspicion, that is the sort of arrangement merchants notice.
People
Eisenmarkers were known for pride, self-sufficiency and craft — the ordinary character of people who live somewhere difficult and are good at it. What the rest of Feldia knows of them now comes second-hand and is thin. The last travelers out spoke of a duchy grown orderly to a degree they found uncomfortable, disciplined about work and short on conversation.
Refugees came west for a while before the border closed. They came with unhappy stories and the vagueness of frightened people, and they have stopped coming. Whether that means nobody wishes to leave or nobody can is a question the other duchies ask each other regularly and answer differently depending on how far east they live.
Rule, and the border
Authority in Eisenmark is not shared. There is no council of nobles with standing to refuse the Duke, and no merchant class independent enough to argue with him. Lord Varek has held the seat for a remarkably long time — long enough that the length of it has become a standing joke in Kronstadt and a genuine puzzle to the heralds, who dislike untidy records. He attends no royal council, answers no correspondence from the High King, and has sent no envoy west in two years.
The Marchbridge crossing is shut. Letters go unanswered. The realm’s ordinary means of finding out what a duchy is doing — envoys, merchants, gossiping servants, priests reporting to their bishop — have all failed at once, and Feldia has been left doing what it does best in place of information, which is speculate.