Grenzmark is the march — the duchy that borders more of Feldia than any other and has fought most of it at least once. It breeds the realm’s best warhorses, trains the riders to go with them, and treats its own geography as a standing argument for keeping both.
The land
Grenzmark runs from a river down to a sea. The Korn closes its northern edge, dividing it from Kirchberg and Kornfeld, and follows round to close the west as well, with Seehaven on the far bank. Southward the duchy comes down to the northern shore of the Sea of Coin — a working coast of landings and fishing villages rather than a harbor coast, and the one direction in which nothing is currently threatening it. Eastward the ground rises toward the Spine, and somewhere on that rise, without a river to make the point for it, the duchy becomes Eisenmark. There is no direction in which Grenzmark is not somebody’s border.
The country between the rivers is open grass and low rolling hill, broken by stands of woodland and by the ridges that every child here can tell you are good ground. It is cooler than central Feldia and considerably kinder than the highlands. Snow comes most winters and rarely stays long.
Crossings matter more here than towns do. Kornford, on the northern river, takes the bulk of the trade coming down from Kirchberg and the grain roads, and the tolls collected there pay for a good deal of the duchy’s cavalry. The Marchbridge, where the March Water comes down out of the eastern hills, used to do the same for traffic into Eisenmark. It does not any more — and since the March Water rises inside Eisenmark and crosses into Grenzmark on its way to the Korn, the closure is felt upstream as well as at the bridge.
Settlements
Grenzburg, the ducal seat, was a fortress before it was a city and has never entirely stopped being one. Perhaps five thousand people live inside and around its walls. The streets were laid for moving troops quickly rather than for moving carts profitably, and the merchants complain about it every market day. Its military academy takes boys from across Feldia and returns some of them as officers.
Everything else in the duchy of any size is a garrison town or a border station — a walled post under a knight or a veteran officer, watching a road, a ford, or a stretch of open ground. They are installations first and settlements second, though enough of them have grown inns, smithies and families that the distinction has worn thin.
People
Grenzmark is hierarchical, competitive and frank about both. Standing comes from martial skill first, birth second, money a distant third — and money can be the wrong answer entirely if it is seen to have bought the first two. Excessive courtesy reads as weakness. Directness reads as respect.
Outsiders are not treated badly, merely provisionally, until they have done something that can be assessed. The people here are also formidable holders of grudges, and the grudges are specific: the winter Waldheim refused them timber during a shortage, the raids across the western hills a generation back, the tournament at Kronstadt where a local champion was unhorsed by a man whose name is still remembered here and nowhere else. None of these are open wounds. All of them are on the ledger.
Horses, steel and hire
The warhorses are the duchy’s pride and its most reliable income. Grenzmark stock is strong, level-headed and expensive, bred on the cavalry grounds outside Grenzburg under rules that make buying one a matter of introductions as much as coin. The spring Coltmarket draws buyers from every duchy and a fair number from beyond them.
Armories here turn out good, plain, dependable steel — nothing to rival Steinmark for craft or reputation, but a Grenzmark blade is made to be used rather than admired, and the men buying them know the difference.
The third export is soldiers. Ambitious younger sons take contracts through the Steel, which recruits openly here and whose captains are on speaking terms with the Duke’s command. The current Duke came up the same way, by competence rather than inheritance, and it shows in how he governs: he trusts officers and mistrusts courts.
Tolls round out the accounts. Trade has to cross Grenzmark to get anywhere, and Grenzmark charges it.
Lately
Three border patrols have failed to return in the past month, all on familiar routes in weather that explains nothing. The official finding is desertion. The families reject it flatly, and their case is a plain one: these were settled men with wives, holdings and years of service, and men like that do not walk into the dark leaving everything behind.
The disappearances happened at night. There has been talk of armed riders on those roads on those nights, which could mean bandits, or deserters from somewhere else, or nothing at all. The Duke has opened no formal inquiry; the matter is politically awkward, and he has said as much. The silence has done more damage to confidence than the losses did.