Three islands stand off Kretavia’s west coast in the open ocean. The largest is a nation, and almost everything written about it was written by people who did not mean to go there. It keeps no embassy, signs no treaty, sells nothing, and has never told an outsider the name of its capital or who sits in it. This is policy rather than misfortune. Everyone who has dealt with Jrakvia comes away certain of that much and not much else.
The land, as far as anyone knows
Kretavic scholars hold that the islands broke away from the Old Wood on their own west coast and drifted, and the argument is decent: the rock matches, the trees match, and the gap in the coast is the shape of the thing that left. How long ago is disputed by everyone and settled by no one.
The two smaller islands appear to be empty. Passing ships report seabirds, cliffs, no smoke and no boats. They also report, consistently enough that it has stopped being remarkable, a light burning on the northern headland of the middle island. No crew has met the person who tends it.
The Descent and the Ascent
The reason Jrakvia does not need walls is the water. Sailors call the inbound current the Descent: a ship that loses the westerly in the wrong latitude gets carried south-west and set down in the calm belt off the islands, and cannot beat back out the way it came. Crews who have tried describe weeks of making no ground at all and then giving up.
What takes ships out again is a separate current, running north, which sailors call the Ascent. It does not return anyone to where they started. It puts them out in the northern reaches of the Sea of Coin, toward the Bagii Isles, a very long way from wherever they were headed. The door works, and it works in one direction.
The practical result is that Jrakvia’s experience of the outside world consists almost entirely of shipwrecked crews and people running from Kretavia. That is a narrow sample, and the accounts suggest the Jrakvians have drawn conclusions from it about what foreigners are generally like.
What the castaways say
The reports are strange chiefly for being dull. Castaways come back describing paved roads maintained between towns, clean water piped into ordinary houses, street lamps that are lit and stay lit, hospitals where the sick are separated by what ails them, and a great deal of glass. They describe being fed, housed, treated courteously and asked very few questions. They rarely describe soldiers.
Kirchberg’s position is that castaways exaggerate and that a man who has spent three weeks on short water will believe anything he is shown. A minority of scholars point out that the accounts agree on details too tedious to invent — drainage, bread prices, the width of a street — and that liars embellish rather than bore. The dispute has run for two generations without moving.
What is not disputed is the timing. While Feldia spent three centuries on invasion, conversion, religious war and the fragmentation that followed, nothing happened to Jrakvia at all. Three hundred years of one place being left alone will produce something, and whatever it produced, it did not develop along any road the rest of the world would recognize.
Dealings
There have been attempts. Kretavic missions have gone west and come back quickly, and the church has published nothing about what was said to them. Merchant ventures out of Kronstadt have twice fitted out expeditions to open trade; both returned with the ships provisioned, the crews unharmed and well fed, the cargo untouched, and no agreement of any kind. The refusal is reported as polite, unhurried and total. Nobody was threatened. Nobody was permitted to stay.
Jrakvia is not hostile and does not appear to be frightened. It has looked at the rest of the world and declined it, and it has been declining long enough that the decision now looks less like caution than like a settled opinion.
The Bagii
The Bagii know the islands are there. They collect the people the Ascent delivers, feed them, and send them east into Feldia without saying a word about where those people were. Asked directly, Bagii captains change the subject with a skill that is plainly practiced. They are not a people who impress easily, and they will not take a charter south for any money offered. That silence is the single most informative thing anyone outside Jrakvia has to go on.