Seehaven is the coastal duchy of Feldia: salt, ships, fish, and the particular hardness of people who live where the sea does not forgive a mistake. It is rich, and it is angry, and both facts come from the same stretch of water.
The land
The coast is rock. Cliffs drop straight into water that is rarely calm, broken by deep natural harbors that are the duchy’s entire fortune. Inland the ground is moor and gorse — thin sheep pasture, peat cuttings, and not much else. Nothing here grows well enough to matter. Seehaven buys its bread from Kornfeld and always has, and a bad year in the grain country is felt on this coast within a month.
Through Seehaven’s waters runs the canal: the one deep-water passage into the Sea of Coin that a laden ship can take. A Kretavic vessel bound for Kronstadt or the northern routes goes through here or does not go at all. That is why Seehaven is wealthy. It is also why Seehaven burns.
Weather comes off the water hard and with little warning. The fishing fleets read it better than any almanac, and still lose boats most winters.
The city and the coast
Seehaven itself holds about eight thousand people, built around a harbor so large that the far quays are a walk rather than a stroll. The city is docks, warehouses, shipyards and taverns, in roughly that proportion. It smells of fish, salt and tar. It is never quiet — the noise of loading goes on through the night when the tide demands it, and nobody in the merchant quarter has ever successfully complained about that.
Smaller harbor towns run along the coast in both directions, each with its own fleet, its own pilot launch, and its own view of the capital’s arrogance. Kalthafen, north of the city, is the largest of them and the one most travelers pass through, because its road inland is the good one.
People
Seehaven manners are direct to the point of rudeness by Kronstadt standards, and the people here are aware of that and pleased by it. Competence outranks breeding. A man’s word is worth exactly his reputation, and reputations are tracked with a care that outsiders mistake for gossip. Caution is a virtue because the sea kills the careless; hesitation is not, because the sea kills those too.
Strangers are tolerated readily enough if they pay their way and handle themselves. Origin and creed matter less here than anywhere else in Feldia — a harbor that sees crews from every coast in the charted world stops being curious about accents.
That has changed, on one point. The Kretavic raids have made this coast wary of southerners in a way that does not distinguish carefully between a raider and a lawful trader from the same shore. There is no ordinance and no formal bar. There is a harbormaster who takes longer over southern papers, an innkeeper who is full, a crowd that forms faster than it should. Older merchants on both sides of the water regard this as bad for business and say so. Anyone in Seehaven who has buried family to a raid regards those merchants as men with short memories. Both positions are held sincerely and neither is going anywhere.
Trade and craft
Fish is the foundation: netted, salted, dried, and shipped inland to every duchy. It is cheap food and it is essential food, and the waters off this coast are reliably rich. Salt is worked from the shore pans and matters as much as the fish, because without it there is no fish trade at all.
Ships are the duchy’s pride. Seehaven shipwrights build the finest hulls in the north and charge accordingly, and a Seehaven keel holds its value on resale in a way that irritates the yards in every rival port. The Master Shipyards are closed to sightseers and open to serious buyers, a distinction the gate guards enforce with some relish.
Then there is the passage itself. Duties on ships transiting the canal make up a large share of ducal revenue, and the Pilots’ Guild, which puts a licensed hand aboard every vessel that makes the run, is one of the most exclusive bodies in Feldia. Its hall admits nobody who was not asked. Guild pilots are well paid, tight-mouthed, and the closest thing this duchy has to an aristocracy of skill.
The Harbor Market trades fish, cargo and news in about equal volumes. The Broken Anchor, an old tavern near the quays, trades mostly the last of those.
History
Before the canal was found to be navigable by large vessels, Seehaven was a fishing community of no particular importance. Afterward it was a power, and within two generations it was a target. The duchy has never entirely stopped behaving like a place that got rich suddenly and expects someone to come and take it.
The Church is present, funded, and secondary. People here are practical about faith and tend to reserve it for the weather.