Steinmark is the highland duchy at the head of the Spine, the mountain wall that divides Feldia from the Wastes. It produces most of the realm’s iron, nearly all of its coal, and a great deal of its best stonework. It cannot feed itself, has never pretended otherwise, and has built its entire politics around that fact.
The land
Peaks here stay under snow the year round. Between them run valleys deep enough that the sun reaches the floor for only part of the day, and fertile enough — barely — to carry oats, barley and hardy cattle through a season that is short at both ends. Old forest survives in pockets where the slope allows it. Rivers run fast and white with snowmelt and are lethal in spring; by late summer some can be forded, and the crossings are all named and all argued over.
The Steinwater marks the western boundary with Kirchberg and drains north to the coast, carrying stone downriver on barges. To the east, the Spine climbs to the passes. Only one of them, the Cold Gate, is open reliably enough to be called a road, and it is open perhaps five months in the year. Steinmark keeps a garrison on it. Nobody in the duchy will tell you at length what the garrison is for.
Winter kills the careless. It does this every year, to people who grew up here, and it is not discussed as tragedy so much as arithmetic.
Settlements
Grimmhold, the Duke’s seat, is carved into the mountainside as much as built against it — a fortress and a city occupying the same walls, holding somewhere near twelve thousand people. It is the center of the iron trade and it smells like it: coal smoke, forge smoke, and wet stone.
Beyond it are the mining towns — Deepreach, Ironvein, Stonemark and a score of smaller works — each built around a shaft and organized around the shift. These are not commercial places. People there know the ground under them the way a sailor knows weather.
People
Steinmark society is built on clans. Loyalty runs vertically and is inherited: a person belongs to a house, a house to a lord, and that arrangement is not treated as negotiable. Betrayal is the worst thing anyone here can accuse you of, and the accusation outlives the accused.
Flattery is taken as an insult or a confession. Cleverness is admired, provided it is useful. A given word binds as tightly as a written contract, and written contracts are regarded as a southern habit — polite, and faintly insulting. Outsiders are tolerated once they have proved both honest and useful, in that order, and the probation is long.
The Church is present and largely ignored. There are chapels in every town and priests in most of them, and the older observances — stone-blessings, the first-cut rites at the shafts, the small offerings left at a new working — carry on beside them without anyone finding the arrangement strange. Bishops in Kirchberg find it strange, and say so, at a distance.
Iron and grain
Iron and coal are the duchy’s life. Ore comes out of deep, ancient, constantly extended workings and goes into forges that never fully cool. It leaves as ingots and as finished goods — tools, fittings, weapons, armor. Steinmark ironwork is not merely good; every smithy stamps its own mark, and wealthy Feldians buy the mark as much as the metal. Marble, granite and slate come out of the quarries too, though stone travels badly and mostly goes by water.
Against all this stands the grain. Steinmark eats because Kornfeld sells, and the price is settled every year at the Grain Reckoning in Grimmhold at the end of summer — a fortnight of bargaining conducted in iron rather than coin, and the single most closely watched negotiation in the duchy’s calendar. A hard Reckoning is remembered for a generation.
Mercenary work is the other export. Young men from clans with more sons than shafts sell their swords through the Steel and send the pay home. Nobody here considers that a disgrace.
Lately
Two things have people talking. The first is the Reckoning, which has gone worse each of the last three years, with terms Kornfeld’s factors call unreasonable and Steinmark’s call overdue.
The second is Deepreach. A new foreman took over there some months ago, arrived with references from no house anyone can place, and since then the mine’s best ore has gone east to Eisenmark rather than west to market. The foreman he replaced, a Steinmark man with thirty years underground, is said to have retired. His family has been asking where.