The Ring

Eighty-one plates were struck at the signing, one per signatory, each the head of a bloodline that mattered enough to be in the room. Three now hang cracked, one is fracturing, six are cold and the remaining seventy-one are warm. The ring is the entire legal order of the world, and it records who held power in a year nobody alive remembers.

The plates are the only enforcement mechanism, and the alarm covers what is wired into it. Kill a dragon whose blood is on no plate and nothing cracks, because the ring has never heard of them.

II.1 · Roster

II.2 · The Blooding

When a dragon is born it is carried to the fire and its blood let in. If the blood is of a plated line the plate answers, and a new name rises struck into its face. If not, nothing happens at all, and the house that brought the child walks back out through the embassy district in front of everybody.

The Blooding cannot be forged, bought, argued or ruled around, which is why the plate-readers resent it and why the Accords have lasted. Names fade when their bearer dies, and a plate with no living names is cold. Cold plates are not reclaimed by distant cousins arriving with a genealogy. Several have tried.

A child of two plated houses could go to either ring, and the choice is made once, at the Blooding. It is the substance of every marriage negotiated between plated houses, in which the dowry is ornament and the operative clause specifies which plate the children go to.

II.3 · The fracture

A plate cracks from the edge, over days or seasons, in full view of every ambassador in the world, and it stops if the house moves.

The case taught to every plate-reader in their first year: a daughter of a plated house did something the terms do not permit, and the iron began to open. Her brother, confirmed on the same plate and facing the same extinction, went after her. The crack stopped a finger’s width short of the rim while the house put down its own member, and never resumed. The plate is warm today and still carries the scar.

So the iron scores the response rather than the act. Whether it understands what it is doing is the oldest argument at the Forge, and the parties concede only two points: it cannot be deceived about blood, and it responds to intent.

One to three names

Every act is the house’s act. There is no mass to absorb a mistake and no member free to do the correcting, which leaves such a house one bad season from cold and makes its plate the most expensive thing a marriage can secure.

Twenty and up

The plate stops responding to persons and starts responding to policy. A great house’s fracture opens because the house has collectively drifted, so no single member can be blamed for it or halt it alone. Turning thirty dragons takes years, and the iron does not wait that long.

II.4 · The four kinds of ruler

The Plated

Bloodlines with names on warm iron. They constitute the legal order of the world without being identical to its great powers, and their standing is strictly hereditary.

The Bound

Enormous powers whose lines rose after the signing and hold no plate. They keep the terms anyway, more scrupulously than the plated do, since observance is the only standing they have. A new plate has been attempted nine times in eight centuries: twice the forge struck iron, seven times it did nothing at all.

The Unbound

A few dragon rulers who simply do not keep the terms: they hold more land than they can overfly and take wing when it suits them. Every plated Wright has condemned them, and no further step has been taken. The Forge has no procedure and no docket under which one could be.

Mortal powers

Most polities by count, and none of them major: free cities, republics, temple-corporations, clan holds, and cold houses whose dragon died and whose institutions did not. None of them were party to the terms, and the terms make no provision for them.

Your grandfather’s blood is why you are covered and I am not, and no other reason has ever been offered. The Bound, standing case

II.5 · Rotten plates

Standing was distributed by the power map of eight hundred years ago and has not moved. Some plated houses now rule enormously; some rule three valleys and a fishing port. A plate is a plate, so the fishing port has exactly the standing of the continent: the same voice on precedent, the same coverage, the same vote on whether the ring may ever grow.

Standing cannot be bought, conquered or married into; it is acquired at birth or not at all. A house down to two names is a full vote that might vanish inside a decade, so the great powers court it, finance it, garrison it for its protection and arrange its marriages down to the month. A minor plated heir is worth more than a province and is generally guarded like one: badly, by people the Accords do not cover.