Politics & Powerful Organizations · Guilds

The Kindlers

Type

The guild that finds newly woken kin

Reach

Continent-wide, except Rowlem

Houses

One in most towns of any size

Members

Mostly kin, and open to anyone

Funded By

Former residents, which is to say the kin it raised

Not

A council, a government, or a voice for the kin

A kin wakes over about two months, and for most of that time it is helpless. The Kindlers are the guild that goes out and finds them.

They are the only organisation on Aropria that exists for kin in particular, and they are careful about what that does not mean. A kin who leaves a Kindler house owes them nothing, and the guild has never claimed to speak for anyone.

A house

A house is small. Three or four people, a kitchen, a few beds, and a room that can be kept warm for a long time.

It takes in whoever is brought to it and feeds them through the end of the change, which is the part that needs no skill and saves the most lives. Then the long work begins, and it runs for months rather than weeks.

Language comes first, and it is the thing the guild is actually expert at. A newly woken kin has never had a word for anything — not a forgotten language, none at all — and teaching a first language to a grown mind is a strange and specialised job that almost nobody else on the continent ever has to do. The methods are the guild's own, passed between houses, and they are the reason a house is worth keeping rather than just a charity anyone could run.

After language comes everything else: money, law, why a shut door is shut, and that other people have thoughts of their own. Then the house walks them through whatever work the town does, until something catches.

Finding them

Mostly the Kindlers do not find anyone. They are told.

The change is slow and it happens outdoors, so what usually happens is that a shepherd or a ploughman or a child sees something halfway between two shapes at the edge of a field and says so in town. Houses take every report and pay for none of them, on the reasoning that a bounty would produce reports of things that were not there and, worse, would give somebody a reason to go looking before the guild could.

Near a city a report takes a day. In open country it can take a month, and a month is sometimes too long.

Money

A house is paid for by the people it raised. Kin live a long time and tend to become very good at one thing, and a great many of them send money back to the house that taught them to speak, for as long as they live — which can be three centuries.

The arrangement works and it distributes badly. A house in an old city is funded by twenty generations of former residents and wants for nothing. A house on a frontier is funded by the handful of kin it has raised so far, who are also young and also poor. The guild's one central function is to move money from the first kind of house to the second, and the arguments about how much are the only arguments it reliably has.

What it will not do

The Kindlers run the houses. They do not represent the kin.

This is a refusal rather than an oversight, and it is under steady pressure. Fourteen million people with no country, no lineage and no faction is a great many people with nobody to speak for them, and there are kin — and more often, well-meaning people who are not kin — who think an organisation that already exists should simply take the job.

The guild's answer is that the kin did not ask for one and are not one constituency. A heron-kin harbourmaster in Nashriam and a wolf-kin hunter on the eastern border have a plant in common and very little else, and a guild claiming to hold an opinion for both of them would be inventing a people that does not exist in order to have somebody to lead. It is the most-criticised thing about them.

Where it cannot go

There are no houses in Rowlem. The Faith holds that non-humans put to labour have proved their own inferiority, so a kin there is a slave and an organisation devoted to freeing and educating kin is not one the Faith permits. What happens along that border is not written down anywhere, including here.

Elsewhere the difficulty is money rather than doctrine. The Slaver's Syndicate trades in kin where it trades in anyone, and a house full of newly woken people who cannot yet speak, cannot yet fight and are not yet missed by anybody is an obvious target. Houses in Curath, Garshalla and Vas'tek are quieter about where they are than houses elsewhere, and are the only ones that keep a guard.

Members

Most Kindlers are kin, which is unsurprising, and the guild has never restricted itself to them. Anyone may join a house. The teaching in particular draws people who are not kin at all, since the skill is the skill whoever holds it.

A kin raised in a house is under no obligation to work in one, and most do not. Those who come back tend to come back late, after a long career at something else, which means the average Kindler is considerably older than the average member of any other guild.