Great Houses of Amulta

Eight families govern Amulta beneath the crown, and each of them holds one instrument of the state outright. Magic answers to Arcium. The army answers to Bombo. Money sits with Izhech, the foreign trade with Bryntel, the siege engines with Katar, and the schools and libraries with Orvhil, who are devout of Winifred Orenda and who designed the education every Amultan child is put through. Korovsk led the country out of Galderia and keeps the standing that came with it. The eighth house is Junta, which is the royal house, and which holds nothing else: no portfolio, no branch of the state, only the throne and the tradition that the person on it be someone of little or no magical capability. It is a monarchy in which every lever belongs to somebody else.

They are not the only hand on the country. The Jewels of Erôth sit inside Amulta’s borders and answer to no nation at all. The military divides into branches, and each of the three counted major is a power in its own right. And somewhere beneath all of it works the Consortium of Eldritch Scholars, a secret body of mages whose business is to push Amultese magic higher than it has gone, at whatever price that costs.

Below the eight sit the lesser noble houses, and lesser is a narrow word for them. A family well short of the great houses still pulls hard enough that Amultan soldiers explaining one to foreigners thought the weight of it worth saying out loud. The Corvain family is one of those.

Almost none of this has ever been spoken in Idir. Six of the eight houses have never been named there at all. The two that have, Arcium and Bombo, were raised by the same person on both occasions: an Amultan living out her exile in a foreign city, wondering aloud whether home already knew what she had just been told.