The Tarumbar

The Tarumbar are three, they are equal, and they began as the terms of a peace rather than as the design of a government. Formally they are the Tarumbar Thulathi. Each holds a title of his own and is addressed by it, so that a man is Tarumbar Harwë or Tarumbar Lungtha or Tarumbar Vórima and not the name of the house he came out of. The nine Princes elect them out of their own number, and what they are elected to they keep until they die or stand down.

The Terms of the Peace

In the early years of Peredhel, before anyone outside it would have called it a nation, the Peren fell into a civil war among themselves. It was fought between the three peoples they then took themselves to be, it ran three years, and the settlement that ended it was short. Whatever was taken afterward, by trade or by war, would be governed by three rulers. There must always be three. Each must come from a different one of the three peoples. And their power was to be equal to one another whatever the difference between what each of them actually held, so that the largest share bought no more say than the smallest.

Beneath them the country divides nine ways, one Prince to a province, and each province divides again into three regional seats. The two higher offices do not do the same work. A Prince is the sovereign of his land and asks nobody’s permission inside it; a Tarumbar is the commander of its armies. The provincial lines themselves move, several times in a year, most often because something has been conquered and has to be brought inside a border before it can be held legally, and sometimes only to shift a responsibility or turn a province’s attention somewhere new. Almost none of it touches the people living there, since the laws of one province are near enough the laws of the next.

Two of them are never inside one province at the same time, and the halls built for them are built on it: one throne room, and one chair standing in it.

The Decree of Nothlir

The founding law did not survive its own success. Centuries of intermarriage ran the three peoples together until the Peren no longer saw themselves as three at all, and a rule requiring one ruler from each became impossible to keep. About two hundred years ago it was replaced, to stop one or two families from holding the whole country: no two rulers may stand in closer kinship than third cousin. It binds Tarumbar and Princes uniformly, and it binds a province separately, where no two of one blood may hold any office above a seat on a council. Below those tiers it does not reach. Fresh elections followed, the family monopolies came down inside a season, and nothing on that scale has been attempted since.

The house it was written against was the Krangal. Four Krangal siblings had held two of the three Tarumbar seats and two princedoms between them, their children held two princedoms more, and the family ran very nearly every major city in the four provinces their princes governed. All of it broke at once. What did not break was the family, which still keeps one of its own in charge of one major city in every province in the country, and which holds Harwë now. A princely election lost to a Krangal is what took Xander Sarros and his people out of Peredhel for good.

Harwë

Harwë carries the economy and the war of the east, and the Peren who carries it is Zhelye Krangal. Under her the nation’s wealth has very nearly tripled. She built a class of merchant guilds out of the upper working class, and those guilds have drawn business to Peredhel from across Erôth. It was under her early rule that the whole region now called Daelaegas came into Peren hands, and she has shed the blood of more orcs herself than most Peren will ever meet. She is looked at with something near to reverence. Her tenure will most likely end inside the decade, and not one Peren cares to discuss it.

Lungtha

Lungtha carries security and the war of the sea, and Galom Malhnidi is the first to hold it who is not a soldier. Whether he has ever drawn a blade for anything but a ceremony is argued over. What he is instead is possibly the most naturally intelligent Peren who has ever lived, unable to let a question stand unanswered, and four decades of Peredhel’s technical advance run back to him. Stationed in Sahóra as a young enlistee, he was told of pirates working smaller and faster boats through water the navy could not safely follow. A week later he had drawn a new way to rig the lines and a new cut of sail, and had stripped half the standard stores out of the hull to sit the ship higher in the water. It cost almost nothing and could be done to an existing vessel in half a day. The raids ended. He had never set foot on a ship.

Set against that, he is afraid of magic. He will not use anything enhanced by it or even crafted with it, and he takes no potions. And he will believe nearly anything put to him in the shape of reason. The Duinhîr argued that the whole nation stood to gain if every river running through his province were his from source to mouth, since it would mean fewer customs posts, one set of laws, faster carriage and more revenue, and nobody opposing him could produce an argument that sounded as sound. They all came off petty and greedy. Lungtha agreed with him, and then talked the other two Tarumbar into making it law. The Duinhîr has since ordered that publications in his province stop calling him Duinhîr and call him the River King. That was complained of to Lungtha, who could not be troubled with it, so the title stands.

Vórima

Vórima carries the arcane and the war of the west, and the man who holds it must be born with magic in his blood as well as willing to give a country his time. Zilgra Fajun manages the second of those badly. Set beside the other two, or beside almost any Prince, his record is thin, and he is unlikely to lose the seat over it, because the one thing he did well was broker a closer relationship with the gnomes of Ustos, and Durwyn’s schools have been the gainers. The siege of Amulta has all but ended in failure, and he is unwilling for that to be what he is remembered by, and would trade very nearly anything to crack it.

Tarumbera

The title is a woman’s name. Nearly five centuries ago a plague came to the city that stood where Meretsk stands now. It crippled anyone who took it, and it killed every Peren who showed a symptom inside a week, without exception. A young woman named Tarumbera watched everyone she had ever known die around her, and, refusing to let the rest go the same way, swore a vow before every god there is, goodly and otherwise. One of them answered her. She was given the insight to find the source, a rogue gnomish necromancer at work on a new spell, and the power to end it. She raised a hundred citizens who swore to lay down their lives and went to his house with them, and the fighting ran through the streets and the sewers and back again for hours, and at the end of it all but three of the hundred were dead and the gnome, taking himself the winner, turned back to finishing his spell. Tarumbera called on the thing that had answered her a second time. She offered it her life, her mind and her soul, and the lives and minds and souls of the three still standing.

The offering was taken. The fire that took it burned hot enough to melt stone and bend steel, and it left the city flat, to the last building. Not one further Peren died that day. Meretsk was raised out of that ash to a plan drawn by Peren architects and engineers and nobody else, which is where the country’s building has taken its shape from since, and the title of the triumvirate was given her name.