Yovance

Yovance lies west, out past the border country Peredhel has taken off it, and it is the nation the slave roads run back to. It is counted among the human nations, one of the handful whose history is traced to humanity’s first arrival on Erôth, and it speaks Galden, which it kept when it seceded from Galderia. Amulta parted from Galderia the same way and about as long ago, and the three still share the tongue and a good deal else: they mark their graves with stone cairns and bury a person’s important effects with them for the passage, lettering the stone with a formal monogram, and none of the three keeps any engagement-ring custom at all.

Yovance and Yovincia are not the same place, and the near likeness of the names was Peredhel’s doing. As the peren took ground they reorganized it into a province and named the province after the country they had taken it from, partly to antagonize and partly to make the change sit more easily on its new citizens. Yovincia is Peredhel, and answers to a peren Prince. Yovance is the country still standing outside it. Meshtes, the greatest slave market on the continent, is in Yovincia; so is the mercenary trade, and so are the barest slavery laws Peredhel permits. Much of what Idir repeats about the one is really about the other.

Structure

It was once vastly larger. Peredhel’s reckoning is that Yovance has lost roughly two fifths of its landmass to the advance, and its own provincial accounts of how that was done are blunter: a three-month war along the coast held the country’s attention while soldiers walked in and took great pieces of the interior. What is left is not one realm so much as a set of them. Yovance is made up of fiercely independent city-states, each governed by a powerful merchant family, and no capital of it has ever been named.

That should have finished it, and has not. The families have aligned their forces far enough to hold Peredhel off for years, and Peredhel’s own summary of the war allows that its greater numbers and better coordination have given it the upper hand and nothing more. What it credits for the difference is Yovance’s refusal to yield, which it sets in the same sentence as the country’s disposable view of human life and its reliance on slave labor, as though the three were one fact.

Government

Who governs Yovance depends on which account is being read, and the two do not sit together. Peredhel’s foreign reckoning gives it no central ruler at all: only the oligarchs of the merchant houses, coordinating when they must. The histories of the hobgoblins give it an Empress. In their telling the Yovan Empress, desperate to save her nation, went to the crime syndicates for help, and it is said in some quarters that she would have got a better bargain out of the peren. Which of the two is true was never settled.

Power Structure

What both accounts agree on is who else is in the room. Yovance is the hub of hobgoblin gangs and hobgoblin political influence on the continent, in a world where almost every major syndicate is either led by hobgoblins or advised by them. The Mól Syndicate, a shadowy remnant of the old empire, is held to operate there. Its reach runs further east than its name is spoken: the Kurvroc house of Loshev is rumored to have connections to it, and Torgun Kurvroc has been quietly expanding his holdings in Yovance.

Yovance has no native magical tradition of its own, and hires its casters out of other lands, commonly as indentured servants and on the servant’s terms rather than the caster’s. That is also how it steps around the Arcane Congress and the magical law the Congress imposes: a foreign caster under contract is not bound the way a national tradition would be. Yovance is criticized abroad for it and has not stopped.

Laws

A person there is owned or is an owner, and the ownership is for life except in rare circumstances. That is the whole of the arrangement and everything else follows from it. Its army is reckoned to be about eight parts in ten slaves, which is a thing said of no other country on the continent. Its wealth is held to come from the same place, and travelers put it flatly: there is only one way a man gets rich in Yovance.

Being freed does not put a person on the other side of the line. Those who are neither owners nor owned belong to neither, and the ones who came from the owned side are resented for having stopped being one of them. Phillipa was born owned there, and is exact about the words: not free, both figuratively and literally, and freed by the only road her town allowed, which was for a man to pay what she cost.

Peredhel has built a policy on the arithmetic of it. The Prince of Yovincia keeps the number of slaves in his province deliberately low, because killing a slave is an excusable act while killing a free man may be answered with war, and Yovance’s armies are mostly slaves. A slave killing a free man is a horror to the peren, who regard their own slaves as citizens in waiting. Yovance keeps its for life.

The whip is Yovance’s instrument and is recognized as such well outside its borders. When the barracks at Forven swelled and began training with whips, Leon Yaegar named the practice by the country it came from and declined to say what he thought it meant.

Foreign Relations

Peredhel

The war is not going well and has not for a long time. Peredhel is at Yovance’s throat and has been eating the country a province at a time; ships are sent against its coastal cities; the ground already taken has been renamed to insult it. Peredhel sells the result as liberation, and the conquered are held to be better off, since a peren slave is a potential citizen where a Yovance slave is a slave until death. Landor de Bellun, whose estate and whose people were liberated, says the people on it had less freedom afterwards than they had before.

Amulta

They are treaty allies, and the treaty is real: Yovance and Galderia together keep the food and materials moving that make Amulta’s generational siege survivable, and Amulta has sent its Gish west to bolster Yovance in turn, back when its own defenses looked secure enough to spare them. Of the two, Yovance has suffered the worse.

It is also the alliance Amulta cannot defend at home. Amulta outlaws slavery without qualification and will not trade with a nation that practices it, and its own citizens grew wary enough of the exception being made here that the crown answered public feeling: Amulta came out in support of Yovance’s slaves in their bid for liberation and a nation of their own, with the understanding that the new sovereignty would hold Amulta’s southern border against peren incursion. Whether that bid was ever won never reached Idir.

Galderia

The parent country. Yovance seceded from it about as long ago as Amulta did, and kept the language. Whatever dealings the two have had since never reached Idir.

Campaign Updates

Nobody in the company has ever set foot in it. Yovance arrives in Idir the way the Order of the Red Haze does, as a name attached to something already in the room: an aspergillum carried as a weapon by a faith-order out of that country, a delicacy called Cam that will not keep and is brought out for weddings, a manner of training soldiers that a commander can recognize across a border.

Mostly it arrives as people. Phillipa was owned there and Phil Nye spent effectively everything he had to buy her out of it, and thought the transaction shameful; she did not, and said so in company for years. Landor de Bellun inherited a Yovance estate and the people worked on it, kept them because he could not run it alone, gave them the best lives he could give, and lost the estate, his wife and his war when Peredhel came. His account of the liberation is that the chains went back on his people out of the liberator’s own hands.

It is far enough, and closed enough, to be a place things are sent to and do not come back from. Hinta has a third cousin somewhere in it, an albino hobgoblin scholar of Mól history and planar energies, banished there, whose name nobody has fixed. Mikhail wrote to him about the planar water and had to pay Nathan Fox’s couriers to carry the letter, because no ordinary post crosses a border two countries are fighting over.