`mette-hina` rite

The mette-hina falls on the last-born child of a Peren family on the day they turn twenty. The family name is stricken from them, and in its place they take the name of the rite itself and go out into the world under it. It is not a surname so much as a declaration that they have none yet. Most Peren adventurers are mette-hina.

To the Peren the rite is not a punishment. It is meant to push a people forward: to make each of them reach past what they were handed, and to keep wealth and standing from settling in the same families generation after generation. Whoever is last out of a house is the one sent to prove it can be done again from nothing. Peredhel keeps the custom in its law and gets something of its own out of it, because the rite and the open door held for Peren who renounce their old allegiances work in the same direction: between them, ethnic Peren remain the largest group in the country, in both of its classes.

What It Takes

Everything that came with the name goes with the name. Inheritance is forfeit. Contact with the family is severed, and so are the childhood friendships and the social and political connections the family could have opened. The severance is legal and not sentimental: however close the blood, a mette-hina is not kin to anyone in the eyes of the courts, and that is the whole of the arrangement rather than an unfortunate side of it. It reaches marriage as well. When Yullen Gemsmith married, he could not take his wife’s name either, on the grounds that he was not yet entitled to hold a name at all.

Nor is it a private matter. The name says what it says, everyone who hears it knows what it means, and the ones who carry it are known to be carrying it.

Earning a Name

The way out is accomplishment, and it is heard in court. A mette-hina who does something bold enough, or large enough, or useful enough to be worth recording may bring it before the benches in Peredhel and be granted a proper surname on the strength of it. The stripping is registered by the same courts, so both ends of the thing run through the same rooms. With a new name comes the right to found a family under it, resume the old ties, and go home.

Without one there is nothing to go back to. The Peren accounts leave that quiet and the people who have lived it do not: a mette-hina who never earns a name never returns, and the exile is permanent by default rather than by sentence.

The Younger Sibling

Because the rite falls on the last-born, a child born after you takes it off you, and a family that stops at one child has made that child mette-hina without meaning to. This produces a particular kind of household. Peren live well past a century, so a nineteen-year-old with no younger brother is not out of options, and it is not unusual to find one working hard on his own aging parents, talking up their marriage and their happiness and pressing for one more child. A newborn is not counted a child for this purpose until it has lived a year.

The rite can also be reached for rather than suffered. The prince who now holds Yovincia was born into the Krangal family, and by fate or by arrangement no younger sibling was ever born; at twenty he took the name Mette-hina, and being kinless in law meant no family tie could bar him from any office he could win for himself. He holds the title of Yovinhîr on that reasoning, and by a narrow reading of it.

Where It Does Not Reach

Idir is where the successful ones go. Coin stretches further there than at home, and at least two of Loshev’s councilmen earned their names in Peredhel and then retired across the border to spend them, trading on the very connections the rite once denied them.

Vigil does not enforce it. The Vigilites leave the mette-hina to each family to settle among themselves and have no law either way, and Peredhel folk have sought the town out and joined it precisely because they wanted no part of the rite. Casimir Kasun gave up a battle command and left the country so that his children would never be mette-hina.

It is a Peren tradition and not a Peren monopoly. A house of another people can practice it, and when one does it is remarked on for years.

Campaign Updates

Malik is the remarked-on case. He is human, out of a wealthy and fiercely Peredhel-nationalist family, the only human house of that standing to keep the tradition, and he has been mette-hina since he was twenty. The family name is closed to him in law, and explaining a human mette-hina to strangers wore thin long ago, so he introduces himself as Malik the bastard and lets people draw the obvious wrong conclusion. He intends to earn his name. What he says he wants out of it is a mother to come back to.

Yullen Gemsmith earned his at the bench. He was the youngest of his siblings, lost the family name on his twentieth birthday, and made “Gemsmith” out of the trade until it was granted to him. Then he left Peredhel altogether and settled in Idir, because he only ever had one child and did not want that child to go through what he had. He calls it a loneliness he would not wish on his son or on anyone.

Whether Cleven would truly have faced it is told two ways. Cleven says he came close and was spared by a second child of his father’s who died shortly after being born. Yullen says Cleven was his only child, would certainly have come to it on his twentieth birthday, and that sparing him was the reason for the crossing. Both accounts stand. Cleven himself will not father children he would have to send away. He said so at his own homecoming dinner in front of the guests, and he left the table early.