Now Vichot—if he’s anything—is the northwest’s answer to the half-Anglos of the Greifswald troubles thirty years ago. His French father was a minor prospector out of Lyon—and a wildly unsuccessful one at that. Gerard Vichot had a weakness for the promise of easy wealth, just in wait beyond the next horizon. He fell victim to as many cons as he perpetrated, dragging his young son to every corner of the Empire to build pumping stations with untested technology or comb the sand for phantom treasure. They robbed graves and won fortunes and lost them again with equal alacrity.
On his mother’s side, the fen-poet is, well—Fen. The liaison between the boatwoman and the prospector was fleeting. Vichot’s own prison memoirs have her disappearing into the dunes sometime around his fourth birthday—whether from one too many nights sunshadowing on the bay or one too many of the Frenchman’s disappointments isn’t really clear. Without the mother to tie him to a tribe, the young outcast was left to the wayward father and the aforementioned formative years, grifting the furthest reaches of Konstantin’s borders.
