Hemp

Hemp shoots up in dense thickets across the open flats of the lower isles, growing head-high in a single season on stalks as thick as a thumb. Beneath the woody rind runs a long, coarse bast fiber —Hemp Fibers — stubborn to strip but immensely strong once freed.

It is the first fiber any forager learns to gather, and the roughest. Woven coarse it becomes burlap — the scratchy sacking of the realm's poorest garments and its heaviest loads. No one wears hemp by choice, but it is tough, it is everywhere, and every tailor's very first cloth is cut from it.