The Blades are a chain of islands off the southwest coast of Adron, narrow and steep-sided, named for the way they break the open water into channels. The largest of those channels is the strait, the passage that southwest-bound shipping uses to reach Greyport and the shipyards of Shipmarsh instead of beating the long way around the chain.
Chavux, a wild green dragon, lairs among the northern islands and has made that strait his hunting ground. He is unbonded, nothing like the war-dragons the Nagashi rode and lost at the Severing, but he is sacrosanct exactly as they were: no Naga in Adron will kill a dragon, so the kingdom endures his raids rather than answer them. The merchants whose hulls he poisons want the problem solved and cannot get it solved by anyone Adron's law can reach. The Blades have become the place where that law's limit is felt most sharply, a stretch of Adron's own water that the kingdom cannot make safe and will not make safe by the one means that would work.