Major city of Watar, held by the Madero family, on the southern coast of the peninsula where it narrows toward the Telphineas Strait. Of Watar's port cities it sits closest to the contested water, and the Madero have built to suit: a naval yard, a standing fighting fleet, and a long-running claim that if anyone is to hold the strait it ought to be them. They are the loudest voice in Watar for strait control, and for most of the family's history that voice and the Strugmar council's have wanted the same thing.
They no longer do. The anchorage fee that Drazvik Strugmar's hulls now collect at the strait mouth was supposed to be a Madero windfall. It has been closer to the opposite. When Bestacia answers the fee with seized cargo and closed berths, the cargo seized and the berths closed are Madero's first, because Madero hulls are the ones riding the narrows day in and day out. An open toll-war over the strait would bleed the family that holds the strait-side city long before it touched the Soleri in the capital or the Strugmar in their counting-houses. So the Madero have made a quiet calculation that would look, set out plainly, like treason against their own state. They have begun routing money to the law school at Pastrova, in Bestacia, to help fund the very case Watar is fighting. They want the fee struck down.
What they cannot do is say so. At the Aldriktch council the Strugmar speak first, and the booking-ledgers decide who is heard at all; a Madero who stood up to argue against the family that books the most cargo would be arguing from the back of the room. So the warships go on being built and the old claim to the strait goes on being made, while underneath both the family pays Bestacian jurists to prove that no one's toll, their own included, can be collected the way Strugmar is collecting it. How long a house can fund both sides of one fight before the council notices is a question the Madero would rather leave unasked.