The Free Folk

The Free Folk are not a nation and not a bloodline. They are wandering nomads who travel some set routes and a good many unset ones, taking what work is to be had along them, and the work is most often the sword. Koa Attila is one of them.

They are also not an old people with an old culture, which is the first thing outsiders get wrong about them. What they are is a young one.

Out of Peredhel

The tribe formed decades ago out of a ragtag body of different races and different trades who sought refuge from the conquered lands of Peredhel. They learned to keep themselves in Idir by taking up a nomadic life across the plains, foraging and hunting, and in no small part by the horses they managed to tame. They have lived in tents since. With no nobles among them they chose their own leaders, mostly for combat prowess and the ability to lead, at times instead for knowledge and ingenuity, and the culture that grew up around the choosing was a libertine one. Acceptance among the races and the faiths thrown together in it followed. Faith plays a secondary role in their society, with gods of every ideopan among them.

A band of Free Folk is still a band of mismatches, men and women who found their way there rather than being born to it: some running from the law of Peredhel, some from a mistake of their own making, more than a few of them Peredhel deserters, and now and then somebody stranger still. They are human, Peren, hobgoblin and Hobbin, with many others in smaller numbers, and half-orcs live among them in numbers seen nowhere else in Idir.

Time does not heal every wound, and nobody among the people who escaped Peredhel forgot the reason they are in Idir. A deep-rooted hatred of that country is entrenched in every member of the tribe, and with it a hatred of anyone else who would take their freedom away. The phrase they use for it is the land I stand on belongs to me.

What It Asks

Their rules are few and loosely kept, and that is the whole of the arrangement: they accept anyone willing to follow them. There is no price to join and no test. You come, you join, and room is found for you. Different backgrounds and different gods are tolerated as a matter of course, and forcing one ideology on them does not sit well. Magic is tolerated too, where in most of Idir it is not, though it is rare enough among them that Koa counts perhaps four spellcasters met in all his years there.

What it costs is everything else. For every silver a Free Folk earns, two slivers go back to the group, which works out to a sliver in every five copper, and that tithe is the one obligation anybody names. Past it there is little warmth in winter, little food in a drought, and no claim on anybody at all. Leon Yaegar, who has had people of his own defect to them, puts it that they may be free of land but they are also free of responsibility.

Who Speaks for Them

Organized as one body they are the Free Folk’s Host, or the Idiric Hetmanate, and its government is democratic and run by council. Its head is the Hetman, a title held for life and revocable all the same, and the Hetman is Izha Krumm. The office is mostly representative, though in military affairs she is the de-facto commander. Major decisions and the election of a Hetman belong to the Council of Many Voices, which is every member summoned to one meeting; the law and the judging of it belong to the Elders and Crones council, three elders and three crones with a seventh to break the tie.

Hired Work

A sword worn at the back is the telltale sign of one, and a Free Folk keeps a weapon on him anywhere that does not forbid it. Past that, recognition is not agreed on. Kithul named Koa’s colors on sight and said in the same breath that they do not really have colors; the band that turned out for the fires in Loshev were plainly Free Folk by their colors and their style once they were dressed; a traveler on the road held that even the Free Folk keep a degree of uniformity in the plainness of what they wear. All three accounts stand. What nobody disputes is that they carry no house crest and no symbol that means anything, that the only paint they own is face paint for fighting, and that it is easy to look the part, which people do.

A gold a head is called the customary rate for a job. A merchant who had hired them before reckoned a whole gold covered a band of three, which is a different sum and was said while haggling. Three is the usual shape of a hire, and the work inside it is divided: one points the trail, one stays on guard, and one makes the camp, fetches water from the creek and does the hunting and the trapping. Phil Nye thought that habit came a little too close to the Dhel way of things, traveling in threes, and asked where the other two were. Koa told him he had traveled in four.

Not all of them keep their word, and the ones who do resent the ones who do not. A hobgoblin captain out of Draazstone, careful first to say that his own band were no mercenaries, drew the line for Koa: some Free Folk are Free Folk only temporarily, a short stay on the way to somewhere else, and those will take the highest bidder and flip sides when it suits. The lifers hold their word and have a reputation to hold it with. He said it knowing exactly who he was saying it to.

They are not assumed to be literate. A man handing Koa a document asked whether he could read, and asked it without judgment, because it was a reasonable question.

Raiding and the Arrangement

They live their lives on horseback, and they raid. Villages and farms are hit for food and for whatever valuables are in them, occasionally rather than as a trade: they are part-time raiders, and not bloodthirsty toward common people. Most of the time it does not come to a raid at all. A village decides instead to host them for a season, which buys off the raid and buys something else with it, because Free Folk camped nearby keep other bandits away. A good part of the region runs on that arrangement, and the name the people of Idir have for them came out of it.

Where they do come to odds it is with the rulers nearby, because they respect no border and no authority whatsoever, and they do not shy from a fight if challenged. Threatened, they lash out in quick and precise strikes. Otherwise they roam the plains and claim them as theirs. They will not subjugate themselves to anybody they do not trust and who does not grant them vast autonomy, and anyone with coin enough can hire them to raid a particular area or pay them to stay away.

The Lands Between

They can exist at all because nobody owns the ground they range. The Idiran city-states leave the country between them lawless and everybody understands it to be so; that, and the Idiran horror of captivity, is why the Free Folk live in those in-between lands unmolested. There is no slavery in Idir, and they carry a reputation for being against it wherever they go.

They live around the forests rather than in them, on every side, and go under the trees mainly in winter or when they are hiding from a persecution, which happens now and again. Otherwise it is the plains, and the first thing a Free Folk mercenary learns is not to cross one alone. They range the Saltmarch, the unclaimed ground where Taziondale, Eldamar and the Vala all stop short of one another, and do not treat it as a border at all. From Loshev they are said to be wandering somewhere well to the north, and their elders have been in the region a long time.

Two of the cursed keeps stand in country they range, north of Haudh-Gwenn and near where Koa’s family camps, and neither has been entered. The Twisted Grove, which has, lies near them as well.

They keep no businesses, which is why a festival that shuts a town down does nothing to them. Koa has celebrated the Martyr’s feast among them exactly once and found it far tamer than a town’s; any occasion at all is an occasion to drink, and they do not do much with games. They keep good horses, better than what can be had in Loshev, and Koa has more than once planned a trip north for the purpose. Their cooking is a point of pride, or at least their soup, which he holds is better and better salted than anything made in a town. Pilgrims of the Chantry of Tranquility come out to them with aid as part of earning their way, and come often, because the Free Folk do not always have what they need. Yara holds that Vroga Waruk sits close in their hearts, which is why she meant to go and find some of them.

What Is Said of Them

Reliable if you pay them properly, and distrusted otherwise. That is the shape of it in every town they pass through. An innkeeper who sees them regularly allowed that they are a decent group, most of them, and that you cannot judge a whole people by the worst among them. Elsewhere the word for them is Merz, and it is never said without something in front of it. Infamous is another of Idir’s words for them and unruly a third, and neither is a word they use of themselves. In Vigil it was put politely, that morality is not necessarily what the Free Folk are known for, and a commander of theirs used them as the byword for a bad plan: this is not the god’s damn Free Folk, we are not riding into a battle half drunk and sliding off our horses. Koa’s own verdict is the least generous of any of them. A great many of them are mercenaries whose morality is guided by where the coin lands, and that, he says, is the way he was headed before he fell into this.

Orsugo is said in some tellings to be one of them, and in one telling to be their chief. A guard on the road west put it to Koa’s face: Orsugo is one of yours, I knew it, damn Free Folk always up to no good. Nothing supports the claim but the telling of it.

Campaign Updates

They have never turned out as a faction. What has appeared is individuals: a bare-armed axe-woman near sixty keeping the door of a bad tavern in Haudh-Gwenn, a red-skinned hobgoblin named Bhir who ran with Koa years ago, and the band that happened to be in Loshev the night the fires went up and stayed to fight them. That night ended with a brawl in a shelter room and then an embrace, when the man Koa was fighting learned he was Free Folk too and demanded to know why he had not said so. One of the older ones asked Koa when he had last been out on a Free Folk raid, then answered himself: too young. Bhir meant afterwards to take a post with Loshev’s winter guard.

Koa’s reckoning after that night was that the Free Folk are not an army, but are closer to being able to raise one than any town in Idir is on its own. Nothing has been done with the thought. Neither has the one concrete plan ever made for them, which was to hand Beltran Grayeras into their keeping and let them hold him where no country’s law reaches. It was argued at length in the Crack and set down again: there are a great many of them, they are mercenaries, and a man with Beltran’s money would only need to find the right one.

Koa’s family joined them when he was already a teenager, and he left again before long to find a purpose. His parents are with them yet, or were the last time he saw them, which was two years before he said so.