The Tillermen

A sellsword company that worked the better part of a decade and then stopped. They made their reputation across a whole career of it, and made enemies at the same rate, which is the sort of thing a person only mentions once the enemies have started turning up. By the time the Valiant Few heard the name the company had been retired for years and its members had scattered into ordinary lives in different towns.

The Company

Six of them, with a seventh who died very early. That death is what bonded the rest, and it happened soon enough in their career that everything they became afterward was built on the far side of it.

• Cazzik, called the Captain: their leader, and presumptuous enough about it as a boy that the name stuck. He retired into a job offer, and the job was captain of the guard at Forven.
• Blackguard Jack: the only one of them whose byname is not an alliteration on his own name. He is not Captain Jack of Harad and never was.
• Bruno, called Bruiser: a name and a byname, and nothing further.
• Milktoast Milton: the company’s wizard.
• Freya, called Face: a bard, and the only one of them who reached the university they all ran for.
• Hunter, called Beartrap: the ranger, and the one who took them through country.

They were not amateurs. Fighter, ranger, wizard and the rest of it, trained to their trades and paid for them. Most of their work was done inside Perel though not only there.

The Scattering

Forven moved on Cazzik for taking Ten Lashes money to keep Captain Jack off the smugglers’ trail, and found his house trapped from top to bottom. Two guards died going in. Two of his old crew happened to be in town, fought him clear, and went east into the woods with him, and a third guard died in the pursuit. His wife Lenore stayed behind and insisted he was innocent, and explained the traps as any household would that had made the enemies this company had made.

What she gave the party over small talk on a boat was the roster. What her courier Keith gave them, a day later in a wine cellar, was where they had gone: a library at the university at Bardh, in Peredhel, south of Meshtes through the mountains. It was too far to follow that winter, and by the time anyone could go looking the picture had changed.

The rest came back in pieces, and the pieces do not all agree. Cazzik was retaken and is in a Forven cell. Milktoast Milton is in it with him, delivered there with his fingers broken one by one, and so is Julius Anguil, the Forven merchant who is not one of the company but was kept with them and counted alongside them anyway. Freya reached the university and stayed, and Lenore is housed with her at Talesong. One of the six is dead. The party’s own reckoning put it on Hunter Beartrap, on the reasoning that he was the ranger and would have been the one leading them through the woods, but nobody settled it, and which of the six went into the ground was never established. Blackguard Jack and Bruno Bruiser were simply unaccounted for.

What the party said about them, halfway through working all this out, was that these were people playing a very prominent part in their lives for a company that had never crossed their path or committed a crime anyone could name.

Vigil

Blackguard Jack answered that. Some while before the party ever reached it, the walled town of Vigil had taken captives, executed a magic-user among them, and returned the rest to their town. The retaliation came at night. Jack led it with a dozen men behind him or more, which is twice what the company ever was, and it went to the one thing the raid was for: Lady Vigil Octavia was seized from behind, her arms looped through a man’s and held out wide so that she had no defense at all, and Jack stabbed her repeatedly and got away wounded. Which magic-user Vigil had executed was never established; the company’s own wizard was in a Forven cell by then.

The Sword of Vigilance has chosen nobody since her burial, which had never happened before, and the office is held without it.