Asiya Azrak

A hobgoblin of Clan Azri, tall for one, scarred through the left eye, and standing with the locked posture of a career soldier. Before the council she commanded on the eastern marches of Peredhel, out toward the Barren Lands, and the stories that came back with her have her eating the chieftains she killed and keeping their skulls. A rival councilor is said to have died by her own marked letter opener. She pushed Haudh-Gwenn to raise a military for years before it agreed to, and her seat’s business is the taxes taken on the rivers and the guarding of them. She carries an ornate gemmed bastard sword given her by the Prince of Duin, the River King, a gift of the same weight as Leon Yaegar’s, which is why those who know what it means assume she served at sea.

Whose side she was on was an open question through the rising. Lady Talia said it plainly: she did not believe or trust the idea that Asiya had not been Beltran’s all along, and of the eight it was Asiya who had the strongest standing relationship with the army he hired. Then she answered it in the Grayeras sitting room. She told Traxian to his face that the party’s argument was sound, and when he called the army mine she corrected him: she thought he meant the council’s. He took that as very near treason and refused her the family guard, so she carried the stand-down order out to the enemy camp herself, alone.

She had been wearing one of the witch’s cursed figures of Lady Eravil Dark Eyes on a pendant, believing it a gift from her daughter. It was not, and when she learned what it did she called it hideous and threw it on the floor. She was furious with Khadija for emptying the medical stores she had hoarded in her riverside warehouse, and voted last, and grudgingly, to have the seizure recorded as her own generous wartime donation. She kept the mercenary who had been contracted to carry her daughter off, saying only that she was not through with him yet, and nobody in the room objected. To get Khudan his passage to Deadport she called in favors and owed others, and when he would not take a councilor’s word she gave him a G’lin honour-oath instead.

On the morning the armies were due to stand down she rode up to the bridge with six guards, put her sword to the chest of the man holding it, told him that with the captaincy of the guard fallen the army answered to her, and disbanded him and his where they stood. At the parley that followed she was talked over by both Leon and Nadier Veilen, and came within a horse-step of opening Nadier with a drawing cut; only a deliberately violent note off Mikhail’s lute cut the moment and handed her the floor. She used it to offer every man on Nadier’s side his full pay to stand down, and triple wages to whoever took his commander for her, and then quadruple. Eleven of his own riders turned on him at once. No council vote stands behind that promise, and it may yet come out of her own assets.