Bhir

Background

Bhir is a hobgoblin of the Free Folk, Idirian by culture, and raised among the Free Folk rather than by any family of his own. He began pulling his weight early, having worked out young that what a man gets comes from what he does and not from what he was born to. Where other hobgoblins keep the histories of their people, he has no use for them: the warriors in those stories are dead, and the victories worth having are the ones being won now.

The accounts of his family do not agree. In one he knows only his mother and has never felt the want of a father. In the other he is an orphan who does not know his family at all.

He and Koa traveled and fought together among the Free Folk for years before Koa went off on his own, and neither had seen much of the rest of the band since. He had met Aldo once as well, though not as Aldo. What he knew of him was the sailor Billy.

The Free Folk were in Loshev the winter the fires were set and turned out to fight them, and Bhir was at it all night. Koa found him at the docks the next day, called over by another of the band, and did not place him until he turned around. The greeting was that Koa was smaller than he remembered and had been expected to be drinking alongside Vroga by now. Koa called him an old bastard, which he did not care for, being twenty-three and the elder of the two by very little. The free-folk woman traveling with him took what wind was left out of him by greeting Koa as the hero of Haudh-Gwenn as well as of Loshev. She had seen one of the gnolls herself, out west, setting a fire with its bare hand, and had taken it at the time for a good costume.

He meant to stay in Loshev for the winter. The guard captain was short-handed and paying, and he reckoned he could get decent coin out of it; he asked Koa not to judge Tariq harshly over it, the man being a good one. Koa told him what was out west, a hundred gnolls or more and a ring of fire around them, and Bhir stopped joking. What came out of that conversation, and stayed with Koa afterward, was that the Free Folk by themselves were no army but stood nearer to becoming one than any town in Idir.

Appearance

Bigger than most hobgoblins, standing near six feet, though a good part of that is boot: he wears more heel than other men do and it flatters him. Red skin. Arms long out of all proportion, which give him a reach in a fight that people do not expect, and he moves quietly for his size. He carries a morning star and prefers it to anything else.

To the company he was Bugbear and nothing else, and his own name never reached them. A bugbear is a separate people, goblin-kin and cousin to the hobgoblins, and he is not one.

Personality

Pride is the center of him. He holds himself a professional and an asset to whoever he is working for, and success is what confirms it. Failure he cannot take, and a fresh beating or a humiliation can push him into recklessness; short of that he runs no risk he does not have to. He looks for capable company on the reasoning that winning builds on itself, and he will not be the weakest man in a group, since that would put his place in it at risk. As long as there is someone weaker than him he is comfortable. He measures people by what they can do, and his loyalty attaches to the strength of the outfit rather than to any one man in it: if it starts to go under he fights harder to hold it up, for its sake and for his own.

He wants to do well. The chance to has not often been put in front of him. Koa’s read of him was that the two were cut from the same cloth, which was not something Koa could say of everyone he had taken up with since.