Brindle

The Peren who kept the Wyvern’s Tale, which was the only tavern in Ridh. What sort of house it was depends on who is asked. Four tables were left of the nine the room was built for, the bar had half the stools it should, and the keg drew slow because it was nearly always nearly out, which is a building in worse repair than most barns; but Koa, who grew up going to it, knew it as old, well made and stone-walled, and it was the stone that made it the place the whole village sheltered in when wyverns came over. Both accounts stand.

He knew Koa well before any of this and had a standing arrangement with him: get a room drinking and rowdy and a few beers came free, so long as the rowdiness stopped short of breaking anything, because he could not afford to replace what got broken. Koa once broke a stool by sitting down on it, sober. He later put a chair through the same treatment, and the six slivers owed for it were a matter between the two of them. It had been Brindle’s favorite chair.

He worked the way a man works who has done it a long time. He caught Koa’s eye across the room, had the mug up and pouring before a word was said, then leaned a little too heavily on the bar and asked what trouble he had been in lately, first drink on the house for news off the road. He called him boy and hoped the tale was not too tall. He asked, as a favor and not a bargain, that if Koa ever rode southeast to where the honeysuckle grows brightest he bring a bushel of it back, because his wife would be glad of it, and told him in the same breath that a man who travels those plains alone with plains cats in them is a few pennies shy of a silver. What he said about the fields around Ridh, he said flatly: they hold more people nobody knows than people anybody does.

He was also where work in Ridh started. He lowered his voice about the stranger at the end of his bar, an old Peren drinking quietly and paying, and said it plainly: not the man to ask for a job, but he might have something himself if Koa did not get his hopes up. The stranger was Leon Yaegar. Brindle kept his chin better shaven than a town that sleepy would account for.

Campaign Updates

Gnolls burned Ridh around him. The village did with the fires what it did with wyverns and went into the tavern, which is exactly what the gnolls had counted on: they drove two swords through the door timbers from outside, snapped the handles off and piled debris against it, so that the bar could not be lifted and the door could not be shoved. Koa broke the blades out of the wood with a hammer, and the people who came out through the smoke were far fewer than he had hoped for. Brindle was among them, with one arm charred. He described the gnoll who had done it, whose hands were spitting oil with a torch, and then the two of them stood in the ash comparing burns, Koa allowing that Brindle’s were the wider spread and the less severe. He greeted him as he always had, and told him Haudh-Gwenn was a mess but that the danger there should be gone.

Then he came back with a gift, a dagger he had held for years and his predecessor before him and had never once needed to defend the house with. It is very dark brown and sheened, bone or chitin rather than metal, with ruddy scaled leather at the grip and a small bulge like a cyst at the base. It came out of Draazstone, he said, carved from one of the stingers. Asked the stinger of what, he pointed at the sky. What he said instead of explaining was that the heavens should watch over Koa.

The survivors were sent south to Haudh-Gwenn with what they stood in. Whether Brindle walked with them was never written down.