Captain Jack

Background

He has never given a surname. The party were sent to him before they had ever seen Harad, by a bar two towns west that could not agree on what he was called: one woman was certain of Bernard, a drinker at the next table was certain of Jack, and the room settled on what Harad itself uses, which is the Captain. He gave the name Jack himself when they finally met, and added that people usually say Captain Jack but need not.

Of what came before Harad he says almost nothing. He served some time in his day, in his phrase. He has dug trenches and taken his part in raising a barracks, and he is careful to add that he was not the one leading those projects. He has never named a home town, a family, a unit, or a war of his own.

Appearance

Human, and past the middle of his life: late forties or early fifties, with mid-length hair going gray and a short beard kept at the stage where a man always looks two days from his last shave, that gray too. The face is heavily worn and so are the hands. He goes armored, the weight of it pulls at him, and he holds his back straight under it anyway, which is the tell of a man who was a soldier for many years. When thirteen armed people came out of the secured slaver cave to meet the party he was among the last of them, and he had a sword already in his hands.

Personality

The honesty he is known for is not a temper but a standard, and he applies it to himself first. Told that the cargo he had waved through under the Seal of Forven had people in the hold, and that the friend who had covered half his town’s shortfalls had been the one selling them, he offered on the spot to turn himself in to the men who had brought him the evidence, and said aloud that he did not know whether he deserved the leadership he had been given. Nobody had asked him for either.

He is careful with the dead. He put the disposal of the bodies at the cave to the crew who would have to do the work, let them vote, and buried the rest; one man he took for a Peren and gave what he guessed was the right rite, on a guess and nothing better, because there was no one left to ask. When Harad’s militia shot a horse out from under a captured courier and broke the man’s ribs, he questioned him, released him and gave him a horse to replace the one they had killed.

He is warm and physical about it, an embrace for each of them on sight, and he apologizes for a poor table rather than not set one: he has no guest rooms to offer and says so, and offers the fire and the carpet in front of it instead. Of Luca’s methods, once they had gone badly, he said only that it was less subtle than anticipated and they would have to make do.

Relationships

Luca Green keeps the town’s eye on things while Jack handles what he calls the more important matters, and Jack lends him out for the work a captain cannot be seen doing. Edrick vouched for him to the party before any of them had met him, on the strength of the town’s willingness to fight slavery.

Ashtara Walnut was his friend. She bought land in Harad at a fair price, built a house on it, and gave the town money every year, once two dozen gold at a stroke; he told her every year that it was too much, and she said it was what friends do. He spent whole winters of evenings with her at the tavern. Luca never warmed to her, never gave a warning, and Jack drew that line himself, unprompted and out of Luca’s hearing, because he wanted it understood that one of them had been right. When the party let her leave Idir under a deal rather than hang her, he was surprised, and he did not go after her, because he has peace in the area to keep.

Current Role

He is still captain, and still the most reliable address on the river. The bridge is his charge and its repair is a running argument with the ice; so is a building project he is visibly proud of, for which an architect was fetched from Bardh, near the university at Meshtes. He keeps the originals of Ashtara’s documents in Harad, and what circulates elsewhere are copies.

He feeds the Crack out of Harad’s surplus and asked that as few people know of it as possible. Asked to name wardens for the camp, Dwayne put him on the list and the party held him in reserve, Harad being hard to reach once the weather turned. Professor Ashanti al-Hassan and Elliot were put into his keeping when their names grew too loud to carry, and Cleven Gemsmith was settled in the town after them. His is one of the names written into letters as somewhere safe to run.

He was last seen out celebrating Martyr’s Day in his own town, which is what a captain does when the docks are screened and the winter is bought.