Cleven Gemsmith

Background

He was a Peren scholar in his thirties, sent north out of Loshev by his councilman father on the family’s business, and in Forven he fell in with Mikhail over music and the University. He picked Mikhail for what he was within a few minutes of talking to him and was delighted about it. What exactly the errand was is told two ways: that he had gone north to meet a ship, and that he had gone north to find Captain Torr. Either way he found Torr.

Mikhail, who had taken the captain for a trafficker and turned down a place on his boat, warned him off. Cleven could not read a room at all, went to confront the captain over what he had seen, and in the morning he was gone. He left behind a sealed letter of introduction to Nikolas Rook under a gem and filigree seal, which is the only reason Mikhail ever went to Loshev, which is the reason for everything after it.

He spent his captivity drugged and remembered little, but he had heard enough through it to be worth having back: talk of new construction at Westwood, with men sent down into the camp’s chasm to cut a tunnel toward it, and a leader he was never allowed to look at, who spoke like a man of Haudh-Gwenn and was said to have had a prodigy’s upbringing. That was the first thread that ran to Beltran Grayeras, and it took a long time to pull.

He nearly did not come out at all. He was found unchained among the captives at the auction camp, and Torr, already down, put a blade in him anyway. He was moments from dying when Koa blocked the bleeding.

Personality

What he looked like was never written down. His manner is another matter. He cannot read a room. He hates being touched, and said so over the rescue stew, which he also hated. He kept a wax-seal ledger procedure so rigid that a man paying him six gold he was owed had to sign in three other people’s names to satisfy it. He wore mittens indoors and took the one seat by the fire. He used the correct fork every time, including on the night he was sent away for good.

He was also, at the one moment it counted, the most generous man in the room. He pressed a sapphire worth two dozen gold into Mikhail’s hand as thanks and went to bed without waiting to see what was made of it. He is a devoted admirer of Gerald the flautist, whom nobody else in Loshev can stand, and tipped him six silver for a performance.

Relationships

His father is Yullen Gemsmith, who left Peredhel precisely so that his children would not have to face the mette-hina, and who earned the name Gemsmith in order to give it to them. Cleven refuses the rite outright, and refuses to father children he would have to send away. I say we break the mold. They argued about it at his own homecoming dinner and he walked out early. Yullen’s private complaint, then and afterwards, is of a son who will not open up to him.

He worked the family trade well enough to be trusted with stones. He recognized a badly rough-cut Nar that Koa had been carrying for what it actually was, and offered to cut it properly, warning that it would take months and might ruin it. Whether the gem work the company kept bringing to that house was the son’s or the father’s was never settled; both men were named for it.

He ran the Loshev auction house: the sale of everything that had stood inside the company’s own granted home, which is why they found it stripped when the Council handed it over, and the Mól Encyclopædia sale after it. And he was hunted. The Muharib leader questioned Hinta about him by name, and went to the Gemsmith house looking for him, and did not find him. Why they wanted him was never discovered.

The Friend in the Warehouse

He found a toad in the auction warehouse and kept it for company, masking the smell of it with honeysuckle oil and floral scent because his father cannot abide amphibians. That was the story, and for a long while it was a small sad harmless thing that a man admitted in confidence and was pitied for.

It was a quasit. It had warned him to leave town before the relic hunters came, and he had gone, and lied about where. It had promised him change, and laid out a plan for it, and by his own account only ever helped him do what he already wanted done. What he wanted was written down: a manifesto for the reform of the council of Loshev by bribery, sabotage and replacement, marking Torgun Kurvroc for death and Nathan Fox as a possible ally. He had accomplished perhaps a third of it. His reading of the region was that it turns in a cycle of corruption and collapse and corruption again, and that entrenched old men are what keeps it turning.

The crime underneath the theory was smaller and grayer. He had doctored the auction ledgers so that stolen goods were struck from the seller’s records or never entered at all, and the town was the net loser on every line. Under his bed leg was a cache of Mól coin; around his room, antique Mól finery out of sales he had overseen, a ledger cross-referencing what it was all worth, his journal, and the manifesto. There was no iron anywhere in the room. He had put it under a floorboard.

The fire at Nathan Fox’s vineyard he denied and went on denying: the demon burned it, not him. When Aldo killed the quasit, Cleven had to be held down, crying that he needed it, and what took longest afterwards was convincing him it had never been his friend.

Current Role

He was not jailed and he was not exposed, and neither decision was made for his sake. Exposure would have cost Yullen his council seat and cost Loshev the one councilman worth keeping, so the price of silence was set by the father: the ledgers and the notes and every scrap of evidence burned, and every stolen item out of the town with the company. Koa objected that the wronged would get no justice at all out of an arrangement like that, and was right, and gave way.

He lives in Harad now with Elliot and Ashanti, set to honest work on the kind of change he had tried to buy. He danced a Dhel dance at the festival on the way out. He embraced Mikhail and he embraced Aldo, and thanked Aldo for the killing, and pointedly did not thank Koa. He is on the company’s short list of people who can safely be written to.