Daric

Background

Daric ran both of the mercenary crews sent down the Haudh-Gwenn road after the Valiant Few. The work came through Whent, a guardsman of Haudh-Gwenn, at two gold a head, and what the men under him had been told was that they were hunting outlaws. Whose was not part of the offer.

He gave his name in the cell as Dar. Mikhail had been letting the prisoners believe he did not follow Taal, and dropped the pretense only once Dar had said enough to be worth it, which is how the company learned that Dar was the short form of Daric and that his family had been a good deal further up in the world than his trade was.

The crew had worked that city before. Months earlier they had taken the family who ran its bank, Sarro Rashid’s, bound and gagged out of Haudh-Gwenn on a wagon and handed them off to somebody else, and where they went after that he could not say. He was not happy about any of it. Naming Beltran Grayeras got a reaction out of him he could not cover, and that is what settled for the company whose money was behind the bounty on them.

His creed, said flatly and more than once, was that he got the job done and did not murder, and that the killing was going to be left to the others. It is a line about contract and not about squeamishness, and the cell showed the difference. He took hold of the archer who had been shot out of the tree and worked his thumb into the arrow wound until the man screamed, and it took three of the company to break the grip. An hour later he sat with the blood drying under his thumbnail and into the fur of his hand and could not be got to care about it. Weighed afterward, what stood to his credit was that he had been an unwilling participant in the hunt. What stood against it was that he had known exactly the scope and the power of the man he was reluctant to cross.

Current Role

He came out of the canopy at Koa’s flank and Koa put him down in a single swing. Mikhail stabilized him rather than let the enemy’s leader bleed out, and his morning star and his worn studded leather went to Koa.

Eight prisoners came off that road, and the war-council over them ran most of the night. They could not be fed indefinitely, releasing them into Haudh-Gwenn would have handed the base to Beltran, and Leon Yaegar refused execution outright. The case was put to all eight together and all eight took it. Daric came over.

He was spent once, as currency. When the company needed something to put in front of the Silver Web they gave up his crew’s work on the bank family, which was the piece the brokers had not had.

He is at The Crack now, kept on because the recruits there do not like each other and he keeps them in order regardless. Nobody uses the full name: he is D, and he is Buggy, the second of those coined by Leon on an evening when he could not remember the first. When a vial went missing from the Crack and Leon ordered every man on the site searched, he handed Daric to Koa, on the grounds that it would not go over easily and the two of them had a mutual understanding. Daric took deep offense at the accusation, stripped bare where he stood, and told Koa to check him. He came up clean. Koa’s reason for beginning with him was that he had never thought Daric took it and had meant to put him on the search instead. Then Daric asked whether he had permission to leave, and left.