Dwayne

Background

He has no surname, no family and no home town beyond Idir itself. What he has is a trade. He reads ground, handles animals, lays a camp, cooks, keeps a tally, and does all of it for money because nobody has ever offered him anything else. He had culled plains-cats for the Loshev council before the company ever heard of him.

Before that he took a job guiding a crew of six up-river to a Mól keep north of Ridh. He thought it was a simple piece of work. What was in the keep were goblins that carried spears and hatchets and moved wrongly for goblins, and one that seemed to be giving the others orders with a proper sword in its hand. The ambush broke the crew into every man for himself. One voice calling for help turned out to be bait. He ran, found one body, buried it, and did not know who else was dead.

He was the only man to walk away from that keep, and for a long while he had every reason to think he was the only man to come out of it at all. He was not. Eralan Rasi, the crew’s lead scout, was cut alive out of the cocoons in the keep’s webbed basement long afterwards. His brother Jahi was not so lucky. Neither was the mercenary Oshuun Karral, who got out of the keep with a cursed blade, carried it to Beltran Grayeras, and was killed by him for it.

There is a worse part, and it took a campfire and two nights of not sleeping to get out of him. There had been more than goblins in the dark: humanoids with swords, a man and a woman among them. He loosed at a shape and has come to believe it was one of the Rasi brothers. I think I may have been part of the problem. And the crew had not really been hired by anyone honest. Whent, acting for Beltran, had bought that expedition, which means the worst thing that ever happened to Dwayne was arranged by the man he later spent a year scouting.

Appearance

A road-worn man in a green traveling cloak patterned for the woods, an unstrung bow across him and a sword he sometimes forgets to draw. When the company first opened a door on him he had a fresh untreated scar down his face and a bandaged wrist, and had not slept. His height, his build and his coloring were never written down. He is always described as tired.

In the Field

Torgun Kurvroc hired him to lead the company to the ruins and to keep a tally of everything they pulled out, which is to say he was both guide and his paymaster’s eyes, and everyone involved knew it. The company’s first decision about him was to be good to him so that he would look the other way. It worked, and then it stopped mattering, because they came to like him.

He is worth more than the tally. He re-packed their badly balanced loads on the first morning and offered to teach Koa how to make a torch out of nothing and where to graze horses. He carried three axes, a hatchet, a splitting axe and a throwing axe, and let the company chisel roots by hand for an entire night before mentioning it. He lays out a bonfire camp better than anyone the company has traveled with. He rode back through the razor vines for a gashed mule. He smoked out a bee’s nest for honey and got a medical kit’s worth of use out of it. He keeps caches hidden in woodland that may not all be his, and out of one of them came a bag of catnip and a flask of midnight milk. Traveling with him, nobody in the wilderness goes hungry or thirsty, and he can dress a wound with whatever is at hand.

He makes his own ammunition, and it matters twice. The blunted crossbow bolts he gifted Aldo are what eventually put down the sentinel in the Twisted Grove. The last things anyone recovered from his ransacked room in Haudh-Gwenn were two blunt arrows and a barbed one for grappling, left half-made on the bench.

He diagnosed Mikhail’s pneumonia and said plainly that he had never once saved anybody from it, then sat with him until he was through it.

What He Can See

At Wraithblade Keep he was exposed to something, and it did not leave with him. He alone can see the keep’s specters. He saw two or three of them circling Whent and panicked, and when the bindings loosened two of them went inside the man, which is what the feral fits had been; he advised putting Whent down like a sick animal. When Yara’s rite burned them out, it was Dwayne who counted them going, two to one to none, and confirmed it had worked. Afterwards he was the instrument the company used to survey Haudh-Gwenn for the same affliction, walking its streets to say which of Beltran’s lieutenants were ghosted. He was not always right: the sunken eyes he read on Davi Solt turned out to be plain exhaustion.

Whether he could also see the Elder was told two ways. At the Twisted Grove the company kept him out of that room on the understanding that he could neither see nor hear it. Afterwards he was spoken of as a man who can. What changed in between was never discovered.

What the sight cost him is not in dispute. The nightmares he told the company had stopped had never stopped. The Chantry was too overwhelmed to treat him and Baku turned him away; offered the hospital again he refused it himself and went back to work. By the end he was sleepless to the point of nearly loosing an arrow at a friend in an inn corridor. What finally worked was Mikhail’s untested dream-protection spell, sat over all night in the same room in case it went wrong, and Dwayne woke from the best sleep of his life and went straight out to help whittle more conduits for it.

Relationships

Kurvroc underpaid him and strung him along with the promise of more work, and Dwayne said so, and the company thanked him and told him he had probably saved their lives. He would take work from them again, for a cut, not for free, and never as far as the goblin keep, and never against Haudh-Gwenn.

He found Kithul half-dead on the road, flagged down a wagon, and got him to the Chantry, which is the only reason there is a Kithul afterwards. He taught the Crack to hunt and to fletch, and is named alongside Leon Yaegar and Edrick as one of the three men running it. Asked for names to serve as the camp’s warden he produced four: Captain Jack out of Harad, Picard, Hanza, and the aged Captain Margaret. Nobody had heard Hanza’s name before he said it.

In Haudh-Gwenn he became something else again. He worked the city with Casper, and it was Dwayne who let the company know that the Support the Few mutual-aid movement was a front arming a hidden resistance, and Dwayne who walked them through a poor quarter to meet Lady Talia Salahaudhi, who had doubted the Valiant Few were still alive. He lit her hearth on the way in. Her old caretaker believes he is courting her, and he lets the household go on believing it. He would not be talked into an assassination.

Current Role

His room was broken into and searched by Grayeras guards while he was out, twice over, and his face went onto a wanted sketch with Casper’s and Gwenivere’s. He and Casper took an innkeeper’s family out of the city toward the Crack, both of them too well known by then to stay, and the only eyes in Haudh-Gwenn that could count a specter went with him. He is off with Leon and the army: occupied, not gone.