The erratic woman

Disheveled and plainly out of place wherever she stood, chanting in Bhaasha, with hair that moved against the turn of her head, coiled, and struck on its own. She put people to sleep without a word, a gesture or anything in her hands, which is not how casting works, and Leon Yaegar’s advice on her was to kill her from range before she could finish a syllable. Her name was never given.

Beltran hired her to find the Valiant Few, hold them and keep them busy. The larger job was quieter: she went about the council of Haudh-Gwenn distributing small crude effigies of Lady Eravil Dark Eyes, which dull the faculties of whoever carries them, and she handed them over as gifts from people the recipients trusted. Councilor Asiya Azrak wore hers on a pendant in the belief that her daughter had given it to her. Councilor Elren Amin turned his out of his own baggage and wondered aloud whether it was why a small burning door had got the better of him. She had run a second con on her own colleagues, convincing the ones who did not know magic that she had cursed them silent, which is why the breastplate mercenary could not describe his own contract.

She was put down in under a turn in the street without being killed, and taken prisoner. Bound, she healed her own wounds and laughed at the gag. The next day, walked across the city on a lead, her hair began to gather itself mid-ambush; with an archer on a rooftop above them, Koa would not leave a bound caster at their backs, and cut her in half. Her regalia went to Ashanti unidentified: an electrum hand harness, cuff rings, a pearl-embroidered outfit, a lyre-pendant necklace, an elaborate electrum filigree mask, a Chantry mask, and electrum bracers worked with animals.

Her effigies, the burning of Johanka Materai’s house and the attack on Lady Talia’s put the same picture together for the party at once: three votes against Beltran were being taken off the council floor in three different ways in the same week.