Hanza

Background

Her name reached the company second-hand, from a man reciting who might be got to take charge of a camp’s defenses, and nobody in the room had heard it before he said it. He had her down as a veteran of the Veren guard and the protégé of its captain. Only the second half held. Picard did train her, and she was his apprentice; the guard who eventually rode west was in her early twenties and had never held a command of her own.

The letters went east addressed to captain and apprentice together, and Picard answered for both. No for himself, and his sign-off for her. She was weighed against Captain Margaret of Ostrad, who has a lifetime of soldiering behind her, and the company chose Hanza: partly because this would be a first command rather than an errand, and partly because taking Margaret would have left Ostrad without its own defender. Then she rode, and when she arrived the first thing she said was an apology for how long it had taken her.

Appearance

A young human woman, early twenties, possibly still in her teens, though she holds herself too well for that reading to sit comfortably. She wears a chain cuirass and not much plate beyond it: padding and leathers, the kit of a small town’s guard rather than an army’s. The colors are the tell. They are Veren’s, and Koa, who has spent enough of his life on the eastern roads, knew where she was from before she gave the name of it. Nothing else about her was ever written down.

Personality

She asked permission to speak out of turn in a room where nobody required it of her, and had to be told she did not need to do that here. Given it, what she wanted to say was that Beltran Grayeras had got what was coming to him. She had also heard there was a horse at the base better than anything for miles around, and asked to be introduced to it.

Leon Yaegar gave the company his reading of her inside the day, apologizing for the indelicacy of it. A sycophant: she takes an order and carries it through wholly and completely, which has its uses and leaves no room at all to learn to make a decision. It makes for bad leaders, he said, and it is a thing most people never overcome. He added that there was another element in it he had not yet worked through and would come back to them on. He never did.

She came believing whatever Veren had been told about the people she came to serve. The legends of the Valiant Few that reached the town have them carrying children out of fires, lifting collapsed walls off the trapped, fighting gnolls and Orsugo single-handed, and killing nobody at all: every enemy captured, talked down or otherwise spared. She believed it. She had grown up in a small town hearing about a world with fire-handed gnolls in it, and reasoned that if it held evils of that size the gods might have answered with a matching good. On that understanding she suggested, sheepishly, that the militia blunt its arrows and dull its blades. It was refused. The company could not afford the disadvantage and the men they would be facing were paid volunteers rather than anyone’s puppets. When somebody asked whose suggestion it had been she colored and started to answer, and Leon closed the question off before she could. He undertook to set her straight about her heroes. They asked him not to work too hard at it.

Current Role

She came to fortify and to train, and she brought more with her than herself. There are people in Veren who will sell Idirian steeds at a fair price and lend quiet aid against Beltran; she picked the ones she judged trustworthy and put it to them herself, and it is kept quiet because a great deal of money runs between Veren and Haudh-Gwenn and word travels along with it. What the breeders would part with is their non-breeding stock. She priced it for the room out of her own knowledge of the trade: you would be lucky to get a fine light steed under thirty gold, heavier stock runs to sixty, and for this they might cut deeper. She argued for buying, said plainly that it would take everything the company had, and lost the argument to Leon, who agreed the horses were worth the money and said the coffers were not.

She carried intelligence as well. Beltran’s army was trained by men brought in from Peredhel, renowned in their own country, some of whom passed through Veren on the road with new coin in their pockets. They stayed on afterwards to lead his squadrons. They are loyal to the coin and not the cause, and they are not his lieutenants.

When the talk turned to Gwenivere Velmont and the Slumbering Queen, Leon found her an errand and sent her out of it: trusted with the war, not with the secret. By the end of the same day she and Leon were already working through where the camp would go if it had to move, and his estimate of her, for all the rest of it, was that she could get that done quickly.

Whether she ever built what she came west to build was never written down.