Hinta

Background

She came to Loshev out of Draazstone, and for the first few seasons that was all anyone in the town had of her. She was raised near the mining town and trained inside it, at the same forge that makes the silver-lined weapons the Muharib carry, though she did not say so for years and nobody in Loshev thought to ask. She grew up a few miles from Wraithblade Keep without ever learning it was there.

Her clan is known by its crest and by nothing else: a pair of wyvern horns, rising at a slant. The anvil beneath them is hers, added to the horns by her own hand, and the two together are the mark she burns into her work. The clan’s name was never written down.

Word of her ran ahead of the name. Weapons made by a Draazstone smith newly come to Loshev were said to have a hint of magic in them, and the market told it two ways: some of the talk put the phrase on Trugs, the other Draazstone smith then setting up in the town, and called that smith a woman. Which of the two was meant was never settled. A set of fine knives belonging to Phil Nye, held to carry a little magic, traveled in a satchel with the anvil and the horns burned into its leather.

Appearance

Hobgoblins grow hair on the head and a rough of fur at forearm and shin. She is completely bald, ears somewhat pointed, and she works in leathers that are not armor but wrap close enough to serve as some. She is plainly in hard condition. Her age, her height and her coloring were never written down.

The Work

Her life’s work is the recreation of Mól weaponsmithing, and before the company walked into her shop she had had exactly one sample to learn from. She kept the Mól long-spear head as her fee for cleaning and authenticating the rest, and named that fee without argument after biting one of the coins.

What the Mól did, as she understands it, is run electrum through steel like veins under flesh, for the conduction. Electrum runs at a fraction of the heat steel needs, so the two will not marry honestly; she can only approximate it by chilling hard and pouring, and only in the deep of winter. Koa’s masterwork greatsword is that approximation: a thin electrum rod and branch poured into the blade, with the seat for a stone deliberately left open so that any cut of gem could be set into it later, and swapped out afterwards. She built it to hold such stones on purpose.

The rest of her output for the company runs long. A blocking rapier with a cross-guard that shields the hand and electrum filigree echoing Koa’s cloak, and an armored kilt to go with it. An earthbreaker she sold as an eastern weapon of the Karak, which it is not, her knowledge of the far east having come to her second hand. A morning star off her apprentice’s bench, for the price of a cutlass she would only accept if Koa revered Tavius or Snaga, and on the condition that he never let Mikhail or Aldo hold the thing. A fire-bolt kit fitted to Aldo’s crossbow for five gold. Horse barding, traded off a battlefield and hammered to fit one animal at a time. She refused outright to build Aldo’s battle aspergillum and set an apprentice to copy it and make it better instead.

She reads metal faster than she reads people. She brushed Koa’s calipers clean and found the maker’s stamp on them, and named the workshop. She took one look at the electrum rings and had not only their use out of them, that they clip onto an electrum-cored weapon and come off again where a set stone will not, but the fact that the way they are made means a third exists somewhere.

Two human boys work the forge out front and do not make the real blades. The blades come from the back, and from a Draazstone apprentice she keeps for the fine jobs. When the company found an ever-burning smokeless forge with three quenching buckets that never empty, standing in a dead clan’s keep, their first thought was to give it to her.

Personality

She met the company hostile and stayed hostile for an hour, and what thawed her was the goods rather than the manners. She interrupts. She prices high against a man she knows will haggle, and does it without embarrassment. She is blunt and she is not deceitful, which the company came to rely on more than they relied on her goodwill. Told that a sword she was still restoring had been promised away to somebody else, she went white with a rage she only just held. Told that a giant spider had taken up residence in the Zarkhûn forge, she was afraid, and it was the first time anyone had seen that on her.

Her working creed is that steel is forged with memory and can be given a new purpose, which is what she says over a blade with a bad history before she agrees to take it in.

Whether she fights is told two ways. She was taken at first for a woman with a fighter’s tone who does not fight. Afterwards she fought a raider off at her own forge and held them there, and she sparred one of the Muharib and held her own, then snapped that in truth he had let her win and had taken nothing off her.

Relationships

Koa is the one she warmed to, and it took a season. She would not design for him until she had watched him fight, and sent Aldo out to hire the men to give her one. She rubbed the blood back into his legs when he sat too long at a dinner table, and told him flatly she liked his jawline. Mikhail’s music moved her more in one evening than a winter of sparring ever had. Aldo she disliked from the first hour and muttered a G’lin threat about, and Rakhzan she hates outright, for a reason never written down.

She was answerable once for the safety of the merchant Phil Nye, and she blames herself for his death still. His widow Phillipa she knows. Somewhere out east she has a third cousin, an albino hobgoblin scholar of Mól history and planar energies, banished to Yovance, whose name was never written down.

Her sympathies do not run with her neighbors. When Loshev was raided she did not share the town’s view of the raiders, and pressed on it she opened up: they are the Muharib, the living clan, the one great Mól clan left, removed before the empire fell. She had sparred one of them and she knew him. Their leader, for his part, had questioned her hard about Yullen Gemsmith’s son and had gone to the house looking for him.

With the Company

She agreed to travel with the company on one condition, which was that she be allowed to look at the cursed blade herself: if it was genuinely cursed she would not stand in the way of breaking it, and if it was frightening enough she might help. Arriving at Haudh-Gwenn she was jailed and robbed before she reached anyone, and was broken out again by Rheem without ever being told who had paid for it. She came into the Crack bruised and nursing an arm, and stopped at every stretch of Mól stonework in the tunnels to admire it.

What she gave the company there was the shape of the thing they had been walking through for three seasons. Each great clan was its own nation, its own bloodline and its own law, united with the others only because you are stronger together than apart, and each curse-keep is the heartbeat of one clan. That is why the keeps feel like different countries. She offered to set a radiance crystal into Koa’s sword, warned that taking it out again would be very hard, and agreed the plan: Mikhail would hold the stone while she and Koa broke the Wraithblade, which had been broken before and put itself back together afterwards.

The Breaking

What told her how to do it was a sword she was already working on. Studying the socket at the center of the Mól blade the company had sent her to refurbish, she understood that the socket is the focal point of everything worked into a blade, the place all of it runs to and through. She put it to Koa plainly: because she knew how to recreate it, she thought she knew how to destroy it.

Before they rode she was given the Mól calipers, which the company had carried for seasons as a fine measuring tool and which are nothing of the kind. They are a Mól open vessel, a thing that is nearly a being, and where the spark to wake one exists in a person and that person is willing, a portion of them goes into it and lives there for good: a symbiote rather than a parasite, never turned against the one who fed it, and paid for with a permanent negative level. Koa had the spark himself and handed her the chance instead. She took it, and said what she had been saying since she first held them, that it was almost as though they knew they belonged to her, that these were of her people.

She rode north with Koa, and with Jaden as far as burning Ridh, where she found four survivors in a house north of the village and sent them after the rest. She was also the one who saw that Ridh had not been a few gnolls, and pointed east. At Wraithblade Keep she and Koa were shut into the anvil room for a week with two horses and the sword in its box, waiting on the timing, while the sword’s dead crowded the corridors outside and gnolls prowled the courtyard. With her hand flat on the Mól stone of the anvil, she told him she wanted to forge.

At the appointed minute her hammer came down and the Khopesh shattered like glass, along the electrum woven through it, with the door behind her already burning. She was hauled through two teleports nobody had warned her about, then left alone in the Twisted Grove map room with the horses while the curse broke: plant-demons out of the ground, thunder inside the building, every seam of the table and the walls blazing first with a killing cold and then with warmth. She had no share of the piece of Nancáro the company carried, and she took the rough end of what came afterward. Koa has insisted since that the breaking was hers and that she be credited with it. Mikhail would rather it stayed quiet a while.

Current Role

The calipers made sense to her the way a language does. She reads a block of stone she can see one face of and knows its unseen depth, how much electrum runs through it and in what shape, and something close to its weight; the company’s joke is that she stole them. What she wants is the forge at Wraithblade Keep, which she says makes electrum as workable as steam-bent wood. With that a smith could weave electrum throughout a blade rather than set it in as a core, which is what she has spent years approximating in the deep of winter.

At the reading of Torgun Kurvroc’s will she was given a few Mól pieces and outright ownership of the very sword she had been restoring for him. When the Draazstone claimants closed on Mikhail over the estate she cut them off with a flat instruction to take what they got and get over it, and to one of them who had known her before she said only that he had not been good enough.