Jaden

Background

She came out of the slaver camp with Harveen and asked for a word before the company rode: two Amultan soldiers in the padded underclothes of armor they no longer had, with accents Aldo placed at once as neighbors of his own. Four of them had walked away from a war that is still running, and two of the four never came out of the mountains. Pressed on what the four had actually been doing, Harveen gave it up: two were deserting, and two had come along out of loyalty. She was one of the loyal ones. She had been trying to get the others turned round and taken home, and she told him he should not be telling anyone that.

Amulta tests its children for magic young, on the understanding that everybody serves eventually and it is better to know early what they will serve as. Those who have it train as mages, or as gish. She has none in her blood and says so plainly, so she went the other road, and made non-commissioned rank in a service whose ranks nobody in the company could ever get straight. She writes in Galden by reflex and has to stop, scratch it out and do it again in Peren for anyone else to read. She has served in a company with a healer assigned to it, through at least one battle they won badly.

Appearance

Gruff, and severe. Nothing else about her was ever written down: no height, no coloring, no face, and no description of her kit after the first day, when she had none. She is human. After the cairn the company judged she could not walk fifty miles east and put her on a horse, which says more about the state she was in than about her build.

Personality

Her temper came before anything else anybody noticed about her, and it is the thing she has spent the longest working on.

She was recruited along with Trinity to fight Mikhail so that somebody could take the measure of how he fought, and the two of them beat him exhaustively. She was furious when Harveen was jailed to buy the company a few days’ delay, certain of everything that had been done to him and able to prove none of it. On the road west she lost patience with the company changing its mind by the hour and announced she was going south alone, and Harveen followed her. The company turned back and tracked the pair rather than leave them to die out there, and found them bound and gagged beside a hobgoblin fire, tied, the hobgoblins explained, only to stop them killing one another. Cut loose, he said she had tried to kill him, and she said it might not be the last time.

At the cairn she came apart. She read the monogram cut into the stone in the characters of her own language, understood whose grave it was, and staggered off screaming for the man who had dug it and gone. Later she charged Harveen and had to be physically hauled off him, put to sleep by a spell before she could get through, and cried in Aldo’s arms for the better part of ten minutes. In the morning she apologized, agreed with Koa that whatever was still owed would keep until they were not traveling together, and cooked everyone dinner.

The accusation is hers alone. It was from her that the company heard that Raerin Corvain had wanted to carry Amulta’s case to somebody with the power to help and had never really meant to desert, that Harveen had put the idea in his ear and kept it there, and that it was Harveen’s panic on the night of the ambush that made the noise that got all four of them taken. Nobody else has ever confirmed a word of it, and he was never made to answer it.

Grief, for her, is early rising and training. The morning after the cairn she slept through, which frightened people more than the screaming had. She argued about being given a horse and then took it and rode east alone.

In Forven she was weathered in and putting on a show for a barroom, laughing too loudly and winking at the bartender, and what the performance was for became clear upstairs with the door shut. If Julius Anguil walked free she meant to kill him herself, that same day so that the message would be public, and then vanish east into the woods. When Mikhail said he knew where she was coming from she told him he did not: he had never had the iron on his wrists. When he said she would be caught she shrugged and said that at least then she would have earned them. He asked her to be patient and to spend her freedom on something larger than one corrupt man, and she said she would think on it.

She did. Months later she found him in a tavern and reported that she had not done it. The trial had slid to mid-spring and she had left town rather than trust herself within reach of the man. She would rather help hunt Beltran.

Current Role

Mikhail worked out that what the Chantry of Tranquility had done for Leon Yaegar was the thing she needed, and put it to her gently. Three weeks of that care gave back a woman the company did not recognize: she bought the round, teased Koa, and told Mikhail he needed a hug and ought to stand still long enough to notice that it was spring. The same conversation gave him the only useful thing anyone had offered on his healing research all winter. A company healer had once told her that the body cannot be made to knit faster, and that what a healer actually does is open it to something, which the body then takes in. She could not remember the word he used for it.

The last step of the treatment was leaving Haudh-Gwenn, which was the place her grief was tied to. She rode down to the Crack with Edrick and she has been there ever since; when the people who are no use in a fight were escorted home she went along and then came straight back. She drinks now, which she did not use to, and between the one and the other sit a captivity, a grave and the Chantry. She has taken to Gwenivere Velmont and to Ashanti, and drank the second of them under the table.

In the cage-hall, drunk, she opened the barred room where people had been kept and named her own dead off the sarcophagi, talking through the bars to Gwenivere, who would not come through the door. She lay down in the exact spot where Koa had killed a man and said it should have been her, and then that she was glad it had been him. The guards there say she carries the spark of Vroga Waruk, as Koa does, which is the mark of the Breaker of Chains having looked at a fighter once in a battle. Her own blessings call on Winifred Orenda and the Wyrd Twins.

She was at the Crack for the length of the war. The company argued at length, before ever telling her, over whether an Amultan soldier could be told that a Peredhel general was now an ally, on the grounds that she was too much a loose cannon to take it well; Mikhail cast the deciding vote and they told her. Nothing has ever put the two of them in the same room. She ended the war serving as one of Leon Yaegar’s lieutenants, greeting the company at his camp and complaining that not one of them had come back with a new scar, and then out of any purpose at all: march home to Amulta, or stay and learn from him, except that he is Dhel and she is Amultan and that war will outlast them both.

She chose home, and took the company’s road north because it was hers as far as Ridh. She meant to stop at the Crack on the way and would not say why beyond hinting that somebody there might be leaving Idir with her; who was never discovered. She was told as much about the curses as she needed to know, including that the goo at Haudh-Gwenn was people, which she took in and reduced to its practical form: so if she got it wrong, Gwen turns into goo. She was deliberately not told about the Elder. On the road she matched Koa push-up for push-up and took about two sparring rounds in three, and the animosity of their last long ride together was gone.

What Was Asked of Her

Things went sideways at burning Ridh, and they went sideways directly at her. She rode in behind Koa, dismounted at the door of the inn where the village was shut in, and fought a gnoll alone: a spear through the side first, a great deal of damage for her, and then a thrust and a slash across the chest that put it down. Koa handed her the company’s last healing potion without being asked for it.

Then she left them. There was a column of townsfolk walking south to Haudh-Gwenn with no soldiers behind it and hyenas somewhere behind that, and it needed somebody who could hurt a hound badly enough to make it stop, so she thanked Koa for the opportunity and told him this was simply more important. She turned south with the refugees, and the ride north went on without her.

Much of the rest of it was never closed off. The companion she was searching for was never found. Julius came to no verdict anyone wrote down. Beltran was killed by other hands with her a long way off. But the question the company asked aloud the day she came out of the Chantry, whether she would hold when things went sideways, has an answer now. She took a spear through the side, killed the thing that gave it to her, and then turned her back on the keep for a column of farmers.