Khadija Dalzen

A hobgoblin, around twenty years old, and likely the youngest of the eight who govern Haudh-Gwenn. She is Asiya Azrak’s daughter, and the seat came to her by that and nothing else, which she has never pretended otherwise about. What she spends it on is schooling and the Chantry of Tranquility, which is still funded because of her. Omar Zokner is the colleague she works most closely with on the council, and by the time the city came apart she had not seen him in some time.

The night Beltran died she was out in the streets and the streets caught her. Koa found her cornered in the open by four looters with her necklace already torn off her throat and an audience standing round enjoying it, and put himself between them until they went. She would not be talked into hiding afterward, because she could not stand up for people she was hiding from, and she went on twice touching her bare throat while she said so. She was also, to Koa’s bewilderment and Mikhail’s, a genuine admirer of Mikhail’s earliest and most obscure songs, which friends out of town had sent her copies of.

She has done the practical work of the rising by hand. She wrote and sealed the writ by which the council would pay Beltran’s army its full contracted due and a bonus on top of it to disband and disregard his last orders. She went back through her mother’s old ledgers, found the medical stores Asiya had been hoarding in a riverside warehouse, and carted them to the hospital herself, load by load. She was walking in for a second cartload when she found the Valiant Few in the doorway with a mercenary at the end of a crossbow, and learned from them that she was the reason he was there: contracted to take her away unharmed for a few weeks and give her back.

Rather than let the seizure stand as a theft her mother could hold over her, she forced a vote recording it as Asiya’s own generous wartime donation. All four hands went up, Asiya’s last. “Then the matter is settled. Congratulations, you’re a saint.” She said in front of the same room that her mother was already working out how to profit from the plan to rewrite the banking rules, and that she was glad she had taken the supplies. Then, when the meeting broke up, she went over and hugged her.

The question she put to the party is the one nobody else on the council would ask straight. Were the Valiant Few going to stay outsiders, vagrants to some and heroes to others, or be seen to work with the council? She asked it with a deliberately even hand and no pressure in it, which Aldo read as its own kind of pressure. Koa answered neither, and she crossed the room to put a hand on his shoulder: she believed every word of it, and “optics are optics. You’re going to have to choose which anchor to throw.”