Kiras Hallo

Kiras Hallo was the officer standing over the guard on the desk when the Valiant Few came into Forven to say that Orsugo’s gnolls had burned Loshev and were roving west. She was the first person in that station to treat it as a thing to be acted on. The party told her the gnolls move at night, so the watch wanted setting to match, and that the townsfolk should be roused rather than left out of it, because a dry winter had left every house in Forven kindling with a fire lit in it. She said she would get buckets ready.

She was straight with them about everything else too. Julius Anguil, the wealthiest man in the town and the owner of the warehouses the Ten Lashes had been running cargo through, was in custody with enough found in them to hold him. If she were a betting woman, she told them, she would bet on his walking free. Every charge brought had something standing in front of it: an alibi, or another man who had kept the books, or worked that night, or handled those particular packages. The sentencing had been put off and put off again in the hope of turning up the one thing that would stick. Mikhail asked her to send word of the verdict on to him in Haudh-Gwenn and reached for his purse to pay a runner for it, and she told him not to be ridiculous.

What she volunteered without being asked for it was the merchants who come out of the woods. They arrive at Forven overland every two or three months rather than by the river, cloaked the same whoever is under the cloaks, near-silent, trading what they came to trade and then leaving. A man who tried to steal from a cart was run down by them, taken by the hands and delivered to the guard himself. Those who watched it said there was metal under the cloaks.

Her own name she gave last of all, at the door, once the party thought to ask for it.

Campaign Updates

By the time the company came back through Forven the following summer the command was permanently hers and Cazzik was in the town jail. She told them Loshev had begun the steps to take the prisoners north, and that Forven would not sell any of them south into Haudh-Gwenn whatever was put on the table, which she gave as a matter of right rather than of policy. She had odd work for them if they wanted it. It was in front of her that Koa and Mikhail argued out whether a man ought to answer for the company he had kept.