Lance

A fixer in Loshev who moves other people’s coin for a cut, and who wants very badly to be invited to better rooms than he is being invited to. He never gave his name.

The Valiant Few had turned up ten old gold pieces in a house they owned and no idea what they were worth. He took them on spec, found a collector who knew, and haggled the man on the party’s behalf, which by his own account got ugly at one point. What he came back with was fifteen gold a coin and the reason for it: the markings meant something in Taziondale. He would buy at fifteen and carry them north to sell them properly, and the spread was his.

The arrangement between the two sides was plain to both. He did the party favors, and the party got him into rooms where he could rub elbows with people who mattered.

Ten coins came to a hundred and fifty gold. He counted that in about seven seconds and then talked them out of carrying it, and they would not put it in a bank, because a bank in Haudh-Gwenn had emptied their accounts once already. So he kept the coins and wrote them a writ instead, to be handed over in Haudh-Gwenn when the sale closed or left waiting for them in Loshev.

He had seen the men he called hunting bandits working the roads that season, and had caught their eye more than once without being troubled by it, and admitted they had frightened him. There had been a call to arms to stand against them. He mentioned, unasked, that he had not been part of it.