Landor de Bellun

Background

Landor de Bellun is a Yovance noble and was a considerable landholder there: a very large estate, gifted to him by his father, worked by a great many slaves, which in Yovance is what having servants means. By his own account he was the black sheep of his region. Which region he never says.

His family did not have him educated in the universities of Yovance. They sent him into Peredhel instead, and he trained in the universities around Osto, and came home with radical ideas about freedom and justice for individuals. Then his father died and the estate came to him, the people on it included. He could not run it alone, so he kept them, and gave them the best lives that could be given; and when the war reached his door they fought for him by choice and not on demand. He knew his opinions could not be imposed all at once. He stayed close to the other lords of his region, disagreed with all of them, socialized as one is supposed to, and meant to talk them round over a generation or two. They were just beginning to discuss it openly when Peredhel attacked.

He had studied Peredhel’s way of war at Osto and was one of the leading commanders on his side of it. He is not much of a warrior, he says, but he could command. They were outmaneuvered and outflanked, and still well enough placed that when he saw the reinforcements on the hill behind he gave an order he believed would have broken the bulk of the invasion where it stood and set the war back by years. His own people followed it. The lords of his own station did not. Once he had recovered enough to think about it clearly, and not from the end of a bottle, he understood what they had done as triage: his servant-soldiers, who fought with heart rather than for fear of the whip, made a fine decoy while their betters withdrew to holes they were flooded out of and slaughtered in anyway.

Because the victors were as righteous as they were, they burned his estate for the justice of the people who had lived under his rule. His wife was inside it. The most loyal of his own people pulled him off the field in the state he was in and got him across the border into Idir, where he was mended, and where he has lived since on whatever assets of his stood outside the banks of Yovance. He has no influence left at home and no way to touch that war. How he came to leave for good, and whether there is anything to go back to, he does not say. He calls himself an old scab being slowly picked away in Westwood.

Appearance

A human somewhere in his forties, tall and well built, straight-backed, carrying the air of money or of a university about him, with black hair and mustache already threaded with silver. He speaks Peren perfectly and has done since he was young, in a mild accent that is not any local one, and he speaks Galden as well and will greet a countryman in it. He walks with a limp and holds his cane in the hand opposite the bad leg to take the weight. He resents the leg, overworks it to prove it still answers, and believes exercise will yet make it work properly again.

The cane was a gift from someone he knows in Galderia, a country known for two things: its crossbowmen and its sword-canes. The shaft is a sheath, and there is a blade in it. He was trained as a soldier and it would be enough for one man in a street, or two.

Personality

Courteous to the point of formality, and he pays. He would rather be asked a rude question than watched sideways, and says so: he has met judgmental eyes over his accent and his clothes before and knows the difference between that and being studied. What he will not soften is the politics. The bitterest thing he says of the war is not about his own house but about his people, that the servants on his estate had less freedom after they were liberated than they had before it, and that the chains put back on them were clasped around their wrists out of Leon Yaegar’s hands.

Relationships

Leon Yaegar is the whole of it. Leon commanded the units that bested him, before he was High Commander of anything, and Landor rates him exactly: he did not stick to the books the way the other commanders did, he had his own vision of how to wage a war. Peredhel calls him the Liberator now. Landor’s answer to that is that his house was burned to the ground with his wife in it, and that even if Leon never gave that order and never knew of it, his son’s blood is on his hands, and so are the chains.

Leon’s account of the same day, given to the party years later, differs in one particular Landor has never heard. Leon was a younger commander then and says he moved harder and faster than he should have; he watched Landor’s fellow nobles leave the man to fall as a ceremonial sacrifice so they could reach their holes, did not like it, thought him a good commander, and told his archers to let the horse go and take no shots as Landor and his people retreated. The two accounts of the son do not agree either. Landor speaks of the estate burning with his wife in it and never places the boy anywhere; Leon says the son fell on the field, having disliked his father’s order and acted against it when the withdrawal was called. The two men have not been in a room together since.

Aldo met him at Gwenivere Velmont’s shop, a well-dressed stranger with a limp buying something against pain because his usual courier had got engaged and moved away, and marked him at once as a target worth working. Over dinner, in a false face and a borrowed name, Aldo got the whole history instead, sat through the grief in real silence, and offered condolences for a wife and a child that were not part of any grift. He never ran the play. Landor took him for old Yovance money, found him a deeply respectful man, covered the bill, and invited him to come calling at Westwood.

Current Role

He lives in Westwood, southwest of Haudh-Gwenn, and bought some of the ground that came free when the Ten Lashes fell, which the news of had reached even there. The Valiant Few’s own gifted plot adjoins his estate, so the man Aldo once picked out as a mark is now their neighbor.

Aldo told him, at that dinner, that Leon Yaegar was in Haudh-Gwenn. What he did with it was never discovered, and he has not been seen since. Leon himself later put Landor to the party as a piece to be played, a noble of genuine repute who could be walked in front of the Grayeras as their inside man; the play was never run. He is a man without a purpose since the war, and the standing invitation to Westwood has never been taken up.