Lenore

Wife to Cazzik, captain of the Forven guard until the town moved to arrest him, and a well-off woman in her middle thirties who was accustomed to being listened to. She found the Valiant Few at an inn, insisted on buying them the best meal the house had, and asked them to go back over their own evidence, on the grounds that nobody else in Idir had the standing to overturn it.

Her husband was innocent and she said so without qualification. The traps in their house were self-defense: his old company had made enemies across an entire career of adventuring, enemies who would obviously come looking one day, and any household in that position would have done the same. That guards died in them was a tragic misfortune. When the party named the lash tattoo as the thing that damned him she deflected it as one tattoo among dozens, half of them lost bets between Cazzik and Milton, who used to choose each other’s designs. She would not accept the copies the party carried and demanded to see the originals held by Captain Jack in Harad. By then her assets had been seized and she said so plainly. Koa called her an idiot to her face, and she stood up and said she had thought the Valiant Few were heroes. Aldo walked her out playing the gentleman, warned her about the gnoll war bands and the burning of Loshev, urged her to have the captain come back and answer the charges, and floated the idea that his old crew might earn some goodwill by hunting the gnolls instead. She said she would see what she could do.

What She Gave Away

The party followed her, expecting her to lead them to him. She was locked out of the seized estate, packed up at an inn, and paid six gold to force her way onto the last boat out to Harad. Below deck she caught them mid-song and narrowed her eyes at them, and then she made small talk, and over the small talk she handed them the whole company: six of them now, a seventh dead early enough in their career that the loss was what bonded the rest. Jack called Blackguard, Bruno called Bruiser, Milton called Milktoast, Freya called Face, Hunter called Beartrap, and her husband, called the Captain. Years together, most of the work done inside Perel though not only there, and then most of them retired into different places, Cazzik into the Forven job.

Jack’s read on her was that she was genuinely pleasant and a fool, and that she and Cazzik loved each other rather more visibly than was comfortable to stand near. Aldo’s was that she was more dangerous than she liked to present. She was drinking with Aldo the evening the party collected him face down in his own vomit at the restaurant, and she left in disgust, saying he was just as valiant as the other two. She never spoke to them again. Her courier had been taken by Luca Green’s men on the road outside the same town that day, and nobody told her.

She had been trying to reach the crew at the university at Bardh. By the following year she was believed to have got there, and by the time Mikhail heard of her again she had: Freya was at the Talesong conservatory asking his old professors about him, and the university had given Lenore leave to stay with her.