Leon Yaegar

Background

He was born to blacksmiths in a small village and learned the forge from his father before he learned anything else. What took him out of it was not the craft but the talk of soldiers passing through, and he left to enlist. He rose with no name and no connection behind him, on strategy and on a dedication that reads in his own telling as something closer to penance, and somewhere in that climb a prince gave him a bastard sword. It is still the finest thing he owns. The prince is dead now, and that is another thing he does not discuss.

He ended as High Commander, which in Peredhel is the second rank there is: only the nine Masters of War stand above it, one beside each province’s prince. He fought the Peren War and Peredhel remembers him as a hero of it, though he fought it his own way. The Peredhel textbook is a textbook; Leon broke from it, and wherever he won he freed the enslaved. The name that stuck to him was the Liberator.

Landor de Bellun is the other face of that. Leon beat him in the field and freed the people he held, and Landor’s wife and son burned. Landor blames him for both, and for the chains that went back on his people afterwards. Leon’s account of the same day is narrower: he spared Landor deliberately, letting his horse go during a retreat, and Landor’s son died disobeying the order to withdraw. The two men have not been in a room together since.

Of the wars he won he says that his obedience to orders and his own ruthlessness led to things that still wake him. He does not sleep well, and that is why he came south at all, riding for the Chantry at Haudh-Gwenn to ask whether anyone there kept medicine for the mind. On the way he passed an abandoned fortress north of Ridh and stopped in the town, which is where Koa met him. The Chantry had something after a fashion: its leader weaves a dream-catcher that shields a sleeping mind against night horrors, and that is why the hospital is quiet after dark.

He got what he rode for. He was months a patient of that hospital, and by the time Koa found him again he had been treated and discharged to an inn a short walk from it. Staying there, he said, was the one place the night horrors did not come the same way; he had talked his way to the woman who ran the place before working out that she was its proprietor, and she was the one who wove the thing that held them off. He told Koa twice to check himself in if he slept badly. An attendant at the hospital, asked after him, remembered a kind gentleman, older, a little worse for wear, who had gabbed on a good bit and was doing well — and said he had been treated for nasty acid burns after one of his own experiments went sideways, never having been sanctioned by the Arcane Congress. Nothing else known of him in thirty years of war touches an experiment, and the party took the account for a different man altogether and went looking elsewhere. It was him.

He is eighty-eight, and Peren.

Appearance

Six foot one, and built to be looked at. Salt-and-pepper hair, unkempt, to the shoulder. One hazel eye, sharp and taking everything in; a deep scar and a patch where the other was. The rest of him is scar-work over tanned skin. He wears a bear-fur cloak, which is the one comfortable thing about him, carries a shield battered past pride and a bastard sword kept in far better repair than its owner, and hangs two amulets at his throat: one to the Martyr for redemption, one to Lady Eravil for order.

When the party found him again in Haudh-Gwenn a season later he was much less haggard, and said of what the Chantry had given him that the crutch was doing its job.

Personality

A serious man, past whom jokes travel unimpeded. He falls into teaching the way other men fall into complaint, catches himself at it, stops, and reaches for the mug instead. Asked at Ridh whether the drink lifted his spirits he said it did not; it only made him remember, and remembering was good, at least in the waking hours.

He is brutally honest, to a fault he knows he has. On war he is reckoned a genius, including by himself, and the brilliance occasionally frightens him. All the years he advised the company, his counsel came down to two rules. Measure the enemy before you move: asked point blank whether he would strike Beltran then, in the party’s place, he said no, because they did not yet know what they were fighting. And morale is the heaviest thing in a war, heavier than steel, and it rests on faith in a cause. When Mikhail offered to write a rallying song for it, Leon told him propaganda travels better in the songs people make for themselves.

He will not be talked into a war over somebody else’s customs. Presented with a people whose ways offended the company, he closed the subject: do not read another restaurant’s menu before you have finished your appetizer.

He defends Peredhel’s servitude system, the incl, as a tax of service that pays for schools, courts, craft and food security, and concedes in the same breath that his country has its faults. He has also noticed that Peredhel’s textbooks nowhere record the Peren having been slaves of the Mól, which is not what he has since been told by people who were there.

Relationships

He is lonely and says so plainly. He keeps a large, well-crafted house he calls empty and cold, and what he wanted out of his last good years was to see more of the world rather than molder in it. Where the house stands was never written down, and nobody left in his family has ever been named.

Koa is the nearest thing he has to a student. It began with the conversation at Ridh, which Leon credits with spurring his own reckoning, and runs through the card lesson (learn to play cards, first with friends, then with people who are not friendly), the game of Conqueror he taught him, and a great deal of blunt talk in both directions. Koa once accused him of being uncharacteristically indecisive and punched him in the arm about it. Asked outright why he cares what happens to Idir, Leon said it was between him and the gods.

He keeps Lady Eravil for order and quotes her when he is settling somebody down: always clear your mind, keep your focus. He keeps the Martyr for redemption, and tells Vëné’s story as Peredhel tells it, a woman who helped in a battle some seven hundred years ago and rose to divinity from it. Handed the whole mystery at last, he offered that the Elder might be an avatar or a chosen of the Martyr, martyred in her name, and warned them against trusting an undead thing whatever it called itself. He was also first to say the arithmetic bothered him: a goddess who fought beside the Elder seven centuries ago ought not to be younger than a thousand years.

The Slumbering Queen was like a sister to him, and he said so on the night he had to put her down.

Current Role

He came in at the war-council in Edrick’s cask-room at The Crack, and the first thing he changed was the objective. Beltran was a piece on the board, not the hand moving it; kill him and you make a martyr, take him alive and you have a lure into the family behind him. Leon laid out the whole capture: an ambush dressed as banditry, quarter given, the man stripped and held somewhere secret, the enemy left to sweat, and information filtered out of him afterwards. Then he told them not to do it yet. It deflated the room.

He came on formally as military advisor and quartermaster, and brought what a company of four could not buy: Draazstone army-suppliers, mercenaries who would not turn coat, and trade contacts of his own. He had done business through Loshev before, on Vala’s behalf and with that province’s prince’s leave. He routed Draazstone goods through the town, bought four hundred gold of Crestborne garments as samples, warned that Draazstone holds a man to be the warrior or the trader and never both, and over brandy made councilman Yullen Gemsmith the case for arming Loshev before the Grayeras reached it. He also flagged what nobody wanted to hear: a town that routes all of its iron through one merchant has handed somebody a rope.

The arms run came back with the base outfitted. Sub-par molded steel, ring mail, bucklers, six Galderian-quality heavy crossbows, two wagons and repair stock, hauled under Draazstone’s protection with no casualties and no extra pay owed. It cost somebody else: Rakhzan, who had traded the party the eagle eggs, lost an eye, his freedom and his family’s standing for it. Leon went off to arm and drill twenty to fifty militia, and inspected a hope chest Koa had built on his way out, long enough to test the hinges and tell him he was a natural-born craftsman who had pursued the wrong goals his whole life.

At The Crack he holds the purse and the defense, with Edrick as counselor beside him. Two of his rulings have shaped everything since. He will not have prisoners executed, which left the base with eight men it could not feed, could not release without giving away its position, and would not kill; what he offered instead was the Peredhel buddy system, each unconverted prisoner tethered to a trusted fighter, drilled as training and watched as custody. And the grand strategy is his: make the Valiant Few an irresistible target in one known place, force Beltran to divide a hundred-odd men to come and take it, and strike the halves. He asked for three months and handed over a supply list.

He had been trusted with the war before he was trusted with the reason for it. Koa gave him the rest at Haudh-Gwenn’s worst hour: the Elder, the ooze, Gwen’s curse, all of it.

Then the night the Slumbering Queen surfaced. She put the whole camp to sleep and Leon did not go down, because Peren effectively cannot be put under. He manacled her arms, covered her mouth, and held on until the power in her ran out. He drew his sword on Baku afterwards and walked her to a cell, not trusting where her help would land. Then he opened the wine cellar and sat with Koa, who was in pieces, and told him it was not that he no longer knew Gwen. He had never fully known her, and now he had the chance to love her. Baby steps. He mustered every Peren in the camp to stand guard.

His last counsel was given in his own office at the base, with Hanza already sitting in it. No cavalry: horses would empty the coffers, keep a few for messengers and officers. No move to Wraithblade Keep: you do not settle your people on a curse you intend to pull down. Order of business: the lieutenants, then the sword, then the curses. And Peren-blooded guards only over Gwen, because the Queen was fighting for control by sleeping as little as she could, and it was breaking the mind the two of them share.

After that he was a letter and an army, and he did not appear in person again. A captured lieutenant’s disposal fell to him because Haudh-Gwenn kept no court that could be trusted with it; an innkeeper’s family was sent south into his keeping; a letter went to him with the state of the city. At the last, Rheem rode for The Crack to bring him and his force up, three days out at an army’s pace. Whether they came was never discovered.