Luca Green

Luca Green keeps the tavern in Harad and leads the town’s militia, which is the arrangement the place runs on: he keeps an eye on things while Captain Jack handles what a captain has to handle, and Jack does not have to be in the room. What he did before the tavern was never written down.

He is about six foot two and barrel-chested, built in the way where it is not obvious whether it is fat or muscle and does not much matter, hairy-armed, bearded, human. He walked out of the secured slaver cave with no weapon on him at all. He is large enough to be frightening and almost never is, because the face is permanently and blandly pleasant, and standing next to Edrick’s permanent scowl it was the first thing anyone noticed about him. He is generous in the way a publican is generous: strangers who had done Harad a good turn were promised free drink at his place for as long as they wanted it, bottom shelf. The barrel he brought out to the fight was his own, carried there to lift the men’s spirits, and when those were spent they opened one of the slavers’ instead.

The pleasantness came off exactly once. Asked whether he knew anyone in Veren and whether a letter could be got there safely, he offered to carry it himself, and while he said it the jovial face washed away into a set jaw and a narrow look, and he became as imposing as his size had always promised. He rode it out against Gleb Meadows and it landed. Offered a drink before he went, he said he would drink when it was over. What became of Gleb Meadows was never discovered.

His militia is heavy-handed and Harad has decided to live with that. Told to keep quiet eyes on Lenore, his men grabbed her courier rather than let him ride out of town, and shot the horse to stop him; the horse came down on Keith, broke his ribs, and was already being butchered by the time the party heard of it. Keith came round in the wine cellar under the tavern, which is where Harad holds people it has no jail for. Jack, told all of this, called it less subtle than anticipated.

Everything the town has since asked of him, it has asked of him personally. The shelter for the homeless stands off the back of his tavern, and the guardsmen who were always sitting in his common room anyway were part of the reasoning for putting it there. He runs the food line out of Harad’s surplus into the Crack, with refugees rotated out to work the fields for their keep, and he was chosen for it because Jack wanted as few people involved as possible and Luca had already carried every message that mattered. He is one of the two Harad names the company’s supply runs go through, and he and Jack together were given custody of Professor Ashanti al-Hassan, Elliot and the alchemy library when there was nowhere safer to put them. He never warmed to Ashtara Walnut when the rest of the town did, and he never warned Jack about her either, which Jack noticed only afterwards.

The name of his tavern was never written down, and neither was his militia’s.