Martha

Butcher of a thorp too small to have been given a name, at the south of the lake in Idir. Her shop was the largest building in the place and it was not only hers. An anvil and a cold forge stood at one end under settled dust, the benches a smith would have worked had been given over to drinking, and she brought the meat up from below to cook it. Blacksmith, butcher and tavern in one room.

Mikhail came up the road the morning after a family of five burned in their own house, and the thorp came out to meet him. She came out holding a cleaver, which looked like a statement and was not: she was the butcher and the thing was to hand. Later that day she came out again to the burned houses and took a share of the work.

There was no inn to send him to; nobody stopped the night in that thorp. What she had was a stable, empty since whatever animal she kept in it died, and she offered him that, saying a roof was the least she could give after the work he had put in and the fright he had given them. Then she stood in the doorway of it longer than the conversation needed. He read the pause wrong, then right: she had been alone every time he had seen her, people had been murdered in their own houses the night before, and she did not want to be by herself. He asked instead whether there was a corner of her floor going spare. She gave him the practiced look of a woman handling a man who presumes, and it was gone almost before it landed.

She slept in a loft up a ladder and he slept below it, and a blanket came down over the edge a few minutes after she did. She was gone before he woke, both mornings. On the second she was easier with him, and that was the morning she gave her name. She woke him with a hand on the shoulder for the boat, told him that if he got a fire going quickly he had time for tea and that he would want it, and walked him down to the docks carrying scraps out of her shop for the fishermen to bait with.

Campaign Updates

He came back by boat with Koa and Aldo, hunting slavers down the river. The same building was running the thorp’s speakeasy by then, and the room went up when he walked into it: they had settled among themselves that he was the one who had driven Orsugo off. His two friends came in on his account and got the barn. She leaned over the bar and asked him under her breath whether Orsugo had a hand in the slaving, somebody heard it from across the room, and after that there was no talking about anything else. She said plainly that she did not think the thorp could help him, and sent the three of them east to Harad instead, to a man everyone there called only the Captain. A drinker at the end of the bar insisted his name was Jack.

Mikhail slept on her floor again. Before she went up the ladder she baked, and left the rolls out warm on the counter where he had watched her make them, so that taking them in the morning would not be awkward. She was still asleep when the three of them went down to the boat, and he carried them down for his friends (S1E06).