Orvayne

Background

Orvayne is the whole of the name. He carries no family name and was never meant to, and none was ever written down for him. He is human, and for years he ran the guard of Haudh-Gwenn without ever holding its title.

The title belonged to Beltran Grayeras, and did from the moment Beltran wanted it. What Orvayne held was everything underneath: the rosters, the day-to-day, the work the captain could not be troubled with. The accounts call him different things and describe the same arrangement each time. Some have him the former captain, passed over so that Beltran could have the post. Some have him the de-facto captain who does all of it regardless. One gives him High Captain outright.

Aldo reached him at the close of the second season, and the contact was worth more than anything else bought that winter. Orvayne loathed Beltran and wanted him gone. Not dead: moved, promoted, married off, disgraced, anything at all short of murder, and the reason he gave was how much money the family had. He gave intel and he gave it carefully, and he would not kill Beltran himself, and for two seasons that was where the line sat.

Personality

He was not an educated man and he minded it. He kept up his reading anyway, and kept three volumes of the Mól Encyclopædia in a guardsman’s house; details mattered to him more than his work required them to. Before the sword got at him he was, plainly and unremarkably, good. He had taken the post to help and to do some good with it, and he put effort into being a decent person, which is a thin thing to say about a man right up until you see what was done to it.

Relationships

A third of the men wearing Beltran’s uniform were the old guard and still Orvayne’s, which is exactly why Beltran kept him close: those bodies could not safely be replaced. Beltran knew what he was holding and used it meanly. The letters found in Orvayne’s house set him to watching his own colleagues and keeping their weekly schedules and days off, and had him ferrying the drunk lieutenant Zarif home twice a week, errands that made a sort of sense for the man who ran the guard and were plainly beneath him.

Riverside on a Tyrsday evening he gave the party the shape of the whole apparatus. Beltran had taken Ostrad by bloodshed for its farms’ food. There was no tidy kill-list, because Beltran nursed grudges and his lieutenants pursued their own vendettas and the thing was chaotic rather than efficient. The old Ten Lashes tavern was being left standing open as bait for a raid to sweep up known troublemakers. He named the four lieutenants Beltran actually trusted, and named Whent as the current favorite among the puppets, and offered to lure Whent into a trap himself. He would fix no pattern for meeting again, because a pattern is a thing a man gets caught in.

What the Sword Did to Him

He was on edge before anybody knew why, worn and exhausted at the river. Then came the same sunken, dark-ringed eyes that had been on Whent. Then a man dead under his hands during an interrogation over a debt, struck down with a weapon already drawn. By the following winter he was the worst gone of the six figures the party could count around Beltran, three or four specters on him, and the word used of him was that he was stepping off a cliff.

His house said the rest. Not the oil of sharpening among the ordinary oils, and not the encyclopædia. The bedroom walls, covered in his own handwriting. Martyr, please. Must hurt me.

He came home while they were still in it, checked his lock, knew, and went at them in the doorway with his hand white on his sword. Mikhail’s sleep dropped him mid-charge and Koa forced a potion of remove curse into him, one of the two the party had. He woke lucid and refused to believe it. He was dead, he said, and this was hell, and he had earned it: play your games, I will not fall for them, but I know what I have coming. It took a hard argument to convince him he was alive and that the Valiant Few were too. Then he wept, and said oh, I hurt people.

Current Role

He agreed to help and not to fight. Rheem took his face, his armor and his sword that same night to walk an escort duty in his place, and kept the house afterwards.

It did not hold. Curing him is what told Beltran anything was wrong: a cured man’s specters go home to the wielder, who feels them arrive by the next morning, and it was Orvayne who worked that out and passed it on. It is also the reason Beltran spent his last weeks frantic. Orvayne could not go near the blade again. The nightmares of what he had done under it had come back on him all at once, and he would not return to his post.

So they walked him out, and did it in a way that covered two absences at once. The mind-mage Venros was already dead in a room at the Color Stay, and Beltran had begun summoning him. Aldo spent a day building a Venros disguise good enough to be seen in, and at dusk Orvayne fled north through the unwalled edge of the city where anybody could watch him go. Ten minutes later Venros rode up, told the guards to stand down and that he would deal with Beltran’s problem, and trotted north after him. Ten miles up the road they swapped horses, Venros’s good Peredhel-trained mount going on with Orvayne, and Aldo stripped the disguise and turned back. Orvayne was routed on toward Harad and Westwood, and The Crack beyond that, or else Veren. Whether he reached any of them was never discovered. He was not seen again.

The last thing he gave was about the sword. Those who craved it, Beltran kept close and then removed, often by arranging for them to do it themselves, and by Orvayne’s count that is at least a dozen men. He was in a position to know.