Phil Nye

Deceased

Background

Most of what is known of his early life is the part he could not tell with his wife out of the room. He was stuck in a town in Yovance, making what trade he could and getting nowhere, when he met the woman he married. She was not free there, in that country’s flat sense of the word, and freeing her meant paying the man who owned her. He spent effectively everything he had on it and was years recovering.

He was ashamed of the shape of the thing ever after. An arranged marriage, he held, is a thing to be ashamed of when the bride gets no say in the matter; his wife held that there is nothing wrong with an arranged marriage at all, and would say paid for an arranged marriage in front of company for the pleasure of watching his face go red. They stayed in that town for years afterwards, poor, and could not afford to marry properly until long after they were married.

He never went back. He would not return to Yovance on any account and did not linger in Yovincia if he could help it, and he did not explain himself. His daughter’s version is that there are stories her father will not tell about his years there, that he swore up and down he had done nothing terrible, and that she was not certain.

Appearance

Portly, human, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, with a beard kept better than the rest of him and going gray. His traveling clothes were good and new enough to mean either money or trade, and worn enough to mean the road; his boots were quality and thoroughly used. Chairs complained when he sat down in them. His height, his coloring and where he was born were never written down.

Personality

A family man, and loud about it. He put it in the terms of the hire before any figure was named: if a deal was being made, Philomena and Phillipa were off the table and that was not negotiable. His daughter was old enough to be counted an adult by every measure that mattered and he still handled her like an eight-year-old, which everyone but him could see.

The wagon was a running joke against him. Its axle was older than his daughter and he had been hoping to die before he had to replace it, since a new one would push his retirement back a decade; when he threatened to show the books to prove it, his wife asked him who he thought handled them. He held that Free Folk hire in threes. Koa’s answer was that he had traveled in four.

He kept one fine thing. In a branded leather satchel rode half a dozen butchery blades, a cleaver and a boning knife among them, very well kept on worn wooden handles, and he was proud enough of them to warn a stranger off before the stranger could ask: watch his girl work those blades, but they were his own finest set and there was a hint of magic in them. The set is the daughter’s to use. She sharpens them, keeps them, has asked for them as a gift, and been refused. The mark burned into the leather is an anvil with wyvern horns, which is Hinta’s.

Relationships

Two places are given for where he and Koa first met. One is the Wyvern’s Tale in Ridh, over an old book wedged under a table leg to keep it steady, and it ends with the hire. The other puts the meeting years earlier at Martha’s thorp, in the speakeasy behind its butchery. Neither account acknowledges the other.

He had employed or traveled with Mikhail before any of this, on a crossing of the forest that produced a marching column of dark-armored figures seen by night and never explained, and one of the three times Mikhail has crossed Orsugo’s name. Hinta was answerable once for his safety, calls the failure one of her more regretful ones, and knows his widow.

The Last Road

He was hurrying. The river route west runs upstream the whole way, which meant a long way round and no chance of making the deal he had in Loshev in time, so he chose to cut the short path through the woods and wanted a sword walking beside the wagon while he did it. The terms were five silver, two of them in advance, and a healing potion out of his own stock, which is what the party carried into the first season and spent on other people’s lives.

The last thing he did on the road was ask who wanted to strike up a song. His wife sang. The arrow came in under it, and nobody heard it leave the trees, only the sound it made arriving.

Campaign Updates

He was buried outside Loshev, the arrangements made by the guard he had hired, who refused the balance of his fee and told the family to put it toward the funeral instead. A swordsman had rushed the wagon for his daughter that night, saying she was worth a ransom, and Koa cut him down where he stood. The archer, Samir, went into the trees and was not found until the hunt for him reached the eastern woods, where Koa ran him down and killed him.

A cairn went up over him later, at a tree beyond Loshev, set by his wife and daughter with Koa walking out to it with them. It stands by the very tree Zahir brushed past fleeing into those woods, which Koa noticed at the graveside and did not mention to anyone.

His wife and daughter still run the wagon. Whether he was hunted rather than simply robbed was never discovered.