Phillipa

Background

She was born in Yovance and she was owned there, and she is exact about the words for it. Not free, she says, both figuratively and literally. Phil Nye was a trader stuck in her town with nothing much moving, they fell in love, and the only road out of it that country allowed was for him to pay the man who held her. He spent effectively everything he had. She corrects the sentimental version of this wherever it is offered: technically speaking it was an arranged marriage, and he paid her owner. He thought that shameful. She did not, and said so, and used the phrase on him in company for years.

Being freed did not make her one of the free. In the town she came from there are those who own and those who are owned, and the people in between belong to neither side; her own account is that her old neighbors disliked seeing one of theirs stop being one of theirs, and that the other sort had no more use for her than before. She and Phil stayed on there for years afterwards, and were married a long time before they could afford a wedding. What was served at it was Cam, a Yovance delicacy that keeps only a short while and only if it is prepared properly. Her husband promised it to her again for an anniversary he did not live to keep. She waved the promise off both times as nothing much.

Appearance

Her age, her height and her coloring were never written down, and her species is never stated outright; her daughter is a human girl. What was set down is her voice. It is not a naturally good one and it has been trained well enough that nobody would say so, and on the road she sings, working through the sort of songs any tavern would give you and giving no cause for complaint about any of them.

The Books and the Wagon

Who kept the accounts was settled early and settled flatly. When her husband threatened to open the books to prove how badly a new axle would hurt them, she asked him who he thought handled them. It was also her who put a name to what the wagon was built of, Darkwood in the common tongue and Ki laati in Peren, near steel-hard and almost weightless, which is why the wagon has outlived so much.

Since his death the whole of the trade is hers. She buys Darkwood in bulk at Momly, where a good share of the Eldamar shipments come down into Vala, through a contact who gets her a fair price; she keeps enough for her own repairs and sells the rest on, and offered it to Koa at exactly what she paid. She has carried barding on the cart. She has good dealings in Draazstone and guards them, being unwilling to be late on a trade deal there, and offered to put in a word for the company on the strength of them.

Relationships

She sided with her daughter over her husband at the butchery block, and when he moved to interrupt the girl at her work she put a loaded cutting board into his chest and sent him off with it. Of Koa she has made something between a son and a debt: a motherly hug on sight, an insistence on knowing the date of his wedding so she can attend if the roads allow, an offer to find something among her wares fit for a gift to the bride, and a quiet look at Philomena as she said it, so that he would take care what he said next. Hinta knows her, and knows what she has been left to do alone.

She dotes on Nightstorm past all reason and overfeeds her with oats, so that a horse who is meant to be grazing does very little grazing. It was also Phillipa who looked the animal over once and called the breed correctly at a glance.

Campaign Updates

The killing took her voice. For days afterwards she was so far inside herself that she was near enough catatonic, and it was the man she had hired who dealt with the guards, the wagon and the burial.

The morning after her husband was in the ground she came to Koa with a small wooden box. Inside it was a flawless compass, and with it an oil that will make even a poor blade cut true for a short while, and a healing potion. He kept refusing and she kept overriding him: she wanted him to come back alive. Then she held him a long moment and whispered no mercy, and looked disappointed in herself for saying it, and set her jaw and left. She told him plainly that the road would not wait for them much longer. He told her to find a guide she trusted before she took it.

They were gone before he came back. What she left him was sealed on vellum, an apology for going, a prayer for his safe return, and a note that the wagon would keep rolling its usual trails and would bring them back around. With it came a third potion, tagged to keep you safe in the same hand, the tag thumbed grubby by whoever had carried it.

The wagon did bring them back. On that visit she walked out with her daughter and Koa to the cairn, thanked all three of the company for the justice they had brought her, tried to sing the traveling song at the graveside and could not get through it, and let her daughter hum it with her until it was finished. She learned the same day where the eggs she had been contracted to collect come from, and that the bird they come from thinks and speaks, and she agreed on the spot to stop dealing in them. That contract had just been taken over by an influential person in Ravenhold whose name was never written down, whose terms had changed, and she left Loshev with a great deal to work out and no obvious way to say no politely.

What she gave Koa at that parting was a bell of white porcelain, small, with a plain bit of filigree worked into it and a seed on a string for a clapper. Its twin hangs in her cart. Rung, it rings there, wherever there is; she may be hundreds of miles off and it will be days, but she will turn the wagon and come. She gives them only to people she wants kept close in her tradings. It has never been rung.