Rafi

Background

An assessor of Vigil, which is a role he chose while young and studied many years to be fit for. Assessors go out from the town and stay out: they travel the country around it, carry stories home, and look for people the town would want. Now and then one of those people joins. The rest of the work is the cover that makes it possible, because Vigil admits no outsiders and most of Erôth does not know the place is there, so its assessors move as merchants. He was plain about the cost of that. The deception, he said, is a hard medicine to take when a man first learns it is to be his task.

He came for the Valiant Few at the northern gate of Haudh-Gwenn at dusk, one of three Peren with a covered wagon and two draft horses, and gave no name until the next day on the road. One of the three took Aldo in an embrace at that gate and swore that if there were ever anything he needed it would be done, by the gaze of Eravil. Which of the three it was, nobody wrote down.

They were the first outsiders he had ever sponsored. He said so twice, said he was nervous, and asked them not to take the nerves for disrespect. What he was allowed to answer he answered: that they would be judged on their deeds and on themselves, and not in a fight; that a pass bought hospitality, the town’s protection, and a home there under its laws if they wanted one; that a failure bought a comfortable room, a guard on it, and an escort back to the camp they had left. The finer details would come after, and not before. At the gate of Vigil it was Rafi who stepped forward to say that he, the assessor, put his name on these three and deemed them worthy of the travel.

Appearance

Peren, and young for the office, somewhere between his late twenties and his early thirties, at the age where the cheekbones sharpen and the ears lengthen and a Peren stops reading as human. On the road he wore a merchant’s loose clothes over light thin plate, and he was the one whose armor chimed under them: the least practiced deceiver of the three. Nothing else about how he looked was ever written down, not his face, not his coloring, not his height. The one description tied to his name is of the morning after a night’s watch. Bags under his eyes, and a jaw locked now and then against a yawn.

Personality

Speak plain or not at all is Vigil’s phrase, and he is the one who gave it to the party, as advice, days before they met anybody with the authority to enforce it. He kept to it himself, up to the edge of what he was permitted to say and no further. He used another of the town’s sayings on them, once writ, undone, and it was clearly a translation of something that works better in his own tongue.

He read Koa for Free Folk within minutes of meeting him and said so, adding without any particular malice that morality is not what the Free Folk are known for. Asked about the people Vigil had taken out of Forven, he drew a slow breath, looked at the ground, and confirmed it: they were captured, and the town had done what it could to keep them held.

On the Martyr he did not hedge. Vëné and the Martyr are one and the same, he said, and to use her mortal name is no insult but a statement of fact. There is one name that would be an insult, the term her enemies used for her while she lived, and that one he would not say aloud. Aldo had already heard it once, in a fever dream.

He is easily thrown by other people’s manners, and easily embarrassed by his own town’s. Seeing Theresa Sarros stand as Lady Vigil without the sword, he called it strange and said the decision must have been made in his absence; then he apologized for having let outsiders see the tension in the room, began to say he was embarrassed, and let the sentence drop. He corrected himself twice for over-familiarity, once for using the Lady Vigil’s given name and once for using Eravil’s. If Eravil chose Theresa, he said, then Theresa is the right choice. Of the raid that killed Lady Vigil Octavia he had one phrase, those vile outsiders, what they did, and one explanation: a practitioner of magic had been among the captives, could not be trusted, and was dealt with accordingly.

Current Role

He helped raise the camp on the road and fed them the worst meal Aldo had ever eaten, unseasoned porridge and a ginger root tea. In the town he stood their night watch himself and then cooked the ceremonial morning meal on no sleep, working through the honorifics while Aldo danced on the table, which rattled him badly. He walked them round Vigil and answered light questions, paid his own respects at the late Lady Vigil’s grave while they used the minute for other things, announced Casimir Kasun at their door, and brought them in when the assessment was ready for them. Before the leaders he set out their deeds without any ornament at all, the slaves freed south of Haudh-Gwenn and the end of Captain Torr’s ring. When the verdict came, his sponsorship was weighed into it.

The last of him is walking Aldo home to his homestead afterwards, fighting a yawn as he went, having by then been awake something near a full day. A day later the guard on the party’s door was somebody else, and where he went was never discovered. Assessors spend more of their lives outside the town than in it.