Rowan

Rowan kept an inn in the wealthy district of Haudh-Gwenn with two baths in it, which was two more than most, and the company were sent to him to wash before their armorer would dress them. He is divorced and has nobody depending on him, and until that week he was a proprietor in the good part of town with an ordinary proprietor’s arrangement: when a long-staying guest stopped paying, he called the guard, and the guard came and dragged the man out manacled in front of everyone. He apologized afterwards. The apology read as being for the scene rather than for the man.

What Mikhail noticed over the next hour was that Rowan kept finding work to do in whichever room they were in, and kept looking at them when he thought they were not looking back. So Mikhail asked him straight out what he wanted to say, which threw him badly enough that he said it: the guards were offering five gold to anyone who would tell them where the Valiant Few were sleeping and for how long. Aldo answered that with the longest speech he had given anywhere, setting out the slaves freed, the haven built at Harad and the work found for Loshev’s council, against the story going round the city that the three of them had let their fame turn their heads. It landed. Rowan did not take the five gold.

The barkeeper went to the guard instead, over that same gold, and Rowan was still in the building when they came. Koa and Gwen came back to find him manacled and bleeding with a guard standing over him asking where the party had gone. He was saying he had not done it. When they had him loose he apologized to them, which was the wrong way round and he was told so, and gave up the barkeeper without being asked. Koa told him to say the party had done it to him, so that he would have something to tell the next ones through the door.

He left the city with them that night, and never got the inn back. Days later, low and with nothing to go back to, he agreed to go out to the Crack and take charge of its stores, which is where he is.

Campaign Updates

His face is on the wanted sketches the Haudh-Gwenn guard carry now, drawn up alongside Dwayne, Casper and Gwen. He was not in the city for any of it.