Taelor

Taelor works leather and makes armor out of a shop in the wealthy district of Haudh-Gwenn that their father opened almost two hundred years ago. It is where the company’s fine armor was commissioned and fitted, all three suits of it. Taelor is vain about the shop and its name, which is the thing Mikhail eventually read underneath everything else, and they keep a teenage apprentice who runs their errands and is star-struck by the company, having lost somebody to the slavers.

They dress the guard. They dress the wealthy district. Beltran himself is in weekly, and when the company finally came to collect, Greg the Tanner warned them not to bring anything else into that shop, because the street it stands on had gone friendly with the guard. Taelor greeted them warmly, told them the armor had been ready two weeks, and then would not dress them until they had bathed, and sent the apprentice to walk them to an inn to do it at the shop’s expense, and tried to keep Aldo’s suit back to be oiled. Aldo refused to be parted from it and the party read the whole thing as a trap. It was not one. Taelor was moving them out of the shop as fast as courtesy allowed so that the shop would not be the ground zero of the war coming, and was fond enough of them to do it politely.

That the shop was where the guard went was also what made it useful. When the company needed somewhere to meet Orvayne unremarked, they chose Taelor’s counter for the reason that guards frequent it, Beltran included, and a guard standing in a leatherworker’s is a guard buying leather.

Mikhail came back alone after dark and caught them locking up. The broad smile went out. Taelor let him in anyway, on the reasoning that there were fewer guards on the street than usual because all of them were out hunting him, and dressed him by one candle in a shut shop. Then they answered the questions.

Beltran had been in that afternoon and is styling himself Lord now, which Taelor gave back with their father’s observation that a man without talent takes a title instead. Two hundred years of the shop has been long enough to watch generations of Lord Beltrans come and go, and having all that time, Taelor said, is not as good a thing as it sounds. Beltran had ridden out days before to put down something happening at Ostrad. And the rumors going round about the company were his doing and were sticking: the worst of them had the Valiant Few paying Orsugo’s gnolls, teaching them magic and setting them on towns so that there would be fires left to be heroes at. Taelor could not offer them refuge, said so, and asked them not to come back until it had blown over. After that, whatever they needed. At a reasonable charge.

They put the other two suits in Mikhail’s hands, checked the street, blew out the candle, told him to be quick, and locked the several locks behind him. Something else had been folded in among the armor boxes, noticed only later and in the dark.

Campaign Updates

Taelor is on the wanted sketches the Haudh-Gwenn guard carry, alongside Dwayne, Casper, Gwen and Rowan. The shop is under new management. The people behind the counter now say the old proprietor sold up and moved on to grander endeavors, and they were frightened enough saying it that nobody pressed them further.