Trinity Barnaby

Loshev keeps a guard of no great size, and Trinity Barnaby is the one in it who looks at things. She works nights, evening through until one or two in the morning, walking a patrol. What clue-work the guard does is hers, and when there is a body worth reading she is the one who finds somebody who can read it.

The company met her on the wrong end of that. Mikhail was elbow-deep in a mattress in a house he had no business in when she came through the door with a short sword drawn and told him that what happened next depended entirely on how well he listened. He argued that the jailer Dan was the real criminal, which was true and did him no good at all, and got himself marched to the guard station for it. Constable Tariq al-Mahir waved the misunderstanding off. She bought Mikhail a late drink by way of apology, flirted, and was turned down by a man too tired to notice.

She had left Dan’s door standing open during that arrest, and evidence walked out of it. Tariq put her on recovering what was lost and spoke well of her in the same breath: more by the books than most, and good people. When Nathan Fox wanted an example of the sort of guard worth keeping through a reform of the town, hers was the name he reached for. What the trial turned up went into her harder than into anyone else in the uniform. She had gone drinking with Dan. The people taken off Loshev’s streets were taken off streets she patrols, and by her own reckoning they were people she had met, or at least passed, and had failed. She writes an official note slowly, scrapping it twice before a third draft goes out, and it is the only clumsiness in her anybody has ever remarked on.

Mikhail came back the next evening and walked her shift with her, and they were together for a long while after that. She is also the company’s way into what the guard knows: the auction-house robbery, the gnoll corpse and the sigil cut into its palm, the promise to have the hands checked on the next one. She found Mikhail sparring partners once, Jaden among them, and handed her own overnight warehouse post to Koa on the strength of Tariq owing her a favor and liking him. She had a cousin she was hoping to marry Koa off to, until she heard he was engaged. She does not know Mikhail is Peren out of Bardh, though she holds enough of the company’s other business that their lives are already in her hands.

When the raiders came through Loshev she fought and held her own, and came out of a night that cut through the Constable’s sword hand and left Tony unable to walk. She was last at the guard station among the crowd of raw recruits Fox’s money had bought. Koa, watching her and Tariq in the same room, came away thinking the two of them were seeing each other now; neither has said so aloud.

Her height, her build, her age and her people were never written down. What is left of her is the uniform, the short sword, and a nightgown at her own door when somebody knocks late.