Yara

Background

She belongs to the Order of the Broken Chain, which hunts slavers and gnolls in the name of Vroga Waruk, and some of whose people train in the Barren Lands, as she did. Their trainer did not use names. He numbered them: her band was One, Two and Three, and she was Three. The One was Grishka, a man; the other was Orsk.

They had come west to destroy the Ten Lashes and arrived to find the work already done by somebody else, so they turned on the gnolls of the Valley of Doom instead, and the gnolls killed them both. When the company found her she was the last of three, and she gave her own name for the first time in the same breath in which she said so. Yara is a name she took.

She buried Grishka with Koa’s help, and what settled matters between them was Koa speaking a flawless prayer over the grave to a god she had assumed no outsider knew. She dragged Orsk’s body out into the morning to pray over it, and carried it to a cave to be buried under a cairn, and then walked away from the cairn without a word. Koa stayed and said a few.

Appearance

Three feet of her, and one arm. How she lost it was never written down, and neither was which arm it was. She rode behind a six-foot man on one horse and pointed out dryly that his back was covered in spider guts. She is faster than he is. After the fire in Loshev she carries a gash across her face.

She carries an axe, called a battle-axe in some accounts and a greataxe in others, and it is the one thing she came out of that fire still holding. Off her band’s ransacked camp she also recovered a small falchion and a coin sack.

What She Gives Away

Almost everything she owned left her hands within a few weeks of meeting the company, and none of it for payment.

Grishka’s axe went to Koa: notched and reinforced, made for cutting manacles rather than men, the Order’s own pattern. Orsk’s unfinished idol of Vroga, carved out of a chunk of Mól ruin-stone and marked with the axe and the broken chain, went to him too. Two healing potions went with them, brewed by Vroga’s people from western river water through communal prayer, and stronger in the hands of those who hold the god in their heart.

And she gave them a bone: a rune-etched Barren Lands charm that can be broken over a body to put questions to its spirit, with more answers to be had if you are carrying part of the body with you. She handed it over with a warning about what magic of that kind can open, and told them plainly not to use it anywhere near a keep. They carried the bone unbroken and cracked it at last over a corpse in Haudh-Gwenn, long after she had stopped traveling with them.

What She Can Do

She heals by Vroga Waruk’s divine spark, which sparks like fireflies between her hands, and she began teaching Mikhail the Barren Lands methods almost at once. She put her own dislocated arm back with a prayer.

She senses evil, and the company learned to fetch her for it. She smelled it out of a sealed hallway in a keep and had to be talked down from taking an axe to the door. She was brought a long way twice more purely to say whether a thing was evil or not, and the second time reported honestly that she could feel nothing off the ooze at all, only the old residue of the torture cells.

Her largest working is a purification out of the Barren Lands, done for a man with Wraithblade specters living inside him. It wants silver, a hot pot and the blood of the pure, meaning those close to the god. Fifty silver pieces were shaved into it and four people opened their arms over it, herself among them, and it cost every one of them something to give. She spoke the rite over the flames in the harsh tongue of the Karruk. It burned the spirits out of him, and it worked.

She explains her god as well as she serves him. The spark of Vroga is the term for Vroga noticing a warrior in battle, and she is the one who named it and said Koa carries it, which he had not known.

She also carries the Barren Lands’ stories: the shadows, and Verex the Ashen Orc, warlord of Clan Denshō, who fought a chieftain that animated corpses inside a circle of fire, bore Vroga’s will while he did it, and grew to the size of a god. She reached for him again when a burning ring erupted across the Valley of Doom, and told that one as Verex trapping a rival’s bound spirits in sacred fire and eating them for their magic. It is her account and she offers it as one.

Personality

Blunt to the point of flatness, and unbothered by almost everything. She lost everything she owned twice and remarked on neither. She talked her way into the Color Stay by presenting herself as Aldo’s wife to a barkeep holding a spear, and did it without a flicker. She volunteers very little about herself.

Where she is not flat, she is sore. Koa turned her down, out of what was starting up between him and Gwenivere Velmont, and it stung; a week later the sting was still showing, mixed in with a plain jealousy of a company becoming famous in a way her order never would. She declined to be tied to a place and went to find her own room. She distrusted Rheem on sight, found her clothes anyway, and glared while she did it.

Current Role

She came back after the fire that burned the building she was sleeping in, having stayed behind to tend the wounded, and traveled ahead to Haudh-Gwenn with the injured while the company forgot she was on the boat. She wintered with them. She walked out of the tunnel at Westwood having burned three specters out of a man.

Since then she has been at the Crack, where the company’s people wait between things, and what she has done there was never written down.