Mikhail Kethrel
A scholar of Peredhel walks north into Idir to finish a thesis, and is robbed of nearly everything before he arrives
TL;DR
A bard and scholar of Peredhel finished a decade at university and walked north into Idir to write about its curses. He got two days on foot, bought a place in a merchant wagon with music, and was abandoned in the grasslands on the third night with his pack gone: books, silver and supplies with it. He reached a thorp the morning after raiders had burned a family alive in their home, helped dig them out, and crossed the lake to Forven. There he met a scholar his own kind, warned him away from a slaver captain, and watched him walk off anyway.
Synopsis
The scholar
Mikhail Kethrel is Peren, and passes for human, which in Idir is worth more than he yet understands. He was raised in Perenhia, the central province of Peredhel, far enough from the borders that his country’s endless wars reached him only as stories, and he has enough of a storyteller’s ear to know how much of a story is embroidery.
He won a place at one of the Arcane Congress universities in Durwyn and spent the better part of ten years there over tomes and old scrolls, studying songwriting and the thing he actually cares about: magic that sits in land rather than in people. Curses. His thesis is on the curses of Idir, which begin just north of his school, and finishing it is what earns him the right to practice. He counts five of them (the Shattered Throne, the Twisted Grove, Wraithblade Keep, Chaos Keep, and the Valley of Doom) and has become fixed on Chaos Keep in particular, which is said to stand on a steep hill by an eastern forest and to bend a mind until it breaks.
He keeps an ideopan of seven gods, and has not told anyone which.
The road
He left Durwyn on foot and lasted two days before paying a few coppers to ride in the back of a merchant wagon, a father and son, on the understanding that he would play for them in the evenings. They took the music, took the labor, fed him scrapings, and on the third night left him in the grasslands with his pack.
What went with it was a dozen silver and more, his supplies, and the university’s books. Borrowed, irreplaceable, and not his to lose. What he kept was a dagger, an old rapier he had rescued from the roadside and oiled ever since, and about two silver. He memorized both their faces. He is still telling people he intends to kill them.
He walked north toward the lake and reached a thorp too small for a name. The night before, men had come demanding a tribute the place had never been asked for, and when it was not paid they locked a family of five in their house and set it alight. The townsfolk could not agree whether there had been one of them or three. They agreed on whose name to use: Orsugo, the fire-brigand out of the east, who is called Krelene’s Vengeance, which Mikhail noted is very close to blasphemy where he comes from, Krelene being a god of fire and not of retribution.
He volunteered to help recover the bodies before anyone asked him to. Afterwards he played for the survivors, and a red-skinned hobgoblin named Kilvan shook his hand and talked with him like a neighbor, and Martha the butcher (who had gone for her cleaver when the shouting started, and was frightened to sleep alone) put him on her floor for two nights. Then he took a fishing boat across to Forven.
Forven
He traded music for a week’s lodging and listened. What he found was Cleven Gemsmith: a Peren scholar in his thirties out of Loshev, sent north by his councilman father to meet a ship, who recognized what Mikhail was within a few minutes of talking to him and was delighted about it. They got on. When Mikhail mentioned he meant to go on to Loshev eventually, Cleven wrote him a sealed letter of introduction to Nikolas Rook, an old mapmaker turned councilman who keeps what the town knows about the curses.
Mikhail had also noticed the ship’s captain. Tattooed, out of Ravenhold, with a cat-o’-nine-tails inked on him bearing five lashes; five of his crew each carried a single whip in the same hand. The captain asked whether Mikhail would care to come aboard (what’s one more), and Mikhail, who reads a room better than he does most things, declined and went to warn Cleven off.
Cleven could not read a room at all. He went to confront the captain about it, and in the morning he was gone.
Mikhail reported it. He does not much like guards, and reported it anyway, mostly to watch whether the captain of Forven’s guard would care, and he did, and named a dockside warehouse owner called Julius as the thread to pull. He took the report from a young man who gave his name as Calvin Hobbs, and wrote that down, and Mikhail left the station under a name that was not his. He gave no reason for it.