Baelon
Baelon has spent his life being kicked out of towns and villages like he’s a bad smell…but then he generally smells damp and musty and abandoned so it’s hardly unexpected.
He cannot recall a time he was ever comfortable or well fed. He has occasionally managed to pilfer a chicken, and has been known to steal a few rotten apples from the odd stable.
If it wasn’t for the edicts of King Meanander the third, who decreed that The King’s Road should be lined with trees bearing fruits or nuts to keep weary travelers sustained throughout the year, then he would most likely have starved to death years ago.
In his youth he fell in with Radabon, a Hedge-Teller. A wandering vagabond who could spin fortunes out of the air. Radabon was a poet and a wit and he taught Baelon everything he knew…except for the wit bit.
Baelon has not the wit to be witty.
The truth is Baelon is not a good hedge teller. He’s not very good at anything. But that’s hardly his fault…is it? The world has conspired to keep him down.
And then one day in the northern town of T’eag, whilst standing on an upturned bucket on the corner where Honey Street meets The Rag Market, words just flood into his brain. Words he didn’t think. He meets two people who will change his life.
The first, a Velvet Speaker, who warns Baelon that if he does not leave town immediately, he will have his eyes ripped out and his tongue removed. Velvet speakers own the right to speak the future. They guard their rights keenly and they do not love hedge-tellers.
The second is a woman named Snee.
What follows is a nightmare.
Snee
Twenty years ago, Snee was the Night Commander of the Watch to the King of T’eag.
Until, that is, one fateful night when the Queen gave birth to her first born child. Even as the queen lay screaming in her bed, Snee and her friend Twizzle hunted a thief through the streets of T’eag and through the teeth of a terrible blizzard.
What they found in the cold changed them utterly and shattered their lives.
Years later, after they have escaped the enchantment that trapped them, and stole everything from them, they return to T’eag.
Snee comes upon a bedraggled hedge-teller named Baelon. He’s standing on an upturned bucket on a street corner spinning futures into the air, hoping some weak willed and gullible punter might find meaning in his rhymes and toss him a coin or two.
He clears his throat and sings in a voice that could shatter glass and cause swine to fall sterile…
‘Seek old Twizzle and Bake-woman Snee
Seek for the ones who coddled thee
Ask a question and ask it bold
Ask for the thing they found in the cold.’
And so Snee discovers that the past she thought she had escaped is in fact coming after her. She is determined to face it.
Sadly for Baelon, she’s determined that he will face it beside her. After all, he seems to know all about it. What more of her deepest secrets might he know?
Wolfram
Wolfram is a highland dwarf from the land of Raft, in the far and frozen north. The land of the walking cities carved into the bodies of giants…but that’s another story and we don’t have time or space for it here.
Wolfram was born to Vulfmar, brother to King Hurm and Lord of the dwarven house of Raft. On Vulfmar’s death, Wolfram was recalled to Raft to take his fathers place.
But Wolfram had left the north years earlier, disgusted with the treachery and duplicity of the dwarven court. No coward, he desired enemies he could fight head on, rather than ones whose chosen weapons were poison, lies and deceit.
He found himself in the land of Pont in the deep south, where he met Brennus Ap Anat, leader of a mercenary band called The Ravens. Wolfram became a raven. Even more, Wolfram became Brennus’s brother in law when he met, and married his twin sister Brenn.
Now, father of Berana and Natan, and step father to a dozen more of Brenn’s children…some natural, most folded into her family, he spends his time cooking in the kitchen of Brenn;s Inn, The Grey Bear in Stoneforge, and occasionally adventuring with his brother in law and his fellow ravens.
But the lordship of the house of Raft is still vacant, and King Hurm is not one to leave a seat of power un-filled.