LISTA

Overview

Bard. Scholar of lost songs. The company’s memory, and the one member who carries no blade.

Lista was born in a port town on the Bane Sea, in a temple whose god fell silent with the rest of the Old Gods more than five centuries ago. The keepers there still copy its hymns and still sing its liturgies at dawn, though nothing has answered them since the Fall. Her mother served as the temple’s cantor. Lista learned her letters copying verses no one could use and learned to sing standing at her mother’s side in the cold before first light. The eldest keepers told her she had a voice worthy of the liturgies.

The temple taught her something else: an old song is a record. Beneath the melody of a harvest ballad or a sailors’ hymn lie names, places, and events the singers themselves have long forgotten, preserved because the tune kept them. By sixteen, she hunted those buried histories in every song she heard. At nineteen, she left the temple with a secondhand lute and a ledger of blank pages, meaning to collect the principality’s songs before the last people who knew them died.

For three years she walked the coast roads and border villages, singing for her supper and writing down whatever the grandmothers sang back. The road proved harder on a lone woman with a lute than any song had warned her. When she met a small company of fortune hunters at the Stabbing Sword, they needed someone who could read a contract and a map older than the principality, and she needed people who could keep her alive in the places the songs were about. She joined them the same night.

Appearance

Lista is twenty-four, small and slight, and easy to overlook until she sings. Her black hair falls in a single long braid wound with a strip of green ribbon, a temple habit she never broke. Her eyes are dark and large, set in a narrow face that shows every feeling she has before she can decide whether to share it. Ink stains her fingertips more often than not.

She dresses for the road and the taproom at once: a long sea-green coat with deep pockets stuffed with folded scraps of verse, a linen shirt, a wool skirt split for walking, and soft boots worn thin at the heels. A leather satchel at her hip holds her ledgers, a travel inkwell, and whatever fragment of faded writing she is currently failing to decipher. She carries no weapon of any kind.

Her lute is a battered, pear-bodied thing with a crack across its soundboard. She mended the crack herself with hide glue and a strip of parchment, and the parchment bears a verse she has never told anyone the meaning of. When she is nervous, her fingers tap out rhythms against whatever lies nearest, whether knee, table, or the lute’s own belly.

Abilities & Expertise

Her voice is the first thing anyone remembers about her. It sits lower than her size suggests, a clear, dark contralto that can fill a crowded taproom without strain or quiet one with a single line. She plays the lute well and sings better, and she can hear a song once and hold it whole.

Her deeper gift is scholarship. She reads the old temple script and the court hand of the principality’s vanished kings, and she can trace a verse back through a dozen versions to the one it started as. Where other scholars see a nonsense refrain, she sees the name of a village that burned. When a job calls for more than a blade, the company turns to her, and she rarely comes back empty-handed.

In a fight, she is useless, and she knows it. She has learned where to stand, when to run, and how to make herself small.

Personality & Demeanor

Lista is warm, curious, and quick to feel what others feel, often before they admit to feeling it. She notices who has gone quiet at the fire and sits beside them. She asks questions constantly, and her best ones are the ones nobody wants answered.

Curiosity is her virtue and her weakness. She cannot leave a missing verse alone. A gap in an old song pulls at her the way gold pulls at Cassian, and she has followed that pull into archives, barrows, and ruins most scholars never visit. Some songs, she says, want to be found.

For all her softness, she is stubborn. Argument rarely moves her, and she does not give her word easily. When she changes her mind, she changes it the slow way, alone, and usually at night.

Notable Relationships

Cassian leans on Lista's learning more than anyone, and though she sees him more clearly than anyone, she likes him anyway. She suspects that says more about her than about him. He has asked her more than once for the song that will make his name. She has promised it to him when he has earned it.

Daegra taught her every hill song he knows, and she reads him the letters his mother sends down from the high pastures each spring. She is the one person in the company he has told about Toren.

Marella is the nearest thing Lista has to a sister on the road. Lista trusts her to get them all out of whatever Cassian gets them into.

Her mother still sings the dawn liturgy in the temple on the Bane Sea. Lista writes to her every season and has never once described what the company actually does.

Role & Affiliations

Lista serves as the company’s bard, reader, and researcher: the one who deciphers the map, reads the fine print on the contract, and finds out what waits at the end of the road before the others walk it. She keeps the company’s histories in a ledger no one else is permitted to read, and when the coin runs thin, her voice pays for their suppers. Between contracts, she holds court at the Stabbing Sword, trading songs for stories. She remains, by her mother’s reckoning, a daughter of the temple on loan to the world.