MARELLA

Overview

Marella was born inside the walls of a fortress-city on Seacea’s southern border, where the fiefdom keeps its standing garrisons against the goblins of the Alzion Mountains. Her father served as the garrison’s quartermaster, and she grew up at his table among ledgers, tally sticks, and the endless arithmetic of a place under siege: so many arrows, so many sacks of grain, so many soldiers on the wall, so many who would not come back from the next raid. He taught her that every war is a sum. She has never found reason to doubt him.

At sixteen she enlisted with the fortress archers. For eight years she stood the walls and rode border patrols, shooting goblin raiders out of the passes and learning the discipline of a soldier who holds her ground because the soldiers beside her hold theirs. She rose to command a file of twelve archers and brought most of them home from every patrol she led.

When her enlistment ended, she sat down with her father’s habits and did the sums. Another ten years on the wall would earn her what a good season earns a sellsword. She took her bow, her discharge papers, and her savings south over the border and hired out as a caravan guard, where she fell in with a hillman named Daegra and a loud boy from Vranna named Cassian. She has been keeping both of them alive ever since.

Appearance

Marella is twenty-seven, tall, and lean, with the heavy shoulders and broad back of someone who has drawn a war bow every day since girlhood. Her wheat-blonde hair is cropped short at the nape, a garrison habit she kept. Sun and wind have weathered her face and scattered freckles across it. Her eyes are hazel and steady, and she rarely looks away first.

The three fingers of her right hand carry thick string calluses, and a pale scar crosses the inside of her left forearm where a bowstring caught her before she learned to wear a bracer. She wears one now, of dark leather, laced tight.

She dresses like the soldier she was: a quilted gambeson faded from Seacean blue to the grey of old slate, wool trousers, sturdy boots, and a hooded brown cloak she can sleep in. She carries a yew longbow her old commander let her buy out at her discharge and a quiver of arrows she fletches herself with grey goose feathers. A thin ledger bound in oilcloth rides in an inner pocket of her gambeson, and she writes in it every night.

Abilities & Expertise

Marella is a superb archer, trained on Seacea’s frontier. She can drop a running goblin at a hundred paces in a crosswind, loose a dozen aimed arrows in the time it takes most bowmen to loose six, and hold a full draw longer than anyone she has ever served beside. She always knows how many arrows remain in her quiver without looking.

Eight years of soldiering taught her more than the bow. She can set a watch, choose a campsite, read a patrol route, and pull a frightened group into order with a word. The first thing she does in any room, camp, or cave is find the way out.

Her father’s trade stayed with her, too. She keeps the company’s accounts, splits every payout to the last copper, and can tell at a glance whether a contract is worth the risk. Cassian negotiates the price. Marella decides whether they can afford to accept it.

Personality & Demeanor

Marella is calm, dry, and practical. She speaks less than the others and means more. When the company argues, she lets them run out of breath, then says what they will do. Usually they do it.

She believes every choice has a price, and she believes a sensible person weighs the price before choosing. Most of the time the belief serves her well. It makes her careful with coin, careful with lives, and difficult to panic. It also makes her a little too certain that anything can be weighed.

Beneath the soldier’s reserve, she is fiercely loyal and warmer than she lets strangers see. She will spend an evening mending Lista’s coat, sit up through the night with a wounded companion, and deny both the next morning. Her humor runs so dry that newcomers often miss it. The company never does.

Notable Relationships

Marella met Cassian when he was seventeen, proud, and newly on the road, and she has treated him ever since with the worn patience of an older sister. She admires his nerve and distrusts his judgment in roughly equal measure. She has spent two years trying to teach him how to retreat.

Daegra was the first friend she made after leaving Seacea. She keeps the tally of his purse, and she knows to the copper how far he stands from paying his blood-price. She has never told him the number.

Lista is family to Marella in every way but blood, and the one person in the company who can make her laugh out loud. Marella taught her how to walk a night road without being seen and where to stand when a fight breaks out.

Her father still keeps the stores of the border garrison. He writes to her twice a year, and his letters arrive as lists.

Role & Affiliations

Marella serves as the company’s archer, quartermaster, and conscience of its purse: the one who plans the road out, keeps the accounts, and tells Cassian no when no is the right answer. Between contracts, she takes her place at the company’s table in the Stabbing Sword, back to the wall and facing the door. She left the Seacean garrison with an honorable discharge and her papers in order, and she keeps them in the same oilcloth as her ledger. Somewhere in that ledger is a figure she has never shown anyone: the price of a stone house on the Seacean coast, with a garden and a door that locks. She knows exactly how far she is from it.