Ronan Blackwake

Ronan Blackwake, listening to a conversation he is not part of

Ronan is thirty-eight, and as an E-grade he looks about thirty, though a weathered thirty: years of docks, sun, and salt wind have put lines at the corners of his eyes. His long hair is sun-streaked somewhere between brown and dark blond, pulled back from his face with thin braids worked through it, and he wears a short beard with a single long braid hanging from his chin. His eyes are a pale grey-blue. A dark tattoo of curling filigree runs across one side of his forehead to the temple, and both forearms are sleeved in ink down to the backs of his hands. He wears silver hoops and small rings in his ears, silver rings on his fingers, a silver cuff over a tooled black leather bracer, and several cords and chains around his neck, one carrying a round silver medallion. He dresses in black, a loose dark shirt under a leather vest edged with braided leather. Most of the time he is sitting at a tavern table with a tankard in front of him, looking like a man with nowhere to be. He usually has somewhere to be.

Ronan is confident, observant, and extremely comfortable living in moral gray areas. He knows which gate guard is working tonight, which ferryman owes whom a favor, and which official will suddenly become interested in a wagon carrying "lamp oil." He drinks socially, gambles carefully, and rarely reveals how much he actually knows. He has no objection to breaking laws he considers stupid, but there are goods he will not move at any price, particularly slaves or anything intended to deliberately spread disease.