Notorious Villains
Earl Oswin Tern
The Chapel Crow
The Guide names him as the standing warning for the rougher sort of company work. He was useful for years before anyone found the nerve to say plainly what he was.
Oswin Tern was Earl of White Barrow and a captain of hired men in the years when the rougher companies were most needed and least watched. The volumes do not date him. The Guide speaks of him as a figure of the past, against whom every company that takes the harder commissions is measured, and the companies themselves tell him as an old story whose lesson has not aged.
He began where they begin: driving off corpse-thieves, standing over hangings likely to turn riotous, escorting witchfinders through country that hated them, taking the crossing nobody else would take. He was good at it. Then he quartered his men in the priories the bad years had emptied, and the houses were put to uses their founders had not envisaged. The companies are specific, when they are made to be. The lead of the roofs and the bells of the towers were sold by the hundredweight. Men taken on the roads were held in the crypts until their families paid, and some were not paid for. A prior who came back to his house with a bishop’s letter was hanged from his own bell rope, and the letter nailed beneath him. The chapel at Hollin Cross was a stable for nine years, and its altar stone a mounting block.
Patrons looked the other way, because the work was done and the roads he kept stayed open. That is the part the tellers dwell on: not the end, which is not recorded, but the long stretch when he was useful and nobody said anything. The registry keeps a Sack of Chapel Crow among the actions of the War of the Two Kings, 4441 to 4452; the volumes do not, and whether it was his work or only his name cannot now be said.
His byname is a warning given to young companies before their first hard commission. When a patron offers good money for work that is harder than it ought to be, the older captains ask one question: who will be the Chapel Crow this time?
In person
About fifty, gaunt and long-faced, with black hair heavily streaked with grey, a hooked nose, a close dark beard and deep-set eyes. A black military coat over half-armour with a crow-feather trim, sword and gloves, and a field lantern burning cold blue; he uses a chapel’s font as his map table in an occupied priory.
