Owen Pike

Where Jim Rook has become rooted in the country, Owen Pike remains what he was hired to be: a professional instrument of armed control.

The Northern Fringes Reclamation Feuds have run since 4611 and are running now. Land informally won hardens into contested right the moment it begins to pay, and small barons, retired captains, road syndics, chapel trustees and opportunistic earls have spent a generation turning half-reclaimed country into hereditary fact. The fighting is driven by named men rather than by policy, and Owen Pike’s is one of the names: the mercenary warden who stands with Earl Nicholas Blackmere and Sir Alexander Crowle.

Like every party to the feuds, he claims to be imposing order, and like every party he lives by survey paper, winter riders and the threat of burning whatever cannot be held. Blackmere’s papers are old and good and his practical presence thin, and a lord whose reach falls short of his parchment needs men who can put riders on a ridge. Pike sells that reach, and he sells it with a contract.

The open market for armed men in the March is small, perhaps two hundred pounds a year across every employer. The irregular market is larger and less pleasant: patrons pay for surveys, for recoveries and for errands they do not describe fully. Pike works the second market under the forms of the first. His riders are disciplined, his equipment is uniform and kept, and his checkpoints are manned. He expects discipline because discipline is what people pay him for.

A company hired to clear a valley in the fringes may find it has been hired into the feuds instead, and Pike is one of the men it may meet on the road. He is professional, disciplined, expensive and dangerous, and less heroic than the captain on the other side.

In person

Owen Pike is about forty-one, six foot one, lean and very fit, with a horseman’s long legs. His face is narrow, severe and slightly gaunt, with high cheekbones, a long jaw and thin lips. His very dark hair is cut short at the sides and longer on top, and he wears a narrow dark moustache and a short pointed beard. His eyes are an unusually pale blue-grey, and a burst blood vessel stains the white of the left one dark red. A deep diagonal sabre scar runs from his right temple toward the cheek and splits the right eyebrow; the end of his left earlobe is gone; a gold cap shows on his upper left canine when he smiles. His hands are long and unusually narrow, and he wears a small black iron pike-head on a cord at his neck. Everything he owns is maintained and deliberately uniform.