Kira Ranmoor
The Moors mark their people on the inner wrist, below the pulse point where the skin is thin and the marking holds clean: three horizontal bars, the outer two broken at the centre. Kira Ranmoor has these, and keeps them under a sleeve that falls to the second knuckle. A Moor shows the mark to her own and to nobody else. That is the whole of what you need to know about the sleeve, and the start of what you need to know about her.
She is from Pitsmoor, where the terraces climb the hill under the Moors' pole, and she is Scarp Southey's blade. The old man trained her himself, blind, in the yard at Southey, with a rag tied over her eyes until she could tell him where every man in the yard was standing by the sound of his boots and his breath. It shows. She fights with her eyes on your chest and your feet, never on your face, and she has the cut half a breath before it comes. Moors who have sparred with her say she doesn't decide to move; she has moved. She is civil, and cooperative when cooperation serves her purpose, and the transition out of cooperative is fast enough that nobody I have asked has seen it begin. Her blade is a crosslander blade, with leather on the hilt that she wrapped herself. She has flown sportsters since she was twelve, and holds that a Gruizer is nothing but a sportster grown fat.
She has worked below the murkline, too. For a time she ran courier routes for Ming Shalom's vault operation, and the above-ground supply chain for the materials the ¢hit lattice needs that can't be sourced underground. She was good at it, good enough that Ming's operation ran better with her in it than without, and Ming was not willing to disrupt a well-run operation on uncertainty. The Moors had placed her there years before Ming had a complete picture of what the Moors were building toward. Ashe Wyre noticed the sleeve before her first operational cycle was out. I noticed it on my third visit. What Wyre did with that, I can only estimate, and the estimate is unflattering to Ming's vetting.
In the Netherlands her name is told two ways, depending on which side of the Dun you hear it. In one, she took the heir of the Leys out of his father's garden at Neepsend and nearly pulled the seventh flag down with him. In the other, she went after him alone, a long way past the edges of anything a netherlander has a map for, where a drained reservoir gives up its drowned village and The Xin are not a story. Both tellings agree that she came back. The Moors will tell you which one is true, at length, if you stand still long enough.
She does not trust me, and I want to be precise about it: she does not trust me as a category of person, which is fair. I am documenting her, and the last netherlander who explained their methods to me at length found those methods in a printed entry. She is polite about it. She is polite about most things, right up until she isn't.
Field note: if her sleeve is down, you are probably fine. If the sleeve is up, she is either comfortable enough with you not to bother, or she has decided it no longer matters. Neither of these is as reassuring as it sounds. There is a third reading, which the Leys at Neepsend can tell you about, if they've a mind to.
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