Van Hallam
I should say up front that I am not the person to trust for an objective account of Van Hallam, and I have given up pretending otherwise. Occasional friend, sometime confidante, drinking associate, and something that might be love if you squint at it from the right angle at the wrong hour, though neither of us has ever agreed on which angle that is. What I am, mostly, is his biographer, whether he asked for one or not. I write down what he says and does, and try to keep a straight face about how much of it is true, because only Van could tell you that, and Van has never once been interested in telling anyone that.
He was born into slavery in Hellsborough in 77.murk-demonspawn and left as a youth to make himself into something else entirely: warrior, statesman, a name people say carefully in public and loudly after a few drinks. He is highly intelligent and will talk your ear off on subjects most people in a bar have the sense to leave alone, and he does this in grammar that has never troubled itself with a classroom, in a Northern accent that gets flatter and blunter the more serious the thing he's saying. He is not a subtle man. He has never once, in my experience, lowered his voice at the correct moment.
That is the actual danger of being near him, and it has nothing to do with his fighting, which is considerable but beside the point. Van will say the wrong thing in the wrong bar at full volume, the sort of thing that gets a person shopped to the organic network by whichever jellyhead happens to be listening, and everyone in Hellsborough knows the name Van Hallam well enough that being seen next to him while he's saying it is its own kind of exposure. I have sat through more than one conversation with my drink going warm in my hand, doing the maths on how many people just heard that, and Van, halfway through the next sentence, apparently doing no maths at all.
He met Shad in the wisewood the way he meets most things that end up staying with him, which is to say by accident and permanently. He has been to the ripperthroat mountains during the milting raids and to the Sunderlands as Hordrön's prisoner, and came back from both with stories and without the good sense to stop repeating them in public. He has a wife, a son, and a granddaughter scattered across the family's history in ways I am still working out the order of, and a habit of recognising people across crowded rooms and announcing it before he's checked whether announcing it is safe. It usually isn't. He does it anyway.
Field note: if you are drinking with Van Hallam and he starts a sentence with "that's when I met," settle in, keep your voice down, and do not expect him to keep his down as a professional courtesy. He won't.
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