Vossard

Vossard keeps an office in the merchant quarter of Crownhold, at the marketplace called the Three Roads — named for the three highways out of the city, and for the bargains that travel along them. Halen Vossard is a human in their late forties, the third generation to run a caravan trade along three of the Vale's routes, and they dress well but understated, plainly able to afford more and plainly uninterested in showing it. There is the trading, and then there is the other trading: the quiet commerce in information that moves alongside the goods. Married, with grown children in the junior arms, Vossard is the respectable and discreet face of that trade.

Vossard has no use for ceremony and less for flattery. Time is money, and they account for both as their own: a visitor is heard, weighed, and answered, and small talk earns nothing. To those they know and trust to deal cleanly — Tar among them — the manner softens into something near familiarity, the ease of a merchant greeting reliable custom. To everyone else it stays brisk.

What Vossard sells is not only goods but knowledge, and they will take payment in coin or in kind. The favours they prefer are the ones that serve the business — a southern road made safe again, word of what the Concordate is requisitioning, a rival's advantage quietly removed. Such favours are not always clean work, and Vossard does not pretend otherwise. Whatever passes across their desk stays there: discretion is part of the price, and part of why people come.

Orsday · 23rd of Octen, 412 Concordis

Tar came alone to the Three Roads, an old acquaintance turning up, as ever, wanting something. Vossard heard the matter of the temples and laid out two roads in answer. The first was slow and cheap: they would put their fingers in the right places and surface what could be found, paid in coin. The second was direct and dear: a specific book drawn out of the Great Library through a contact Vossard holds some pull over — paid not in coin but in a favour, and the favour, they let it be understood, would not be a clean one. Tar made no promise either way. Vossard, who is never in a hurry, was content to wait.