Iron Jarl Gorrach

Lord of the Iron Barrow and Marshal of the Great Hunt, which makes him the most dangerous individual in the Outer Wilds and the one most likely to be underestimated by a court that thinks Redcaps are stupid. He is not. He has been declining favorable battles for thirty years on the grounds that the Kingdom cannot afford to keep offering them.

In Person

Squat, immensely dense, and slow-moving in a way that is entirely tactical — he has learned that people fill his silences with their plans. He wears the cap. He is aware that everyone believes the story about the dye and has never once corrected it, on the grounds that a free reputation is a free reputation.

In conversation he is dry, exact about numbers, and completely uninterested in insult. Faerie envoys who arrive expecting a savage spend the meeting being asked about forage, road capacity, and how many days their column can march before it has to eat.

History

Forty years in the Muster, eleven as Marshal. He made his name not in a battle but in a refusal: offered a favorable engagement against a Kingdom column in the third year of his command, he declined it, withdrew, and let the column stand in an empty campsite for nine days at ruinous expense. He has done a version of this four times since. The Kingdom has spent four campaigns' worth of money and taken no ground.

He is also, and this is the part the capital never mentions, the guarantor of the Term-Keepers: the arranged-combat institution that settles the Wilds' disputes by negotiated terms, honored afterward. He has enforced a ruling against his own house twice.

Method

Logistics and the muster. Twice a year he assembles twenty thousand under arms on the Standing Ground, drills them, reviews them, and disperses them inside a month — and about a third of the exercise is theater aimed at the Queen's generals, who have to plan against it every season.

The other two-thirds is not theater, and he has been arguing for four years that it should be used. His position is simple and he states it plainly at table: the Hunt has been running two centuries, the Kingdom is weaker now than it will be again, and a king who never stops moving never arrives.

Household

The Muster. The Redcap core: cavalry, discipline, and the column's spine. Loyal to Gorrach personally in a way that would be a problem if he were a different man.

The Term-Keepers. Not his — judges of arranged combat, independent by design — but they exist because he backs them, and everyone knows what would happen to their authority if he stopped.

The Bloomeries of Ochrewater. His smith-houses in name. Commercially, they sell to whoever pays, including the Kingdom through a Rimeward factor, and Gorrach has known this for six years and has not closed it, because he wants to see what the Kingdom orders.

Relations

Absolutely loyal to the Goblin King and increasingly, openly, in disagreement with him — a distinction the column understands and the Kingdom does not.

Correct with Thornmother Pesk, who has never sworn and whose remedies he buys anyway. Contemptuous of nobody, which unsettles people. He has met Foreman-Ascendant Coilbrass once, through intermediaries, over a shipment, and both parties described the other afterwards as serious.

Reputation

In the Wilds: the Marshal, and the reason the Standing Ground still means something. In the Kingdom: a savage chieftain, per the histories, which describe Redcaps as incapable of institutions and decline to mention that the Wilds have a functioning law of war and the Kingdom does not.

Hooks

"He asked how many days we could march before we had to eat. I gave him a number. He thanked me and we did not fight that year."