A lean, weathered human man with sun-browned skin, bright hazel eyes, and shoulder-length chestnut hair tied with a faded red cord. His crooked smile suggests he is always halfway through a lie, though his battered nose and numerous small scars hint that some of his stories contain a grain of truth. He wears a well-maintained but conspicuously patched leather coat, a crimson waistcoat, polished boots, and a lute decorated with painted scenes of battles that clearly never happened.

Orsino is theatrical, warm-hearted, and almost pathologically incapable of giving a short answer. He treats strangers as an audience until they prove themselves friends, then treats friends as co-conspirators in an ongoing legend. He is quick to laugh at himself in private, but in public he would rather be thought a fool than be seen as afraid.

Orsino Valcera was raised in a river town where every tavern had a different version of the truth and every dockworker knew how to improve a story before the second cup. His mother sang old marching songs for supper money, while his father sold dubious miracle tonics from a painted handcart. Orsino inherited both talents. He learned early that a confident voice could turn a spilled drink into an assassination attempt, a broken chair into a siege engine, and a bruised eyebrow into the scar of a legendary ogre duel. He left home after one particularly ambitious tale convinced a local gang that he had stolen a jeweled war banner from a duke. The banner was actually a tablecloth, and the duke was a tavern owner with a bad temper. Orsino escaped by singing until the mob laughed, then spent the next year drifting from inn to inn under the invented name of Captain Valcera, Hero of Seven Campaigns. In reality, most of his battles have been arguments over unpaid tabs, contests involving thrown tankards, or brief encounters with men considerably stronger than him. He usually lost, but he remembers every defeat in heroic detail. Beneath the boasting, he genuinely wants to become the person his stories claim he already is, especially when someone weaker needs an advocate.