Sir Dorn Plang looks as if someone built a banquet table into a suit of armor: barrel-chested, thick through the neck, and broad enough that people instinctively leave him a lane. His old mail and breastplate sit over a belly softened by years of rich stew and cheap brandy. A faded sash of service medals crosses his chest, its thread rubbed nearly smooth where he worries it with his thumb. His nose is perpetually red, his cheeks mottled, and his heavy jaw shifts audibly when he chews. When he laughs, his square teeth show in an unexpectedly broad, almost boyish grin. He moves with careful economy, setting each boot as if the ground might be a bridge under siege, but turns too quickly for a man who insists he is retired. He never puts down the little glass in his hand, even when he needs both hands for a task; he simply hooks it between two fingers or sets it on the nearest person's shoulder-high surface.

Dorn is generous with food and stingy with praise, and he can be warmly funny until someone invokes duty as an excuse for cruelty. He likes being useful but resents being treated as a relic. Around frightened people he becomes patient and solid; around officials he grows sardonic and tests every promise. When sober, he is alert and methodical. After drinking, he becomes sentimental, then abruptly ashamed of it.

Dorn was raised in a mill town where his mother kept accounts for the grain weigh-house and his father repaired wagon axles. He entered service as a young squire, more attracted to the certainty of drills than to songs of honor. During the border campaign at Hallow Ford, his commander ordered a retreat that would have left a company of wounded soldiers behind. Dorn disobeyed, held a narrow causeway with eleven others, and got most of them out. The medals on his sash came from that day, though he remembers the names of the two who did not return better than the names of the men who decorated him. He served another twenty years, becoming a dependable officer and an increasingly unreliable drinker. His old commander, Dame Odelia, taught him that obeying orders and doing right were not always the same thing. Years later, Dorn discovered that the retreat at Hallow Ford had not been a battlefield necessity: a noble patron had paid the commander to abandon the wounded and conceal a failed supply deal. Dorn confronted the truth too late to prevent the commander from dying in bed with honors. He retired rather than swear another oath to the same court. Now he keeps a room above the Rattlebridge tavern and serves as an informal counselor to its owner, Femi, who has repeatedly tried to get him to stop drinking before noon. His former squire, Zsóka, still writes asking him to help train a new town watch. Dorn has not answered. A survivor from Hallow Ford has recently arrived in town with evidence that the old cover-up is still being used to blackmail the families of the dead. Dorn wants to help, but fears that acting now will cost the few people who still trust him.