Mara Venn organised grain deliveries for the Free Provinces, the rebel cause of western Iskandar, and is remembered as the first voice of the Apocalypse Horde.
She was not a soldier. She was the reason soldiers ate, and for the whole of the civil war her work took her toward the places everyone else was leaving. She cared less for charters and councils than for whether the people in front of her had eaten, and by the end she had no patience at all for speeches.
That work made her a witness. Bringing food to the eastern burial road on the morning after a battle, she saw the dead raised by a loyalist priest, and nothing of what the other side had done there. The Gilded Coven, which was secretly financing the rebellion, chose her for exactly that narrowness. She carried a truthful but incomplete account to the Supreme Ruler’s court, and it helped bring the Justicar’s Legion into the war. The only thing she asked in return was whether anyone in the capital would send food.
The peace took everything else. Her village accepted the Legion’s protection, was accused of burning a Veinwright shrine, and lost her two brothers to the purges; a lender working under Gilded licence took the family’s land while they were gone. Her district recorded her as departed without destination.
She surfaced among the last rebels hiding in a quarry in the western wilds, wearing scavenged armour and carrying captured weapons. When Darien Rusk came to them and apologised, she struck him and said she wanted nothing from him. Around her the survivors burned the broken crown and the seals of the Free Provinces, and her refusal to go on begging the realm to become better became the seed of a harder creed: that whatever is built will be controlled, and whatever is controlled must be destroyed. Some later accounts say she executed Rusk when he tried to negotiate with the Legion. No reliable record survives.
The Horde burns its dead on open ground and gives them no named stones, because a name can be entered in a ledger. She had learned that from a ledger.
Appears in
- The Civil War in Iskandar Three centuries of silence end on the morning the western tax road falls, and a court built to intimidate discovers it is surrounded.
- The Shadow Conspiracy A contract is refused in a gilded room and a second one is agreed, and a kingdom that has not yet heard of either is already being sold.