Yorik the Tracker

Yorik cannot remember the last time he slept two nights in a row under the same roof.

He has spent forty years clearing the way for the Order of the Dawn. Before a knight sets foot in a forest, Yorik has already walked every inch of it. He knows which stream is poisoned, which bridge will not hold and which tree the enemy sentry sleeps in.

He is short, skinny and has an old man's knees. The novices laugh at him on the first day. On the second, they try to follow his trail and cannot find it. On the third, they stop laughing.

He reads the ground the way others read a book. A bent twig. A stone turned upside down. A silence of birds where there should be noise. For Yorik, the forest is never quiet. You just have to know how to listen.

He carries no sword. He says it weighs too much and makes too much noise. He carries two daggers he has sharpened so many times they are half as wide as when they were given to him.

He does not need them for much, either. When Yorik strikes, the enemy has been lost for a while already. They just did not know it yet.

Ser Aldric once offered him a post at the castle. A bed, a fireplace and a wage for teaching the young ones. Yorik thanked him, picked up his cloak and left that very night.

He came back three weeks later with a map of the enemy's lands that nobody had managed to draw in ten years.

He is fifty-eight years old. His back hurts when it rains and he forgets the novices' names.

But never, ever, has he lost a trail.