Name
Tamsyn Trelawney, née LeMorrigen
Age Twenty-Seven
Appearance To the trained eye, Tamsyn's aristocratic pedigree is clear to see. Her face is gracefully longer and more angular than typically seen amongst the lower classes and has the sort of prominent, well defined cheekbones that on anyone else would be their most striking feature. Her body is more like that of a dancer than someone who has to toil in a field for their daily bread; while she does have more developed muscles than typical for a woman of her background, at 5'10 she also stands taller than most which gives her a lithe frame rather than a stocky one. Her head is crowned with a flaming mane of auburn hair that is often wound into a tight plait that reaches the middle of her back and her skin is the fair, freckled affair that often goes with such hair.
Of course, all of this is merely the background of the tapestry that is Tamsyn. Her most striking feature, the one that has quite possibly determined the strange and twisting path her life has taken, is her eyes. One is a brilliant emerald green, the other vivid blood red. Few people remember much else about Tamsyn.
Typically she wears practical garb favoring sturdy trousers, a shirt and a hard wearing leather jacket. Around her neck an eight inch marlinspike is her only normal concession to wearing jewelry. She does still own a very modest collection of dresses and jewels befitting of a lady that she keeps for the rare occasions they are required or when she needs to make a certain impression.
Personality To be born into the ruling classes is to be born with a god given confidence about your place in the world and Tamsyn has this in spades. She is equally as happy haggling over the final price of shipment with men considered thugs and brutes as she is negotiating the quite possibly equally dangerous waters of a society ball. On the tailcoats of this confidence comes a generally relaxed and friendly demeanor and a certain generosity of spirit. For the most part, the only thing she refuses to talk about is her past, preferring to keep those she has left behind secret from anyone else. Additionally, as a result of her upbringing she has a taste for the finer things in life to a degree that borders on hedonistic and given the opportunity will lose herself debauched carousing.
With that said, to look on Tamsyn as some lost little lady playing at being a smuggler would be to underestimate her. She has achieved everything she has in her life by sheer force of personality. Fighting against the tide expectations has forged within her an iron will that could hold fast the largest of ships in the roughest of seas. When Tamsyn sets her sights on a goal, she will keep going until the world is the way she wants it to be.
History To be born different, is to be born touched by fate. Some folk say this is a blessing; others, a curse. Really only those who fall outside of the world's expectations for them can tell and when it comes to subverting expectations, Tamsyn LeMorrigen is quite possibly the person to ask.
Born the daughter of a relatively minor noble house of Fief Thiah, the life planned for Tamsyn was simple and well established. She would love and respect her parents; learn as much as was appropriate; be matched with a boy from a suitable family and when the time was right marry them. From then on she would tend to her husband's household and provide him with as many heirs as she could. Such had been the lot in life of noble women since time immemorial and such should have been Tamsyn's. Fate had different ideas.
The mutation was only a minor one. The child was born with one eye green as an emerald, like her father, but it's partner, it's partner was red as blood. In every other respect Tamsyn was a perfectly ordinary newborn but all anyone could see, or would talk about in hushed tones, were her eyes. Yes the church taught that everyone should be judged on their deeds, but even in the well educated ranks of the nobility, the old faith still held sway. To be flawed of the body as the newest member of the Lemorrigens was, was to be flawed of the soul; as she grew, Tamsyn only seemed to prove the value of this ancient wisdom.
Wilful was what her mother, a woman with three sons and only one daughter, called her. Disobedient, selfish and wicked were words many other folk including her father used. Certainly, Tamsyn was rarely where she was supposed to be or doing what she was supposed to be doing. If you were to seek the youngest LeMorrigen, it quickly became common knowledge that her chambers were the last place you should bother to look, and her tutors the last people you should ask. Music and needlework held no interest for Tamsyn; she much preferred to watch ships pulling in and out of the town's harbor from her window and imagining where they were going or spying on the castle's men-at-arms as they practiced their sword work. It practically took chains and shackles to keep her where she was meant to be.
Unsurprisingly this determined individuality caused a strain in familial relations. While Count LeMorrigen wasn't wholly concerned by the actual behaviour of his daughter, the reputation that Tamsyn was quickly building for being different and difficult was another matter. At the lower end of the noble pecking order, marriage prospects for the scions of House LeMorrigen were already limited. Tamsyn's unique visage and behavior meant that by the age of ten, long after the age when these things were normally settled, her father had still not been able to secure a promise of marriage for her. His response to this growing embarrassment was to take an increasingly active and authoritarian role in his daughter's life. Tamsyn responded in kind by rebelling against what was expected of her in increasingly daring and brasher ways.
In an attempt to foster some harmony between father and daughter, Lady LeMorrigen, having noticed her daughter's interest in the activities of the harbor, persuaded her husband to teach Tamsyn to sail just as he had his sons. These lessons did achieve a modicum of understanding between the pair, Tamsyn deriving the same joy from being on the water as her father, but they also planted the seeds of devastation that were to come.
Shortly before Tamsyn's sixteenth birthday, Count LeMorrigen finally secured a betrothal for her. The groom-to-be was seven years younger than his daughter and the fifth son of a family of even lower status than the LeMorrigens, but at this point Count LeMorrigen was ready to seize any match he could get. His daughter was not; partly because she had fallen in love and been having a secret relationship with Roland, a fisherman's son, and partly because the family with whom her father had arranged the marriage with were barely more the shit stained pig herders to her mind.
Whatever familial harmony had been hard fostered over the years was shattered. For weeks the arguments and shouting matches went on, neither side giving an inch until finally Count LeMorrigen offered his daughter a choice. Accept the marriage, try and join the order of the Iron Rose or leave and never darken his door again. For Tamsyn the marriage was out of the question and she had no interest in joining the Iron Roses because a nun with a sword was still a nun and she had already discovered the thrills sharing a bedchamber. That left her with one option.
One night she wrote a short letter for her parents to find, shaved her head, bound her chest, wrapped a bandage over her deviant eye, donned some of her brothers more worn out clothes, and snuck out to meet Roland at the docks before boarding a ship heading south. From then on the pair traveled from port to port, staying in one place only as long as their coin lasted before signing on to a crew for a new journey. The confines of sea travel meant that Tamsyn's attempts to pass as a man were often seen through but rarely before she had had chances to prove her worth as a sailor. While most captains were irritated at having been deceived none could deny the girls usefulness as a deckhand.
Tamsyn's first foray into smuggling began innocuously enough whilst crewing aboard The Walrus, a ship working the trade route between XXXXXX and XXXXXX. The captain offered Tamsyn a week's pay if she would row a package ashore for him and deliver it to his agent, explaining that the man who should have done it was sick. Tamsyn jumped at the chance for extra coin and happily took the package ashore. She knew what she was doing, smugglers had been one of the problems that had vexed her father greatly but Tamsyn decided to feign ignorance of it for a while, only confronting the captain when he asked her and Roland to sign on as deck hands again and using it to leverage better pay from the man. Despite Roland's reservation, this was the last time the couple signed onto a new ship. For a couple of years they sailed with the same crew, making little deliveries to anyone who had coin for what they had.
While this was a happy time for Tamsyn her relationship with Roland was beginning to fracture. The love that had once burned so fiercely now cooled and the couple argued more and more. After a night of drinking in a XXXXXXX tavern a particularly vicious argument erupted that resulted in Roland hitting Tamsyn. Generations of noble blood boiled and she struck him back and the ensuing fight ended with Roland, lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a neck that was visibly broken. Realising what she'd done Tamsyn fled through the city streets fighting back tears as made for the safety of The Walrus. Not much fuss was made when Roland wasn't aboard by the time The Walrus left port the next day but for Tamsyn everything felt wrong. Her life before had been an adventure but now she was just reminded of everything she had lost and began to increasingly feel like she'd made a mistake leaving XXXXXXX. Roland had been a little piece of home and without him she felt lost. Part of her desperately wanted to go back to XXXXXX but she was too scared of how her father might react to her presence. Instead she stayed with The Walrus feeling increasingly despondent, trapped and rudderless until the day they sailed into a sleepy XXXXXXX port and she saw the most beautiful boat she'd ever seen.
Most sailors would have considered the sloop that had caught her eye little more than the local Count's plaything, but to her it was perfect. Big enough to be a home, her home, but small enough that she could sail it by herself if she needed to, it was a chance to start and truly seize control of her fate. Stealing the boat was easy enough, the noble family's jetties were guarded at night but all it took was a little outrageous flirting with the definite promise of more to come and one of the guard actually walked her to the boat with a spring in his step. After that it was a simple matter of hitting the lecherous idiot over the head with a cudgel,hauling up the sail and sailing out of the port. By the time a ship had been readied to give chase Tamsyn had long disappeared into the night.
From then on Tamsyn pretty much sailed wherever she thought she might make some coin. Sometimes she would take on a hand but mostly she sailed by herself. The Eel, as she had dubbed her boat, was to her mind the perfect craft for a smuggler, large enough to handle rough seas, small and shallow enough that it could travel a good way further up many rivers and inlets than most boats and it was faster on the wind then any boat she'd been on before. Her stock and trade became weapons bought in the north and sold to those who wanted them in the south. While The Eel was her home, Baytown was a natural port for Tamsyn to base herself in as a place to sell any excess cargo she had and to resupply. A the demand for weapons grew Tamsyn was only too happy to cash in on this lucrative trade.
Art Credit
@Lady Luindis (Except for the hatchet job that is the eye color. That bit of vandalism is all me.)