PERSONAE · THE VALE

Korga Ren

aka the Ninebout, the Crowd's Own, the Champion Who Stays Poor

The reigning Champion of the Marrowring and the crowd's beloved — a big, warm, guileless brawler who fights nine nights in ten and cannot understand why he is still poor. He is poor because Ondrey Kass holds his contract, structured so he can win forever and never quite buy free; Korga half-knows this and cannot let himself finish the thought.

Korga Ren is the best-loved man in Highbridge and one of the least free. He came up out of the Underbridge with nothing but reach, a jaw like a shield-boss, and a grin the whole stone drum can see from the top tier, and Vell Osgrim signed him off the practice sand in an afternoon. He has been Champion of the Marrowring for two years. He fights the daily wager-bout more often than any fighter should, wins most of them, sends the crowd home hoarse, and lives in a rented room over a tanner's in the Kilns because after the ring's cut and the company's cut and the payment on his contract there is, somehow, never anything left. He is not stupid. This is the thing that will break a player's heart about Korga Ren, if they sit with him: he is not stupid, he is loyal and hopeful and afraid, and those three together do the work stupidity would. He knows the numbers do not add up. He knows the contract Osgrim signed him to was bought by the soft man in the Underbridge, and that the payment is structured so that the harder he wins the longer he owes. He has done the arithmetic in the dark more than once and arrived, each time, at the edge of the true conclusion — that the arrangement is designed for him to never get out — and each time he has flinched away from it, because to believe it is to believe that the roaring crowd that loves him and the arenamaster who plucked him from nothing and the whole warm loud life he has built in the ring are all just the pretty front of a cage. So he tells himself it is bad luck, or a bad season, or that one more good year on the sand will do it, and he goes out and fights the ninth night, and the crowd chants his name, and Ondrey Kass's book gets a little longer. What Korga wants, under the grin, is almost unbearably small: to fight a little less, to keep a little of what he wins, and to stop being afraid to count.

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