Vera Redhook

Human bandit chief of the Redhook crew, who took a hooked boarding-axe off a Tidewrack reaver, named her crew for it, and grew bold enough to camp within sight of Valenfeld's gate.

Vera is not grand and does not pretend to be. She runs a crew of deserters and debt-jumpers on nerve and a fair cut, and her one real talent is reading exactly how slow the watch will be — slow enough, she has decided, to pitch tents on the east road in plain sight. The hooked axe is her trick: it catches a shield-rim and drags it down before the next blow lands. Cut her down and the crew is a rabble; that is the whole of the Redhook problem, and the whole of its solution.