Olaf

Olaf is a young northerner in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"), a sellsword who fell into the hands of orcs together with Jonathan River and became his steadfast companion. He is larger than most men, with long fair hair and beard, and looks to be in his early twenties; he wears a fur vest and tattoos and carries a great northern axe. He says only that he could not stay in the land he came from and that he works for whatever crews will hire him.¹²

Among the orcs

Olaf told Jonathan that he had been with a band of bandits for about a month and a half, at first taking them for soldiers. Before the orc chief Brakar and the shaman Gromak he claimed to be working for the bandits to pay off a debt; he later admitted to Jonathan that this had been a lie. Sent with Jonathan to recover a relic for the orcs, he found camping places, chopped wood at the soldiers' camp and joined in Jonathan's plans, and he warmed to the mage when Jonathan spoke to him in the Fran tongue.³⁴⁵

On the way back to the orcs he found the rough route to their camp and hid when three orcs came near. One night, as wolves approached the camp, he froze, not knowing what to do; it was no spell. Later he breathed hard in his sleep and said he had had a nightmare, which he read as an omen of the Great Wolf and of being far from the north.⁶⁷⁸

Olaf speaks the orcs' tongue. After a battle had scattered the orc camp, he interpreted for four badly burned orcs, and in a cage he found a note and a parchment whose words hinted at an allegiance other than their own, which angered him. When Jonathan offered him coin and his leave, he refused: they had begun the journey together and would finish it together.⁹¹⁰¹¹

Jonathan next found him bound to a tree and half conscious. According to Gromak, Olaf had lashed out wildly when the orcs tried to wake him and had been wrestled down and tied. When a burning rain began to fall, Jonathan cut his bonds and sheltered him in a cave.¹²¹³¹⁴

The mountain of Azbo

When the orcs went their own way, Olaf dug through to the entrance of the buried rooms that the companions were seeking, reminded Jonathan to keep moving when he lost himself in the parchments there, and left his sleeping bag behind so that he could carry off about five old books. At the threshold a smoky spirit cut his shoulder with a sword, and the wound burned; he fled after Jonathan, then in an old bear hollow he heated metal in Jonathan's fire to sear the wound and sewed it shut. He did not see the visions Jonathan saw of the woman who later came to the rooms, but heard her scream.^1516171819

He noticed that the map they followed kept turning them in circles, and once the true route was revealed he crossed a chasm hanging from a rope. Inside the mountain he went down before Jonathan, read northern history in a little library, and used the rod Jonathan carried to draw a chair, cushions and a pillow. In a duel with the tomb's animated gear he was wounded; his rage, beastlike movements and reddening eyes were seen, and, enlarged by Jonathan's magic, he smashed the pieces apart.^2021222324

Sınır Sapı

Riders of the quarantine forces surrounded Olaf and Jonathan and took them to Sınır Sapı. When Jonathan again offered to let him go, Olaf reminded him that Jonathan had not abandoned him before and said he would stay. The two took rooms at the inn; Olaf left early from a long talk with the elf Ektelyon, saying he knew too little to add to it.²⁵²⁶²⁷

There he told Jonathan of his nature. What the north counts a gift he calls a curse: he is a werewolf, and he fled before finishing the rites and training by which northerners learn to master it, unwilling to take up the role his family would have laid on him for life. Among the Frans, a lycanthrope who learns to control the curse can become one of the ulfhednar, the strongest warriors of the land, held to be chosen by the gods. Olaf believed he could not fall sick, though neither of them was sure that held for the new plague, and he thought of guard work or the prize fights by which he had once earned coin.^28293031

He woke with Jonathan in a cellar, lightly scratched, remembering nothing after they had set out to look for Teresa, and broke the locked door. With his senses sharpened by Jonathan's magic he picked out among the tangled tracks around the house the coming and going of two people, some days old; he followed the trail for a time, but could not say whose it was.^32333435

In the investigations that followed he kept watch while Jonathan searched the house of Captain Markus, changed Jonathan's gold bars in the town, and swept their tracks away with bundled branches after an envelope from the house burst in the forest. Made invisible, he spied on Markus's house and reported that the captain had looked under a floorboard and left in anger, and that a poor-looking child of twelve or thirteen was watching the house. He later picked that child out among the orphans while playing a local ball game with them.^3637383940

Olaf says that reading is hard for him. He forced a back window of the captain's house, carried the sleeping Markus to a lower room and bound him to a chair, then stood masked beside Jonathan during the questioning. He came to wear the mark of the governor's house on his arm, and he usually preferred to wait at the door when Jonathan sought private counsel.^4142434445

Teresa's forest and the drow

Once he woke in a cave, lightly wounded, dusty and with his clothes torn, reaching for his axe and remembering nothing of what had happened. He dressed an old deer that Teresa had brought, and she hinted that she smelled something on him that no ordinary human nose could catch. A great black water serpent frightened him, and later, in the caves beneath the lake, he warned the others just before sharp stones and branches rained down.^4647484950

The spirit Aqua said that Olaf could bear her no ill will because of his bond with another spirit, whom she did not name. When Jonathan drew the wolf he had seen behind him, Olaf said he knew that the northern kind differed from the cursed kind, but for him it was still a curse of the social sort.⁵¹⁵²⁵³

At the drow cave he caught his foot on a rope and set off a smoke alarm, harming no one, and he was shaken and angered by the human bodies below. He held the line in front of Jonathan against the drow, resisted a mind flayer's attempt to master him with Jonathan's help, caught a fleeing drow once enlarged, and kept a tentacle of the mind flayer as a keepsake; the town's rulers promised him a reward.^5455565758

The road south

When Tim, the governor's son, showed that he could change his shape, Olaf did not object, since he could change too. On the new journey he drove the two-horse cart and took on the camp work and hunting, though he did not like Tim wearing his or Jonathan's likeness for long. He searched a burned settlement for large tracks, and, made invisible, watched imps and devils kneel before Jonathan; later he hurried the freed captives of a devils' camp on their way.^5960616263

In a village he took the braided beard of the guide Max for a northern custom; Max said he wore it in memory of northern friends he had lost. Olaf did not hide his own wolf nature from Max and vouched for Jonathan. With Jonathan's magic he tracked a lost girl to a lake ringed by trees, where he found the lack of animal tracks strange. When the lake later drew at Max and the girl, he burst from hiding in anger and pushed them free.^6465666768

Below the lake he learned hand signs from Max to talk under water, pulled Jonathan back from a path that was about to collapse, and, enlarged, stretched himself across the pit so that the others could cross over him. In a chamber with a beast he was clawed, and afterwards he lifted Jonathan up to a broken glass shelf. A fey in the shape of a deer looked at him a little more closely than at the others before greeting him. Later he opened the single door that led the group out by an old waterway.^697071727374

Character

Olaf is loyal to Jonathan before all else: he twice refused to leave him, and said that even when parts of Jonathan's plans were kept from him he would trust him. Jonathan, for his part, feared that Olaf's will or mind might be read by their enemies and told him little of his plans.²⁶⁷⁵⁷⁶

The northern tradition he fled is one of rite, faith and a warrior's place in society. Werewolves of the north can gain full or partial control over the curse through Fraza's wisdom, and one who already carries Fran blood gains the ability to control the change naturally.⁷⁷⁷⁸