The chieftain was not a particularly powerful man except by the measure of this peasants and freemen; though a [i]þegn[/i], most of his lands were empty, with few inhabitants paying few taxes. Maybe this was the root cause of his ostentatious nature; for he wore the best clothes he could, in the finest green dyes afforded from faraway lands; and he sat in the nearest thing they had to a throne, a tall wooden chair, cushioned in stuffed linen, carved at its facets with runes and snaking dragons. When he had quaffed the very last of his beer, of which the village possessed a startling abundance, he turned the cup over, and smacked its lip repeatedly into the table, pretending at being a sort of gavel.

He was tall and burly, as befitting this people; he was measured the strongest warrior in the tribe, and one of the wiser. His wavy grey hair, stained by the last few flecks of black which in his youth had filled his mane, draped luxuriously like ivy off these hulking shoulders. And in his acrid green eyes, he peered across his room of subjects, waiting patiently, if with a certain smoldering angst.