[hider=Tamsyn Grimm]
Name: Tamsyn Grimm                                                                                 

Age: Twenty-four

Affiliation: Her, Herself and She


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Appearance:  Tamsyn stands at five foot, ten inches tall and and 140lb with the lean muscular body of a sailor. She has dark blue eyes, fair skin with freckles brought out by the sun and her red hair reaches the middle of her back, though it is normally wound into a tight plait.

Profession: A Smuggler selling untaxed or illegal cargo between Essos and Westeros.

Equipment: A Recurve Hunting Bow,  A Steel Dirk, A 27 ft sloop called ‘The Eel’

Skills: Archery and Sailing

Biography: The Story of Tamsyn Grimm began near Winterfell's outer wall just after the fall of the Night King. It was here that Nicholas Grimm, heir of Greyshield, became rather taken with Thora, a pretty wildling girl, and in the atmosphere of heady joy and jubilation that fallen over the city the pair were soon united in celebrating life's pleasures. Parties however, always come to an end and after several hazy days Nicholas Grimm awoke in a tent he did not recognise with a sore head, a turning stomach and a wildling spear pressed to his neck.  It transpired that the young Nicholas Grimm’s companion was in fact the daughter of one of the freshly appointed lords of the New Gift and he was somewhat less than pleased to find a naked kneeler half spread across his daughter. 

Despite Thora’s protest and Nicholas's offers of gold and other gift, the chieftain was all set to kill his daughter's defiler when Nicholas out of desperation tried to cow the savage by declaring himself as a Lord of the Reach. The words had an almost magical transformative effect on the man thought not quite the one Nicholas had hoped for. The Chieftain made the Lord Grimm an offer; either he married Thora like a lord in a Sept of the seven or he married her by the customs of the Free Folk. After a brief explanation from Thora, Nicholas Grimm chose the former and the two were wed in the Winterfell sept later that day before being ushered to a less than private tent. By the time the Lord and new Lady Grimm reached Greyshield Thora was heavy with child and before the fourth moon-turn had passed she birthed twins, Gerren and Tamsyn.

For the next fourteen years the Grimm household fell into pattern all too common in noble houses throughout Westeros. Nicholas split the majority of his energies between the affairs of Greyshield and raising his son to be a true Westorosi lord, perhaps more so than normal to spite his son’s blood, and left his daughter's education largely to the castle Septa and his wife, a decision he would later come to regret. While the Septa tried to educate Tamsyn in the manner of a noble lady , Thora saw this education as soft and weak and took it upon herself to teach her daughter more practical things such as how to shoot a bow, how to hunt, how to fight and how to survive. In short the lesson of the Free Folk.

One of the few areas where Lord Grimm did take an interest in his daughters education was when it came to how to sail. With the memory of the Ironborn invasion he was determined that none of his family be trapped on Greyshield for lack of loyal subjects to sail them. Tamsyn loved these lessons, the feeling of the wind in her hair and spray splashing her face called to something in her. When she was at sea she felt like the birds that flew so freely wherever they choose.

Soon after the twins fourteenth name day Gerren was sent to Blackcrown to finally begin his training in arms. The boy was older than he should have been as Lord Grimm had had trouble persuading any of the other families of The Reach to ward his son. The lords and ladies of the other nobles house disapproved of his marriage to a wildling, even if Thora’s father was technically a lord, and saw his children almost as a lesser breed. It took a further four years for Nicholas to secure a betrothal for his daughter but when he broke the news of it to her he did not get the reaction he had expected. Tamsyn refused to go along with marriage, 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.

After a month of arguments with  her father not backing down Tamsyn decided to take her fate into her own hands as generations of her ancestors had. One night, once most of the castle was asleep Tamsyn donned some of her brothers more worn out clothes, left a letter for her parents in her bedchamber 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 White Harbor and Bravos. The captain offered Tamsyn a week's extra coin 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 King’s Landing tavern a particularly vicious argument erupted that resulted in Roland hitting Tamsyn. Generations of wildling and noble blood boiled and she struck him back and the ensuing fight ended with Roland him 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 Greyshield. Roland had been a little piece of home and without him she felt lost. Part of her desperately wanted to go back to Greyshield 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 Dornish 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 lord'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 fool over the head with a stick, depositing him on the jetty, 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. Tamsyn often used the Step Stones as a place to sell any excess cargo she had and to resupply and as the demand for weapons grew Tamsyn was only too happy  to cash in on this lucrative trade’ visiting the islands with increasing frequency.


Notes:  Keeps her last name a closely guarded secret.

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