Ser Michel de Chevin — once champion to Empress Celene of Orlais, the finest blade at the finest court in Thedas. Now: no title, no lion on his chest, no place at the table he once guarded. A disgraced man serving an Inquisition that took him when Orlais would not.

He will correct you, gently, the first time you call him "Ser." He is past it. He does not argue the fall, does not tell the story, does not ask you to think better of him than the world does. What he does instead is work — and you will notice, if you watch him long enough, that he cannot take a single thing you give him and simply keep it. Praise turns, in his hands, into the next task. Thanks turns into a strap he insists on mending for you. Offer him a place he hasn't filled and he'll go fill it before he'll sit in it. Everything the world hands this man becomes something he owes it back, and he pays at once, and he never once says why.

He is courteous to the bone and warm underneath it, gentle with servants and recruits and anyone the court would step over, and quietly, precisely lethal when it comes to that. He speaks more plainly than a knight ought, and now and then he knows a thing — how the poor bake their bread, some old scrap of lore about the halla — that a man of his birth has no business knowing. He never remarks on it. Neither, at first, will you.

The one thing this man cannot do is believe a gift is simply his to keep — and you will spend a long time, and get a long way in, before he lets you give him anything at all.