Hexen Ward: Character 2
Grizel Warnock Hortenz
It is not with art or culture or military might that Great Britain has claimed dominion over the whole world. It has accomplished this feat instead with numeracy. So it goes with open war, so it shall be in secret war. When we can account for every iron horseshoe, every tooth left for the mouse, and every soldier, then the war is as good as done.
Attributes 
SAVVY 
| NERVE 
| REFLEXES 
| GUILE
Hexen SFX: Once per scene, step up or double an Attribute. 1s and 2s count as hitches.
Roles 
RESEARCHER
HELPER
SCRAPpER
INFILTRATOR
LEADER
FIXER 
CON
Distinctions 
Streetwise Distinction - Bricky Scotch Climber
- Hinder SFX: Sometimes your distinction works against you. Gain 1 plot point when you roll a
instead of a 
Hexen Distinction - The Bitch of the Books
- Hinder SFX: Sometimes your distinction works against you. Gain 1 plot point when you roll a instead of a
Fae Distinction - The Hunted Hound
- Hinder SFX: Sometimes your distinction works against you. Gain 1 plot point when you roll a instead of a
Tricks
Mastery 
Travel
- Mastery SFX: Spend a pp to safely translocate yourself or someone in your line of sight away from immediate danger.
- Limit: Shut down this Mastery until the end of the following scene to earn a pp.
Focus
Bronze Sickle
Backstory/Bio
The Barghest
In 1790 a huge black dog was spotted Edinburgh. The creature inspired a fair few tall tales, most attributing indistinct malice to the prowling beast. While sightings were difficult to confirm, they were lended a certain credibility by virtue that many came from the mouths of Scottish Parliament. A tense vigil was set, with iron crosses and keen-eyed guards, but the beast was not caught.
Make no mistake, however, the beast was there. It showed itself several times to figures of note. It only spoke with one, however. In Panmure House, the great black beast sat upon the very bed of a dying man and breathed in his dying breaths. It came to him in part because his life's work was deserving of a memorial. More than that, however, he had played his own part in the secret war. So much passes through a country's custom house. So many goods, relics, and people who aren't what they seem...
The sat upon his bed told him that there was no escape for him, no mercy in the hereafter. Only the hunt.
Adam Smith had tried to say something in reply, but it had all fallen apart into stammering.
After the economist's death, the barghest left Panmure House and found by scent its mistress. Swan-footed Perchta stood as white as snow in the night. Her distaff aside, and her sickle in hand. The other dogs were baying somewhere in the night, and Perchta's eyes were far away, on some poor fool beset by the hunt.
The barghest ached to join that hunt. It had completed the task for which it had been formed, and now it was time for its reward. For blood and screaming and the hunt.
Perchta looked down at the beast. She held her hand out for the dog to sniff, and after it embraced her scent, she knelt and stroked its tar-black fur.
"You deserve the hunt," the faire said. "But, there is work to be done."
The barghest whined, but offered no other protest. It would obey the lady.
That night Perchta entered, quiet as snow, into the house of a poor woman heavy with child. A hag was riding the woman, feet planted firmly on her chest as the woman writhed in horrible dreams. With her sickle Percta cut open the struggling woman and opened up a passage for the black dog. Obedient as any well bred beast, the barghest leapt inside and joined the child. With thread so fine as to be imperceivable by mortal eyes, Perchta sewed back the wound in the woman, and left the dog in blackness. Before the last ray of starlight vanished, however, Perchta gave one last instruction to her hound: "Listen for my whistle. Await my command."
Then all was darkness.
Grizel Warnock
Months later, a child was born, and given the name Grizel Warnock. She was not a well liked child, even from birth. Her light haired father wondered at her tar-black hair, and her hagrid mother could not look at the child's face without a certain dread. As she grew in age and understanding, her many siblings taunted her ceaselessly with how she screamed at her christening, and her body had emerged red as though burnt.
It did not help young Grizel's reputation that she spent much time in the companionship of dogs. One need only a passing acquaintance with English vulgarity to imagine the names she was called.
Worst of all, however, was that Grizel had a nasty habit of knowing when people were going to die. Before she was even managing proper sentences she was telling her mother which old lady they passed would die soon, or which young man wasn't going to return from the mines. It did not earn her any love. And, as she grew older, it earned her whippings. At the age of eight, when she correctly predicted the death of her sister Iona at the mill, Grizel was prepared for a whole new level of beatings. But it never came. Instead her mother cried in front of her, held her, and begged to know why.
Grizel didn't know.
Her mother listened to her a bit more after that. When Grizel said something bad was going to happen, her mother would change her course of action and avoid whatever it was. This seemed to work, and the family managed fewer deaths and accidents in the mines and factories.
Grizel herself began working in the cotton mills. There was something about spinning the imported cotton that was very comforting to her. Something that made her think of a swan-footed woman she sometimes dreamt of. Somehow, Grizel knew that this was the work she was meant to do. That all she had to do now was listen and wait.
But there was the problem of numbers. Grizel had always been good with numbers. Her parents could scarce credit it, and attributed it to the Dame School, and the Dame School was in turn mystified by it. Grizel did have the benefit of a good dame in Mistress Clara, and even when her parents wouldn't pay for the school she put her own money to it. Grizel can remember quite clearly when at age 12 Mistress Clara had openly despaired that Grizel should never go to university or any other institute of higher education. Shortly after this, Mistress Clara had begun providing Grizel with books. If she could not be taught in university, she must learn to teach herself.
The books consisted mainly of the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, though a copy of the Grumbling Hive caught Grizel's interest quite early. The writings of Hume, Boswell, and, most ironic, Smith soon dominated what little private time she had.
As a young woman, it was her pursuit of more books of intellectual, and most of all economic interest that led to several encounters with young men of better standing and more official education. After a certain number of arguments, a great many insults, and one memorably altercation that ended with Samuel Hortenz breaking his collarbone, she managed to impress several young men enough with her work for them to introduce her to their associates.
Grizel was aware in these early introductions that she, a lower class woman doing higher math and discussing economics, was little more than a curiosity. A performing dog that could walk on its hind legs. Somehow, that didn't bother her terribly. She just liked the attention, the discussion, and, of course, being able to poke around and eat in finer houses than her family's cramped and crowded townhouse.
Her circumstances were elevated, when the time came, by Samuel Hortenz's uncle, Phillip Hortenz. Phillip had need of accountants, and a lack of funds to pay them. Grizel, being both a woman and lacking in proper credentials, could be safely hired for a rate well under her fellows. It was still vastly more money than the mill provided, however, and Grizel made a shift in circumstances.
Grizel worked hard as an accountant, and proved aptitude for it, both natural and learned. She was not ever an official accountant, but in those days no one was. Edinburgh was the first place to produce modern professional accountants, and as of yet there was no official charter and no accreditation beyond the word of the solicitors who hired them out. Even so, Grizel was officially only Samuel's 'assistant', and should rise no higher, regardless of her merits.
It was then, in her early twenties, with her life caught in the doldrums, that Grizel heard the whistle. She had been out on an evening walk, admiring the first winter snow with Samuel when out of the dimming light there came a whistle so high and shrill that a banshee might have made it. Grizel stopped at once. Samuel continued prattling as though he had heard nothing, but Grizel began to run towards the sound. Samuel tried to keep up, but failed. Grizel ran like a thing possessed, as Samuel would express in his tired cliches.
Grizel stopped running somewhere far from Edinburgh. A forest deep and raw and green. There were other women there, with dresses and clothes as torn and battered as hers. Bronze sickles waited for them. As they pulled them from the earth, each finding their own by scent, an old crone with a hideously twisted face and one foot like that of a giant swan came out of the woods. Her sickle shone in the darkness as though it had been cut from the moon. She spoke in a tongue that Grizel did not recognize, but the meaning was clear. They had their weapons. They had their hunt.
That night was both a blur and somehow perfectly remembered in Grizel's mind. The chase, the forest, the screaming, the scents of the woods, her sisters, and the fleeing man. Grizel never learnt his name, never understood a word he spoke. She came later to believe the whole thing had somehow taken place in Norway, but she didn't even know the man's affront to Perchta. There was much about that night Grizel would only understand later, and much she still doesn't.
It would not be the last hunt that Grizel would run to, off in some other far corner of the globe, and once through London's fog... but that is putting the cart before the horse.
Few noticed her disappearances. She was not a woman of firm conventions, and her schedule was often erratic. Samuel Hortenz sometimes did, as he had the first time, but he learnt over time not to expect answers. Grizel did not allow her hunts to interfere with her personal life. They were, simply, a thing that happened. They were almost like dreams, rather than a real part of her life.
Her station continued to improve with time. Frustrated by her lack of opportunities in Edinburgh, she moved to London. The city was desperate enough for true Scottish experts on accounting that many smaller firms and companies were perfectly willing to overlook her sex in exchange for a job well done. She made, at last, a name for herself as a component accountant, unattached to either Hortenz. A modest wage grew into a quite impressive one, and while she would never be numbered amongst the idle rich, she could at least manage comfortably middle class.
Then one night the whistle came, and the hunt was in London. Sickle in hand she and her sisters sniffed out their prey. In a dark alley they cornered him, drunk and terrified and holding up a cross of iron while pleading for his life. None of it would avail him. The hounds of the hunt were drawn from across the world, and the handful who spoke English had no mercy left.
Except, it wasn't just English. It was English with a familiar brogue. Grizel stepped forward and pulled the cross from in front of the man's face, even as it burned her hand. Their eyes met, and she knew him at once. Samuel Hortenz. She had not even known the boring twit had come to England, let alone London. So close to her, and not even a letter to say so. Somehow she was more angry about that then his imminent death.
Of the few beings that know of Grizel's betrayal that night, when she turned her sickle crimson with her sisters' blood and they returned the favor, most assume she did it for love. Her marriage to Hortenz some years later seemed all the proof they might need. Grizel herself likes to think this was the real reason she acted. At the time, however, it had not felt like affection. Here she was, in the middle of London, surrounded by fellow women from around the world, all with their dresses torn and battered, hunting down Samuel bloody Hortenz, of all people. An associate of hers, an accountant of Edinburgh. All this time and effort for a man who she could have had killed for £200 by a proper professional, or killed herself for the price of a cheap razor. All this drama, all this magic and warping of reality, over Hortenz? It was infuriating. And, most infuriating of all, was that he wasn't theirs to take. He wasn't accounted for.
Probably none of the men and women she'd taken with her pack had been accounted for, but Samuel was the first time she realized it.
Grizel Hortenz
Grizel's survival was a minor miracle in itself, and that Samuel escaped unharmed a major one. He tended her wounds in the following weeks. In that time he also expressed himself as somewhat less useless than Grizel had supposed. Apparently ever since that fateful winter night, he'd been trying to understand what had happened. He'd learnt of fairies and hexen, and a whole secret war. He taught Grizel much, and for the first time she really saw a chance to be something else.
The couple were married not too long after, though as of yet the family has not expanded beyond the pair. Grizel has misgivings about pregnancy, and the couple are both so busy that the servants would have to raise the children anyhow.
Some consider the marriage rather loveless. They might site the lack of children as evidence, or simply the way Grizel refers to Samuel as 'tedious, boring, predictable, fallible fool'. Those who know Grizel better appreciate that those are the exact qualities she most prizes in humanity.
Grizel has moved from comfortably middle class to upsettingly rich for a working woman. While most still won't admit to hiring an accountant of her sex, word gets around when an accountant has the seemingly impossible ability to traverse the world and audit far flung outposts in days, rather than the months or years such travel should take. This leaves her clientele limited to the credulous and the truly savvy about the world of magic, of course, but such individuals are often outrageously moneyed.
But, the soliciting and accounting duo of Hortenz and Hortenz is even better known in the world that hides beneath the sight of the big companies. Fairies may express hatred for the banality of numbers, but they still need someone to count the teeth and crosscheck the dates. Any business that deals in occult side of the river and needs their books balanced has recourse to Hortenz and Hortenz. Samuel, who has moved on from accountancy and into soliciting, serves legal representation to the same kind of individuals.
Despite her apparent neutrality in the Secret War, willing to serve fairy, human, and even wildling clientele without judgment, Grizel still has her sickle... and has found occasional need of it. Audits have a way of uncovering things people want hidden, and some beings will go to great lengths to stay hidden. Like a great black dog with the scent, Grizel has trouble letting mysteries go... and little compunction about drawing blood.
It is difficult for Grizel, as a living omen of death, to completely avoid theatrics, but she prides herself in conducting her part of the war, such as it is, with unyielding practicality. Simple, cutthroat, and businesslike solutions are her abiding preference. If all parties are able to negotiate, that is the course. If not, then it is best to not let things like honor, poetry, or sentimentality stay one's hand.
In politics Grizel's thoughts are still largely shaped by Smith's. She believes in the power of a properly motivated market to accomplish great ends, and that it is the responsibility of the state to ensure the market be pointed at great ends, rather than mere wealth. This is a rather frustrating opinion to hold in Victorian London.
