Roffe

• Build & height: 2.05 m and round as a barrel, with enormous arms and hands like shovels, criss-crossed with old burn-scars from pot-handles. He's the strongest person on either ship by raw lift (as bosun he hauls the anchor alone), and he moves that bulk with surprising care.
• Face: big, round and ruddy, half lost in the beard. Small, warm brown eyes, a nose like a potato, deep laugh lines. At rest he looks contented, and his stomach growls.
• Hair: brown, cropped short under a knotted amber-yellow cook's kerchief.
• Beard: a great brown beard to his belt, combed every morning, with a horn tasting-spoon tucked into it, and usually a crumb or two he's saving for the birds.
• Eyes: brown. When the Full Table takes, a warm amber light comes up in them, like a hearth catching.
• Skin & sin-mark: ruddy and weathered. Gluttony, amber. The script runs in rings round both hands, like the rims of bowls, and in a wide spiral round his belly (seen when the apron flaps, or in the bath). At K-III it climbs his forearms in curls like rising steam.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a wool undershirt · boiled-leather armour: cuirass and bracers, scorched and knife-scored ("the only armour that doubles as a chopping board") · a long canvas apron over the armour, amber-stained, with a dozen loops for knives, whisks and spice-pouches · the kerchief · heavy hobnailed boots · the cauldron Mätt on his back by broad leather straps · the ladle Sleven slung across his shoulder like an oar.
• Signature item: Sleven, a ladle the size of an oar (iron bowl the size of a helmet, an ash-wood shaft), and Mätt on his back.
• Movement: slow, heavy and gentle, then shockingly quick with the ladle. One hand is always making small stirring circles, even when there's no pot. He stoops to talk to people at their own eye level, every time, even children, even Tihi, even the dog.
• Voice: deep, warm and unhurried, a voice that sounds like a kitchen at night. He calls everyone "my heart" ("Sit, my heart."). He thinks in food ("That plan's underdone"). His balloons are round like bowls, with a curl of steam rising off the top edge.
• Variant looks: Kitchen boy (flashback: sixteen, already huge, sleeves rolled in a stone kitchen under Glasheim, sliding his own bread to the smallest child at the table) · Hungry (grey-faced, sitting down hard on Mätt, stomach SFX GRRRMMMBL in the quietest panel) · Bosun (Mätt off his back as a shield, Sleven swinging, the deck cleared) · The Long Table (Saga VI: sleeves rolled, steam to the sky, a table running to the horizon and every seat full).

Whoever eats at his table that day gets their strength back, and those who shared the meal can't be turned against each other while it's in them. No collar, no Reassigner, no Unwritten touch.

• The requirements: he cooked it with his own hands, he set the table (anything flat: a door on two barrels, a deck, a blanket in the snow, a rock in the sea), and it's eaten together and willingly. "A meal forced down somebody isn't a table."
• Strength back: the hollow after a fight, the shakes after a tempo burn, the grey exhaustion of a long march, all gone by the last spoonful. Strength, not life: it can't return heartbeats a burn has spent, close wounds, regrow limbs or bring back memories.
• Unturnable: while the meal is in them (until they're hungry again, about a day, longer after a feast), no power can turn a tablemate into a weapon against the others: Orm's re-tied loyalties, a collar, the Unwritten's grey touch, any command that says strike your friend. Free choice stays free. It can't stop anyone choosing to strike, but almost nobody ever has.
• Everyone eats. Enemies included. It's Roffe's law, and the Full Table doesn't care which side you're on: anyone who shares the meal is bound to the others at it.
• Range: wherever the diners go. It's in them.
• What it can't do:
  • Feed Roffe. His own cooking does nothing for him.
  • Raise the dead, or reach a heart already overflowing. Nobody can sit down to eat mid-burst.
  • The Null. The grey doesn't turn anyone; it takes them. A full belly is still countable, and still takeable. Nothing grey can be fed: a bowl carried into the grey comes out empty, and he can't remember filling it. (Phase One: shown failing, once, and it breaks his heart.)
  • Mingus. Mingus can't be turned against anyone, ever, so the Table does nothing for him. But Mingus's bowl is always filled first (Roffe's law), and it's the only bowl Roffe has ever seen licked clean every single time.

• Tempo: 36, one for each bowl in his rack. It's a cook's tempo: thirty-six things at once, and all of them stirring.
• Home tempo: the Upp Igen's galley, at the stove under Mätt, with every bowl out.
• Heartbeat technique: THE HEARTH BEAT. Everyone who ate at his table shares one warm beat of rest, and in that beat no wound bleeds. On a burning deck, mid-charge, under the worst blow of the war, one beat when every tablemate's heart lies down by the fire. No one else lays a single beat of rest over a crowd.
• Burn cost (and the HADOM OVERFLOW rule): he's the one heart that doesn't rest in it. He holds the table while everyone else sits, and his hunger deepens with every Hearth Beat. After a big one he swoons: sits down hard on Mätt, grey-faced, his stomach roaring. A resting heart does nothing, so the Hearth Beat can't overflow anyone. But it's one table, one beat: he has never rung it twice inside one of Mingus's heartbeats ("A cook sets one table at a time"), and it arrives a beat too late for any heart already bursting. It could not have saved Echo.

His own cooking doesn't feed him. He gives his portion away every meal, and he's always hungry: Bakasura's kin in spirit. Other people's cooking would feed him, but nobody cooks for the cook. He tastes every pot with the horn spoon in his beard, a spoonful at a time, and it's the only thing he ever eats, and it does nothing. On the page: at every meal, an empty bowl at his place, and somewhere in the quietest panel, the stomach: grrrmmbl.

• Time: a table takes cooking. Ambush the crew before dinner and there's nothing in them.
• He can't make anyone eat. The proud, the frightened, the fasting and the Unwritten (who've stopped needing anything) all refuse, and stay turnable.
• Poison in the pot is his nightmare. He's the taster, which means he's also the first one down.
• After-dinner drowse: the Full Table makes people strong, not alert. Half the Upp Igen's ambushes have come right after dinner.
• The swoon: hunger can put him on the deck at the worst moment.
• Free choice: a traitor who chooses to strike can still strike.
• Orm the Reassigner, who re-ties loyalties, is the villain built to break what Roffe builds, and the one most likely to try it at the worst moment.

• Sleven, the ladle, and Mätt ("Full"), the cauldron: iron, black, as wide as a cartwheel, bought with his last wage the week he was barred from the Order's kitchens. He named it Full because it's the one thing he never is.
• The horn tasting-spoon in his beard.
• The spice belt: a dozen pouches, which grow over Saga V: Tidekant salt-cod, Lumen lamp-honey, and Värn barley from Öde's planter box.
• The Long Table: built by hand by Jeppson on the Reject Quay, twenty-four places, folding out across the Upp Igen's main deck. Because Jeppson built it by hand, his chalk copies of it keep, which is how it can run to the horizon in Saga VI.
• Mingus's bowl: a wooden bowl with MINGUS burned into the rim, kept on the Upp Igen "for whenever the ships are side by side." It's always filled first.
• The UPP IGEN: he's her bosun (deck, anchors, boats, crew discipline) and her cook. The galley is the warmest place in the Current. The ship: a broad, battered carrack, sunk five times and raised five times, every raising a band of differently coloured planks (tar-black oak, rust-red pine, grey larch, pale ash, and Jeppson's cork-brown fallen-bark band at the rail), her bottom sheathed in Jeppson's bark-scrap mosaic so she can sail the Current. Figurehead: a raised fist with a bandage across its knuckles. Flag: the bandaged fist on black. Motto: "UPP IGEN!" They raised her on his stew.

He holds the deck. He opens a fight by setting Mätt down between his crew and the enemy (a wall of black iron) and swinging Sleven like a sweep oar, clearing boarders off the rail by the half-dozen. He never kills, never lets anyone go hungry in a siege (enemies included), and finishes fights with an invitation to dinner. Most of them accept. Crew combos (the Up-Again crew):

• Roffe + Krydog, "Ladle Launch": he catches the rising captain on Sleven's bowl and flings him back into the fight. Sometimes the landing counts as another knockdown, so Krydog rises again, healed. Roffe calls it "seasoning".
• Roffe + Emma, "The Safe Table": a meal inside her Sanctuary, where nobody can be compelled and nobody turned. The safest ground in the world, and it's where the wounded are fed.
• Roffe + Jeppson, "The Long Table": the hand-built table, chalk-copied as long as it needs to be.
• Roffe + Perne: her bowls go up to the masthead on a line, because she never comes down to eat.
• Roffe + Daniel: "Nobody goes to a hearing hungry." Before every appeal, Daniel eats.
• Roffe + Flexsnus: the best stores in every port, bought a little cheaper. The only man Flexsnus never haggles with.
• Roffe + Tihi: she steals from the pot, and he lets her. One rule: Mingus's bowl first.

Marka combos:

• Roffe + Bakasura, "Bakasura's Portion": 5 and 12. The hungriest friendship in the Current.
• Roffe + Smurjan, "Twenty Bowls": for one man he sets twenty: Smurjan, Kali, Bakasura, and the seventeen voices inside him. "Nobody at my table eats alone. Not even inside somebody." When Kali looks at the empty space, a twenty-first appears without a word (her fourth bowl, "for when he comes back"). The seventeen can't eat; the bowls are the point. Smurjan argues with himself about soup, so Roffe makes three.
• Roffe + Kompis (Shared Beat): Kompis can lend a tablemate a kept line; Roffe makes sure there's a tablemate to lend it to.
• Roffe + Trollmage: troll-coffee is the first thing Roffe has ever been unable to swallow. Trollmage naps exactly forty minutes after every Roffe meal, and the crew counts it as banked.

• Wants: for nobody, anywhere, ever, to be hungry. He never says the other one: to be fed, once.
• Fears: an empty pot with someone still at the table; poison in his food; anyone eating alone.
• Contradiction: written down as a glutton, he has never once eaten his fill. The gentlest man on either ship is the bosun who can throw an anchor.
• Humour: warm and slow: food-puns, cosy threats with the ladle, and a deep laugh that shakes the galley pans.
• Habits: tastes every pot with the beard-spoon; sets a bowl for everyone, including people who aren't there; fills Mingus's bowl first; hums a kitchen song while he stirs (a song from a stone kitchen under Glasheim); counts heads before every meal and after every fight, and the two numbers had better match.
• Alone: he sits on the galley step with his empty bowl, listening to his stomach, chalking tomorrow's menu on the bulkhead (Jeppson hates it).

• Bakasura: the hungriest friendship in the Current. First meeting (Saga V, Arc 1): the maw rises out of Smurjan's shadow, every Up-Again hand goes for a weapon, and Roffe goes for a bowl. "That one's hungry. Properly hungry. Nobody's ever fed him right, have they?" In the Burn (Arc 6) he cooks for three days and feeds Bakasura properly for the first time in his life, and the maw says a new word: "…Full." A long silence, and the small sad eyes look down at the cook: "…You?" "Me? Never. Somebody's got to stay hungry, my heart. Keeps the cook honest." Because the Triple Pulse shares hunger, Smurjan and Kali are full too, for the first time in centuries. Smurjan weeps, very quietly, into the twentieth bowl.
• Smurjan & Kali: the twenty bowls. Kali calls him "the only man aboard who's bigger than our shadow". Smurjan asks his opinion on soup, and gets three answers.
• Drekk: in the Burn, the Relit Kettle (Aska's minute): for sixty beats Marka sits at Roffe's table on the burned boat's deck as the Kettle remembers her, elbows on the planks, laughing with her mouth full, and Drekk eats with her. Neither of them says anything. Roffe serves, and counts the beats, and doesn't cry until the sixtieth. (A ship's memory, not a resurrection: Marka returns only at the Ascension.)
• Aska: at the Minute Meal he sets a place for her. She doesn't eat; nobody had ever set her a place before. "It's yours. Sit, my heart. Just for a minute."
• Kompis + Mingus: Kompis knows Roffe's humming before he knows his face: the kitchen song from under Glasheim. He doesn't remember the bread. He remembers being warm. Mingus's bowl, always first.
• Öde: her barley, his bread.
• Trollmage: the coffee. Mutual, baffled respect.
• Krydog: he re-sews the captain's patches every night and makes him eat first. Krydog is the one man Roffe can't feed to sleep.
• Flexsnus: the stores; the only man who never haggles with him.
• Jeppson: built the Long Table; hates the chalk menus on the bulkhead.
• Perne: the bowls on a line.
• Emma: she makes him sit down for one minute a day, inside her circle, and he hates it, and he needs it.
• Tihi: the pot-thief.
• Daniel: "Nobody goes to a hearing hungry."

• "Sit. Eat. Then you can kill each other, if you still want to."
• "That one's hungry. Properly hungry. Nobody's ever fed him right, have they?" (Bakasura)
• "Nobody at my table eats alone. Not even inside somebody."
• "Me? Never. Somebody's got to stay hungry, my heart. Keeps the cook honest."
• "It's one table. It was always one table." (Saga VI)