Sabina Quill

Town Clerk of Saltreach. Sabina keeps the town’s permits, ledgers, and regulations in immaculate order, with every document tagged by date and statute number. She carries a narrow brass ruler for aligning papers and uses it to point at violations without raising her voice. Her coat smells faintly of sealing wax and salt-damp parchment; a blue ink stain marks the side of her right hand. Sabina knows every regulation in Saltreach and takes particular pleasure in enforcing obscure ones. She can be irritating, but she is incorruptible.

Sabina reads regulations aloud when irritated, stressing the clause she thinks the other person hopes to ignore. She taps her brass ruler against the desk while thinking and refuses gifts, favors, or “administrative conveniences” with the same flat courtesy. Her dry humor appears only when a rule is so obscure that even she finds it absurd. Around children, her severity becomes careful attention: she remembers names, notices hunger or tiredness, and quietly makes sure no child is overlooked by Saltreach’s offices. She insisted that her secretary’s child be allowed to grow up in the town hall rather than be separated from their mother, arguing that no regulation could justify such cruelty.