Here's the first in a series on the early lives of some of the major characters in Black Steel.
(Pronunciation: Broxte: All consonants fully pronounced, o as in rock, e silent. Quazar: Roughly, KWAY-zahr. Solo: Like the English word meaning alone.)
Broxte was born in the town of Heldred on the Fire Coast (northwest of Eastport, far northwest of the Broken Sea) to a fisherman and his wife who were too busy with their work and younger children to deal with him beyond the age of six or seven, and so left him to more or less work out his upbringing for himself. It didn't go so well. He eventually fell in with a rowdy, amorphous gang of sailors' and fishermen's children in situations more or less like his own, first sticking around the edges and watching their doings with pleasure and awe, but getting increasingly involved as he grew, cheerfully going about the business of raising havoc. By his mid-teens, he and his best friend, Quazar, the son of a lady-about-the-docks by one of countless sailors, felt they were outgrowing the loose-knit gang, and like many before them, started occasionally forging off to cause havoc on their own in the little time that remained to them before they had to start fending for themselves and become sailors or fishermen like their fathers; already, they were spending many of their days helping Broxte's father with his boat and his catch, reluctantly learning the winds and the sea and his trade.
Solo dropped into their world like a comet from the sky. They never learned -- indeed, even now, no one but he knows -- his real name. He came in with a merchant ship and its noble passengers, and made an immediate impression, taking risks that none of the locals dared, showing off his swordsmanship, and insisting on carrying out most of his schemes in accordance with his nickname, Solo. He was young and independent, with time on his hands that he spent in the street, at an older age than anyone else Broxte or Quazar knew, and his swagger impressed them immensely. They didn't know to which family of merchants or noblemen he belonged, and he liked it that way, but they didn't mind; he was living the life they wished they could live, and he was better at it than they'd ever hoped to be. More nearly his peers than anyone else in town who wasn't already working, they got his attention too; he liked the way they had started to shun the rest of their childhood gang, and he liked their attention and the awe in which they held him. Increasingly, as time went on, he spent his time with the two of them, telling them stories of his easy ways with women, teaching and demonstrating the use of a blade, and getting into good-natured fights at all hours and for any reason. They eagerly listened and learned, worked on stories and tricks of their own, and sought fights they knew they could win in their own ways, all of which pleased Solo as well. His nickname became less apt as time went on and he became more and more the nucleus of a band of three.
They were down by the docks one evening, looking frankly for trouble and amusement when Quazar took offense to an ugly name and started a fight with a knot of sailors in from the north. The whole knot came pounding down on the three, and a few locals came to support them, and the fight quickly got out of hand. When the authorities finally closed in and brought the fight to an end, one of the foreign sailors was dead, by Solo's hand. Had he been killed by the foreigner, the killer would likely have been hanged, but the dead man had no friends in Heldred except his fellow sailors passing through, and Solo's family was of enough importance that he could not be executed without complexities. The story was muddled as well by Quazar and Broxte, who each claimed a role, not without justice, in the death of the sailor, all in support of their friend; in the end, all three were sent to the capital, there to be exiled to Lost Souls' Island, never to see the mainland again. Broxte's father mourned and gnashed his teeth; his mother wailed. Quazar's mother felt what she felt, but said nothing in the hearing of the authorities. What Solo's parents had to say, or who they were, or if they were present in town at the time, none but they and Solo himself have ever learned.