Legends & Lattes characters

Also known as Viv

Appears from the start

An orc who has spent most of her adult life in mercenary companies, hunting monsters and warlords for pay. Tall, heavily built and physically formidable, she is tired of the work, of the injuries, and of the people the work attracts, and she walks away from it to open a coffee shop in a city where almost nobody has heard of coffee. She tasted the drink once while on campaign far from home and has been quietly planning this ever since. She is direct, practical and capable of rebuilding a derelict building with her own hands, but entirely out of her depth as a shopkeeper: she can intimidate a debt collector and cannot work out how to persuade a stranger to try a cup of something they have never seen. She keeps a greatsword named Blackblood from the old life, and a stone she took on her last job.

First appears in chapter 4

A hob carpenter Viv hires to convert a derelict livery stable into a coffee shop. Broad, unhurried and exacting about his work, he says as little as the job allows and turns out to be both a better craftsman and a shrewder judge of the city than Viv expected. He becomes the first person in Thune she can actually rely on, and he keeps turning up to fix whatever needs fixing long after the original contract is finished.

First appears in chapter 6

A succubus who comes to the shop looking for work and becomes its first employee. Sharp, well read and observant, she grasps immediately everything Viv does not about running a business: what a sign should say, what the room should feel like, how to explain an unfamiliar drink to people who have never had one, and how to make a stranger come back a second time. She is accustomed to being treated as her species rather than as herself and is guarded about it. She and Viv build an easy working partnership that steadily becomes something neither of them names for a long time.

First appears in chapter 8

A large, unhurried man who calls at the shop to collect a share of its takings on behalf of the Madrigal, the figure who controls the district's criminal business. He is courteous about it and treats the arrangement as ordinary commerce rather than a threat, and he is not remotely deterred by being refused.

First appears in chapter 8

A university student researching the ley lines that run beneath the city, who adopts a corner table as a permanent workspace and effectively never gives it up. Pedantic, self-important and difficult to dislodge, he is nonetheless one of the shop's earliest regulars, and his academic interest in the lines of power under Thune gives him a standing reason to be there.

First appears in chapter 11

A rattkin baker who joins the shop's small staff. He speaks rarely, preferring to communicate by gesture and by what he produces, and he is meticulous and quietly inventive. His pastries change the business completely: they give people who would never have come in for coffee a reason to come in at all, and the spiced bun that becomes the shop's signature sells out daily.

First appears in chapter 13

An enormous cat that walks into the shop one day and declines to leave. Scarred, imperious and afraid of nothing, it takes possession of a favoured spot, tolerates the staff on its own terms, and is gradually accepted as belonging to the place.

First appears in chapter 13

A young musician who asks whether he can play in the shop. Painfully nervous and, at first, not good, he is trying to make a living at music against his family's expectations. Viv gives him a place to perform on no particular terms, and he becomes part of the shop's ordinary life.

First appears in chapter 17

A gnome who served in Viv's old mercenary company: loud, cheerful and disproportionately dangerous for her size. She turns up in Thune out of frank curiosity about what Viv has been doing since she left, and she is one of the very few people from the old life who is simply pleased to see her and unbothered by the change of career.

First appears in chapter 20

An elf who served in Viv's old mercenary company: elegant, unhurried, cold and entirely unsentimental. He arrives in Thune uninvited and makes no secret of the fact that he has kept track of Viv since the company's last job together, or that his interest in her new business has nothing to do with coffee.

First appears in chapter 24

The figure who controls organised crime in Thune, whose collectors take a share from every business in the district. She is spoken of with real fear long before she is seen, and proves in person to be a small, elderly, entirely unremarkable-looking woman with courteous manners, absolute authority over her people, and a serious appetite for good pastry.