Izolda was the only child of struggling family in Old Korvosa. Her father was a stevedore, and her mother made modest meals for the dockworkers. When she was eight, an outbreak of filth fever tore through her neighborhood. Scraping together every coin they could muster, her parents managed to get Izolda treated by a cleric, trusting they were strong enough to endure the disease.
As fortune would have it, they were not, and the young girl was left alone in a vast, uncaring city. Like so many before and since, she eventually found her way to Gaedren Lamm. Surely, Izolda thought, being a Little Lamm was preferable to life alone on the streets?
She was quickly proved wrong. She was begging for coin just as often as before, delivering shiver to his miserable clients, and swiping food from the markets. One cold, rainy day, as she carried a purse of drug money back to the gangster, she noticed a starving Varisian woman in the marketplace, begging for food. Reminded of her own mother, wasting away with disease, a compassionate impulse overcame her, and she bought the woman a bowl of stew.
When she returned, it took Lamm a matter of seconds to realize a silver piece was missing from her purse. Without saying a word, his men, twice her size, beat her within an inch of her life, and tossed her in the gutter.
As she came to, a slip of paper, drifting on the wind, landed in the puddle next to her broken form. It was a Harrow card, The Wanderer. The card seemed to speak to her. Get out of this city, child of the road. Life here will be cruel and painful. Find a better life. Help others find a better life.
She left Korvosa the next morning, and set off on her own. Before long, she found a caravan of fellow Varisians, who took the young girl in, and taught her about her ancestral culture, including the reading of the Harrow. From the very beginning, her skill with the Harrow was apparent, as she read the spreads with more skill than seers fifty years her senior. That first card she found became the basis for a deck of her very own.
As her magical ability grew, she quickly became influential in the group, doing her best to steer her group towards the course of Good, avoiding entanglements with the more nefarious Sczarni brotherhoods, and doing her best to avoid conflict with the Chelish, Shoanti, and others unwelcoming to her kind. Yet her vision remained imperfect. Sometimes she led her family astray, unable to truly master complicated situations.
Though she has traveled across Varisia and beyond many times, she seldom returns to Korvosa, and never stays past dusk if she can avoid it, still haunted by painful memories of her youth.
Not long ago, feeling a burst of inspiration, she decided to perform a reading for herself. Closing her eyes and laying the tapestry of nine in front of her, she took a deep breath before seeing what the cards had to say.
For the past, The Beating, The Survivor, The Waxworks. Your days in Korvosa, Lamm’s cruelties. Years of helplessness before rising above, stronger. It was an array she had seen many times before.
In the present, The Cricket, The Winged Serpent, and The Empty Throne. It is time to end her journeys, to return to the place of those struggles. Back to Korvosa. After all these years? Why?
And ahead, The Liar, The Courtesan, The Marriage. Intrigue, yet new connections arising from her struggles. Things would never be the same again. Maddeningly vague.
Bidding farewell to her adopted family of the road, she set off, back to the city of her birth.
