Brennan Oakheel – Master of Coin
"Gold doesn't lie. People lie about gold. Those are very different problems, and I solve both."
Name: Brennan Oakheel
Race: Dwarf
Role/Class: Master of Coin
Appearance: Brennan Oakheel is a broad-shouldered dwarf in his mid-hundreds, compact and immovable-looking in the way of a well-set cornerstone. His rust-brown beard is kept shorter than dwarven tradition typically favors — practical for a man who spends more time leaning over ledgers than honoring clan rites — clipped to a blunt wedge and shot through with early grey at the edges. His eyes are a warm amber that sharpens to something considerably less warm when numbers don't reconcile. He dresses well but plainly: heavy wool in deep green, a leather-bound counting vest with interior pockets organized by denomination, and boots that have never seen mud if he can help it. A coin of unusual make — large, thick, bearing a stamp no one has identified to his satisfaction — rides in his left waistcoat pocket and turns up between his fingers whenever he's thinking.
Backstory
Brennan Oakheel came to Brightcrown from the merchant consortium cities of the dwarven southern ranges, where he'd spent forty years auditing trading houses and developing a reputation for being the person you called when you suspected someone was stealing from you, and the person you feared when you were the one doing the stealing. He took the Master of Coin position not because the Crown offered the most gold — several merchant houses offered considerably more — but because the scale of the problem interested him. Brightcrown's treasury, when he arrived, was a labyrinth of overlapping tax codes, noble exemptions, undocumented grants, and creative accounting that had accumulated over two centuries of varying royal enthusiasm for fiscal oversight.
He has spent eleven years straightening it out. He has made powerful enemies doing so, which does not trouble him particularly. He has also identified approximately four ongoing schemes of financial fraud that he has not yet moved on, because he is waiting until he can unravel all connected threads simultaneously. He is patient in the way that only someone who has balanced very large books can be patient.
