The Easterners hail from Carmarthen, Wales, but are of Syrian blood, whence the name. They're a big family and have what amounts to noble status, Kiram's grandfather having moved there with enough money to negotiate/buy himself a respectable chunk of land from the ruler of the area and build a sturdy castle on it. Two generations later, they seem to have been there forever. Kiram, real name top secret (though Aellin has got hold of it) is the seventh child of twelve at the last count, and the first daughter. It must be something in the water.
At the age of fourteen, Kiram found out that Grandfather had betrothed her to a particularly nasty neighbour thirty years her senior, whom for some twisted reason her sister had an eye on. The sister in question being a rather skilled herbalist of the sort you don't trust around your kitchen, Kiram bolted - the fact that this also meant escaping the marriage was simply a bonus. The army were drumming for recruits in the area and were soon to be heading east at all speeds in covered carts...
The army suited Kiram. She stayed put - well, as far as one can when you're forever getting stationed all over the place - and eventually ended up as a regular in the Wessex army, working mainly as a city guard although loosely attached to a Mercenaries' Guild on the west border. Demobbed two years ago, she moved to Grantabrugge as it looked a bit more promising than a border town and took up a job as a live-in guard and chaperon at Mrs' Weaver's Riverside Rest, a laundress-house of dubious reputation. More recently, she got her Guild membership transferred and has been made a Corporal, which she takes far too seriously.
Kiram has been living as a man for the last twelve years and has only just let down the pretence. It worries her that nobody seems to have noticed the difference - apart from the laundresses she lives with, who keep tying ribbons to her and making comments about petticoats. She has dark hair, eyes to match and a semi-permanent scowl. She's also utterly insane, for reasons known only to a privileged one or two. You may well catch her talking to the empty chair beside her, but more likely she'll be beating hell out of the empty air sitting in it. Her ears bleed almost constantly, despite being stuffed full of bandage, but she only blames "the boy with the scream" when asked why this should be.
Kiram is best played after listening to Savage's album "Holy Wars", and that song from "Xtreme Machine" whose title escapes me. Here's the quote that makes me so certain, however.
"I am you and you are me / Psychopath and Prodigy / we are you and who is me / Create our own reality / Or is it just me?"
Yeah. She's confused.
At the moment, Kiram is somewhere over Syria (back to the homeland!) fighting for the King's army in whatever territorial scrap-stroke-crusade they're having at the moment. She loves it - she's serving as an NCO, she gets to scare seven shades of... sand out of her squad, let alone the Bad Guys; she can scream at people and wallop things with pointy weaponry all day long, and they think she doesn't know they call her The Dervish behind her back. Also, nobody tries to get her into petticoats out there.