Harp
| Title | Personal Guard to Lumikki Otsby |
|---|---|
| Affiliation | Sacred Guard |
| Home | Ovallia Lighthouse, Ovallia |
| Status | Not recorded |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Harp is the Sacred Guard assigned to Lumikki Otsby, the Sacred Ruler of Ovallia.[1] He walks the city at her shoulder, takes up position outside her bedroom door when she goes in, and is the reason she lives through the night she is poisoned in her own bath.[1]
Appearance
Neither novel describes him. His species, his face and his dress are all unrecorded, and the only physical detail on the page is the raised brow he gives Lumikki when she announces she is leaving the kingdom.[1] The novel refers to him only as he, and gives him no surname.
Personality
Harp is formal to the point of stiffness and volunteers nothing. Asked what he makes of a strange mark on a merchant's wrist, he shrugged and said he would not have thought anything of it until she asked, then offered a new gang in Varaar as a guess.[1] He puts his own suggestions as questions: "Might I suggest this?"[1]
He takes the blame for things that were not obviously his to take. Having worked out that his Ruler had been poisoned by a gift she was handed in public, his response was "Please forgive me. I should have been more careful," and then that his naivety must have gotten the best of him.[1]
He does not argue with her. When Lumikki decided, minutes after being poisoned, to leave Ovallia on a hunch, Trelluby looked to Harp for support and found none: he stared down at her with a raised brow, and the novel notes plainly that he knew better than to question his Ruler.[1]
Story
Sacred: Eslura's Calling
Harp walks back with Lumikki from an afternoon of audiences in the town square. She is turning over a jar of pink and red petals and translucent green stones that a travelling merchant claiming to live in Blighburrow has just handed her, and she asks Harp about the marking she glimpsed on the merchant's wrist: two intersecting vertical circles pierced through the middle by what looked to be a fork in a road. He has no better answer than a gang.[1] At the Ovallia Lighthouse she nods to him and he takes his post outside her door.[1]
She empties the jar into her bath. Some while later Trelluby, leaning through the window, watches her lose her words and topple out of the tub, and shouts for Harp twice. He comes through the door hard enough to bang it off the wall, shakes Lumikki, gets nothing, and runs out and back with a vial. He puts its lip against hers and tells her to drink. The warm liquid is dringrys, the serum drawn from fish guts and fed to gullys before overnight flights, and Lumikki's stomach turns it and the poison out onto the rug. Trelluby, who suggested it, apologises; Harp gets down and starts cleaning up the mess.[1]
It is Harp who names what happened. He picks the empty jar off the floor, hands it to her, and when Trelluby says the word poison he agrees it is quite likely, on the grounds that the water was pure: he had drunk from the sink himself when the two of them got back. Lumikki drops the jar and it shatters.[1]
She then tells him and Trelluby to take the next day's audiences in her place and to say she is sick, and leaves through the window to go and find her brother Remidigon Otsby at Morgaedion. Harp does not object.[1]
He is next heard of second hand. Millennium Loftwind, arriving in Ovallia to collect Lumikki for the High Moon Festival at Galecrest, could not find her and spoke to Harp, who was uncertain of her whereabouts himself and told her it had been several days since Lumikki was last seen there.[2]
That is the last of him. Ovallia was invaded by the Nelazgians some time after Lumikki left it, and what became of her Guard is not recorded.[3]
Relationships
Lumikki Otsby is the Ruler he is assigned to. He is close enough to be the person she nods to at her own door and formal enough that she half expects him to be scandalised by gossip about her private life, and he is on the other side of the wall for most of what happens to her at home. A Ruler's personal Guard is required to be present even in their private quarters, which leaves Lumikki with few visitors who are not on duty.[1][4]
Trelluby works alongside him without much ceremony. The sea serpent knows him well enough to shout for him by name through a window in an emergency, and expects him to back her up in an argument with their Ruler, which he does not.[1]
Behind the scenes
Harp is listed in the pronunciation guides at the back of both novels, in both cases with no pronunciation printed beside the name.[5][6]
The vial he fetches is often described as an antidote. The novel is more specific than that: it holds dringrys, and it works by emptying Lumikki's stomach rather than by countering the poison in it.[1]