Quentin Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Winter Seal. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

Quentin Faulkner kept a tavern in Lancaster and lived only twenty-five years, and in that short span he managed to become the vampire slayer the Red Ledger's clerks called The Winter Seal. He was born in 1575 in Lancaster, Lancashire, the eldest child of Ralph Faulkner, a forester on the edge of Pendle, and Iona Thorne, a seamstress who had come south out of a border-reiver family. He was the first of four brothers and sisters, and the one whom the rest of them, for good and ill, measured themselves against. The Lancashire of his boyhood was a country of market towns and hand-loom villages. Lancaster, Clitheroe, Padiham and Colne each held their weekly markets, and the lanes between them were busy with packhorses carrying wool, oatcake, coal and finished cloth. Hand-looms clacked in the upper rooms of stone cottages, and a family was as likely to be paid in pieces of woven cloth as in coin. Religion was an uneasy business in these hills, where old Catholic loyalties lingered in gentry households and the authorities of the Elizabethan settlement kept a close ear out for recusants; the Faulkners attended their parish church and said as little as they could. Quentin grew up with the smell of woodsmoke and wet bracken from his father's work, and with his mother's needle flashing at the window, and he learned early that a household could hold two kinds of labour without ever mentioning the second. He was a large, fair, slow-spoken boy with a broad face and a habit of listening before he answered, which served him well when his father sent him to work at a Lancaster inn as pot-boy and cellar hand. By his late teens he understood the trade thoroughly: how to tap a cask of ale without stirring the dregs, how to judge whether a barrel of sack had turned, how to spot a man who had stopped drinking for pleasure and started drinking for company. Innkeepers of the day were licensed by the justices, which meant that a tavern keeper was a small officer of the peace, answerable for disorder under his roof, and Quentin took the duty seriously. He took over a low-beamed house near the river when its previous keeper died, and he put a wolf's-head sign over the door that, the townsfolk said, looked more like a seal. The house drew a mixed trade of carters, quay-men, weavers and soldiers passing through on the road north, and Quentin listened to all of them. He discovered that a tavern is the best possible place to hear what has gone wrong in a district, since drunk men repeat the things sober ones would keep to themselves. Long before he was a slayer, he was already noting which farms had lost stock to no visible cause and which families had begun shuttering their windows early. He passed the odd word on to his father, and Ralph, who kept the family's ledgers of such matters at the forest lodge, would nod and say nothing. Quentin took that silence for approval, and it was. The calling came in 1597. It began as an argument. Two men in the tavern quarrelled over a debt and a dead brother; one of them had buried his kinsman the previous week and had, in his grief, threatened the other with the sort of curse men make when they are hurt. Quentin threw both out, shut the house for the night, and was clearing the tables when the door opened and the buried brother walked in, grey and courteous, and asked whether he might finish what had been begun. Quentin had never been taught the craft, and it was fortunate that he had a hawthorn cudgel under the counter for the sake of the drinkers. He held the creature off with it until his own hands, as he later put it, understood what they were meant to do. Ralph Faulkner arrived at dawn and found his son sitting among the broken stools with the stake still in his fist. It was the last thing Ralph did as a mentor; the older man himself died in that same year, and Quentin was left to complete his training under the eyes of his mother and the wider Faulkner circle. He took the alias The Winter Seal from his mother's remark that he was warm, heavy and hard to move, and that a person who stood between a vampire and the door of a house was as good as a wall of ice. His craft was Hawthorn Craft, the family's oldest discipline: the choosing, seasoning and sharpening of hawthorn, and the reading of the ground so that a stake could be driven at the right angle in a bad light. He carried hawthorn stakes in a sleeve along his forearm and a matchlock pistol, a clumsy and unusual weapon to take into a cellar, since it needed a slow-match kept burning in a tin and could not be relied upon in a rainstorm. He treated it as a signalling piece and a last resort, and he used the stakes for real work. The Archetype the ledger clerks gave him was Hunter, and it fitted a man who preferred patience to pursuit. In three years he entered a modest but honest tally in the Red Ledger, a handful of vampires taken in cellars and outbuildings around Lancaster and up the Lune valley. The ledger rewards clean kills and clear witnesses, and Quentin insisted on both, sometimes dragging a reluctant neighbour to a cellar door so that the entry could be countersigned. The rivalry with the Proctors of Yorkshire was a matter of tallies rather than blood, and he was content to let his father's memory and his brothers' numbers carry the family's side of that contest. William, the next brother, was apprenticed to a saddler; Sabina took up weaving at Padiham; the youngest, Nicholas, was still a boy. Quentin looked after the household in the years after his father's death, sending part of his takings to his mother and standing behind the counter each evening as if nothing had happened. He never married, and he left no children. His death came in 1600, in a cellar under a merchant's warehouse near the quay. A vampire had taken up residence among the barrels and had been feeding on the porters, and Quentin went down with two hunters and a lantern. The creature was destroyed, but not before it had torn his side open with a blow that a healthier man might have survived. He climbed the ladder unaided, told the others to fetch a surgeon, and sat down on the quay with his back against a bollard. The surgeon, a barber of the town, could do little; the wound festered, and Quentin died a few days later, aged twenty-five. Iona buried him in the parish churchyard on a clear cold day, and the Red Ledger's marginal note for that year reads only that the Seal did not thaw. The tavern passed to a cousin and eventually to strangers, though the sign is said to have hung for another thirty years. Iona Thorne outlived him by seven years, and William and Sabina both took up the calling in the years that followed, each with a memory of their brother at the counter. For the Faulkners, Quentin remained the pattern of the patient slayer, the one who did his work from behind a bar and lost his life in a cellar. His story is repeated in the Slayerverse as a reminder that the family's first line of defence was, more often than not, an ordinary man who kept a warm house and heard what was said in it.