Description

Personality

Likes: birds (his wife loved them), target practice, his children.
Dislikes: the House of Damian, sleeping, darkness.
Fears: assassins, the deaths of his sons, poison.

Skills/Talents: he is an incredible marksman with a bow and arrow and has an extremely keen sense of hearing and of smell. He has taught himself to recognize the scents of many poisons.

Weaknesses: paranoid, tactless, and unforgiving of any he suspects might have sympathies with the House of Damian. To have Damian blood is to be cursed, in his mind. He suffers from insomia.

Personality: brash in speech and careless for the sensitives of those near him, Benjamin has spent years consumed with hatred and regret. Impatience drives him to pace and shout at those making him wait, and to those who first meet him, he seems a very paranoid, disagreeable man. He has begun to slowly fall into madness in the years since his wife's death, and has developed strange, regular habits: he confuses the timeline of events in his life, calls his children by one another's names, makes demands about the 'north tower', and talks to himself about his plans to overthrow the Damians - and often concocts ridiculous plots he believes they are creating to kill his sons. More than once, he has mistaken a serving girl (or even a dog) for an assassin. These tendencies are more exaggerated when he is angry or tired. For days, he will be perfectly fine, then relapse. In his better days, he is a friendly, talkative man, much like the one he was years ago.

History

From childhood, Benjamin was taught to hate the Damians. They were the violent occupants of a stolen throne, the source of his House's defeat and lacklustre, and the tyrants of an unwilling, terrified people. Battle surrounded him and claimed the lives of his father, uncles, and elder brother. Every generation of Winslers had lost worthy, steel-boned men to their hungry, bloodied swords. But it was a hatred that he never let consume him. For all that he resented them, he knew that a show of allegiance was needed, to bide time until their House had grown strong enough to crush them - whether in his lifetime or not. As the years passed, and the deaths of the men who had been close to him receded, his heart began to calm.

That was when he met her. Her name was Constance, a minor noblewoman, and one whose dazzling looks, kind heart and rapier mind caught Benjamin like the finest trap. Their marriage was a love match and he did all that he could to make her happy: had caught the birds that she loved so well, housed in immense cages so that they would sing for her, and every evening they would read before the fire. Fortune smiled on them with the births of three sons and Benjamin could not imagine his life being any different than it was. That all changed the night of her death.

There was no doubt in his mind that the assassin was from the House of Damian. In a letter to the King, she had plainly insulted the man ... and, to a greater extent, his eldest son. She had a piece of information that could threaten to plunge the House of Damian into turmoil and it was information that Benjamin planned to act on. But before his preparations could be finished, she was murdered. He never saw who plunged the dagger into her chest, and she was too near death to speak when he found her in their chambers. He was overcome with rage and grief.

A note was left: Your silence for your sons. Even when his boys were grown, he never told them.

Solitude became his companion after that and, like his son Teralo, he kept to his rooms. They were the only ones who could bring him out of them to talk and Kervall remains the only one who can best effectively 'manage him'. He has an easy friendship with Lady Strake, partly out of admiration for her father, who died fighting the Damians, and the few years he spent helping to manage her estate when she was newly come to the position. Nowadays, he is happiest when practicing his archery or writing. He writes many, many pages and keeps them entirely secret.