Legends of Belariath
Peregrine
Peregrine, as he calls himself, was born a bastard son of a human mercenary, and a wood elven noble. In an odd bit of stereotype reversal, the human was his mother, and the elf his father. Abandoned by his father at birth and by his mother shortly after, Peregrine grew up fast and hard in a overcrowded, dirty orphanage in a city somewhere south of Nanthalion. His unusual heritage and lean, wiry build marked him as a frequent target for well-fed, oversized farmer's boys and the rest of the local crowd of roughnecks in the city he grew up in.
He was forced to learn to defend himself rather early in life, picking up basic hand-to-hand from both firsthand experience and a few trainers, and killed his first man at the age of thirteen, after taking a beating. Peregrine stalked his antagonist until nightfall, ambushed the local farmer from a side alley, driove his stolen knife into the man's gut, sliced his achilles tendons, gagged him, and left him to slowly bleed out, to be found the next morning hidden behind a pile of garbage by a pair of local officers.
By the time he turned eighteen, Peregrine had gained a small amount of notoriety as a local thief, concentrating mainly on burgulary. His natural agility and softfootedness greatly assisted him in the predominantly human city, but it wasn't long before a misstep and a setup ended with the halfbreed arrested and thrown into the local prison. He spent six months in his newfound home, quickly rising in the jail's hierarchy by beating down convicts much larger than him, and soon had a small-time inside business smuggling in small luxuries, utilizing the jail's guards as his fences.
This eventually garnered the attention of one of the local noblemen, who offered the thief a very one-sided bargain - join their militia as a scout, spy, and infiltration expert, or meet the executioner's axe. The decision wasn't a difficult one. He picked up languages and trained hard, and excelled in what he did, aquiring artifacts and important documents, and offing rivals from time to time. The thief led quite a life during this period, needless to say.
Like all things, however, this would eventually come to an end. Years later, in a suprise raid by one of his 'sponsor's' enemies while Peregrine was away on one of his little excursions, his employer and the lot of his family was slaughtered. The thief returned to a bloody charnel house, but didn't seem at all miffed. He ransacked what was left of the manor's valuables and left the city, heading for Nanthalion.
Now somewhere in his late twenties, Peregrine has staked out on his own, confident in his own abilities and determined to make a new life for himself in Nanthalion. Thus far, he's been quite successful, building a small name for himself within the walls of the Lonely Inn, and keeping his thievery well below the radar of the local authorities. Time will tell how Peregrine's life unfolds, but as he often says . . . it certainly won't be boring.