Vandaguilder’s journal

This hanse’s mighty odd. All these grizzled men with hard eyes, lads with hundreds of murders under their belts, and near half of them sit around all evening scribbling in a journal or writing letters. Where’d all these blasted scholars come from? My lord managed to beat letters into my head before I seduced his daughter and he chased me off, but someone like Sylvain Blacktooth – how’d he master the art of writing while traveling with a circus and sweeping dung from the cages? Just lately I was sitting guard with three other lads, and instead of sipping on wine, farting into the fire, normal stuff, they all sat there quietly jotting things into their notebooks. What really scares me is that maybe Starling Straggen likes the company of “literates” of this sort and I’m going to have to start a journal myself…