Signora Lucietta Santo

Signora Lucietta Santo is a woman of motion — always doing, always seeing to. Where her husband, Signore Santo, is the public face of their mercantile house, Lucietta is its pulse: the one who makes things move when words have finished. She has spent decades in the warehouses and counting rooms of Pullitierra, learning the rhythms of trade like a second language.

Personality

Lucietta is pragmatic to the bone. She does not indulge in superstition, idle gossip, or the posturing of politics — at least, not openly. What she values is function: things that work, people who deliver, plans that make sense. Her speech is brisk and to the point; her humour, when it surfaces, is dry as the salt wind that blows in from the harbour.
Yet beneath that iron practicality lies a deep, unspoken loyalty — to her family, her workers, and the city that has given her both profit and hardship. She does not forgive easily, but once she grants trust, it is unshakeable unless betrayed.

Lucietta’s temper is slow to rise but fearsome when it breaks the surface. She believes that a person who must shout to be obeyed has already lost authority — so when she does raise her voice, everyone listens.

Mannerisms

• Hands that work as she talks — she cannot stand idle; even in conversation she ties cord, checks ledgers, or folds and unfolds a handkerchief.
• A sharp, measuring gaze — Lucietta’s eyes seem to assess the weight and worth of everyone she meets. She rarely blinks when she’s being lied to.
• Speech marked by mercantile idiom — she frames arguments in the language of trade: “A poor bargain, that.” “You can’t expect to draw profit from a leaking hull.”
• A tendency to straighten things — loose papers, a crooked crate, even someone’s collar. She cannot abide disorder, physical or moral.
• Small gestures of quiet generosity — a hot meal for a hungry stevedore, a candle lit for a lost sailor, done without spectacle or sermon.

Motivations

• Family and stability. Her foremost drive is to secure her family’s position and survival. The recent turmoil — the tournament, the arrests, the strange undercurrents around Maradia — threaten everything she has built, and she will act ruthlessly if she must to preserve it.
• Justice, but not law. Lucietta believes in fairness, which is not the same as obedience to authority. She has seen laws bent to favour the powerful too often to revere them blindly. If the law stands in the way of what she deems right, she will find a “quiet route” around it.
• A private suspicion of the unnatural. Though she calls herself a rationalist, she has felt the unease in the air lately — the strange tides, the dreams her dockworkers whisper about. It gnaws at her in the night, though she’d never admit it aloud.
• Redemption for her husband. Signore Santo’s imprisonment humiliated her, and his exile stings like a personal failure. She blames herself for not foreseeing the politics behind it. If she can clear his name, or at least preserve the Santo trading name in his absence, she will.

In Play / Portrayal

• When speaking with the party, Lucietta often tests them before trusting — dropping small, innocuous facts to see how they react.
• She keeps emotion tightly controlled, but when something touches her deeply (the mention of her husband, or injustice against her workers), her voice takes on a raw, fervent quality.
• She moves with the confident precision of someone used to commanding a space — not nobility, but competence.
• Beneath her restraint, she may become one of the few sane voices who recognises that the “miracle” Maradia pursues will doom them all.