CHARACTER PROFILE
Khe
Mercenary soldier. Half-Firg. The wrong blood.
At a glance
Height: Just over seven feet
Heritage: Half-Firg (Tallfolk), half Del’Marahan
Occupation: Mercenary soldier
Allegiance: Whoever she has contracted to — and then honour
Appears in: Book One (major), Book Two (expected)
Khe is the only known woman with Tallfolk blood north of Dancare. Her mother was Firg — the giant race of the Tallfolk. Her father was Del’Marahan, a devout follower of the ascetic Pheffist tradition. She carries her mother’s gold-ringed braids and her father’s quiet principles into a world that has no use for either.
She is a soldier for hire — part of Burrel’s company when the story begins — and she operates by a code that the people around her find alternately admirable and maddening. She does not chase gold. She does not abandon those in her care while they still live. She has “too much of the honour of the Tallfolk.”
When the naive lord Elderne Karos carries his ring to the Thartan wall, Khe is with him. She watches the wall break. She watches the Thartans emerge. When they drag Elderne away, they look at her — and say “wrong blood” — and let her go.
Her arc in Book One
Khe escapes east after the Thartan emergence and travels to the abandoned monastery of Asuun Saar, where she discovers something Parsifus — the Queen’s ancient Chamberlain — built centuries ago: a subterranean prison containing the Elder Norn, the mother of all Thartans, held in place by sacred Firg Thyral stone. The lone monk guarding it has been driven mad. She kills him, collapses the prison to prevent easy Thartan access, and escapes with a shard of the Thyral stone.
That shard becomes the decisive weapon of the book’s climax. At the fortress of Talerin Rock, she hurls a javelin tipped with it at a Thartan Master — and it erupts into white fire, destroying the Master and freeing its Thralls. No one else could have done it. No one else was there.
“She had always fought well, slain those that needed to die, and been, as far as she could fathom, magnanimous in victory.”