Naevora Grayeras

Background

She is the elder of the two Grayeras children, daughter of Traxian and Alyphe and older than Beltran, who was groomed as the heir while she was not groomed for anything. There is one public event in her adult life. She was to marry into the Merrick family, another house of the council, and she refused it loudly at a ball. That is the reason usually given for why very few in Haudh-Gwenn speak of her at all.

Since her late teens the family has not mentioned her in public. Most of the town assumes she married out of it or died. Neither happened: she is still at the estate, in the private library, in a house where the council’s business is done in the next room.

Digging her out took a season. She surfaced first as a rumor with no name, then as a name and nothing else, and then as the street’s explanation of her, which was that she is frail, sensitive and unsuited to politics, and that she is kept out of sight because she blurts out what she should not. Marry correctly and bury deep, as it was put. A rival account had her hidden because she is secretly a mage, which is not true and is the sort of thing a town invents about a woman it never sees.

Appearance

Late thirties. Her father is Peren and her mother is human, so she is half of each, as her brother was. Fine features, pale skin, and long dark hair kept braided and wrapped in silken scarves. She wears layered robes in slate and silver, cut close to Johanka Materai’s style but functional where Materai’s are fashionable. Her eyes are green with a faint violet at the rims. She carries herself with a practiced, easy elegance, and sitting down she has more of a hunch to her than the other women in a room: not an ailment, but years bent over a desk and a shelf.

The scarves are the one thing every account agrees on. She wears a different one every day, and she was still wearing a different one every day beneath the Color Stay’s glamour, where the only person in the house immune to the illusion was the only person who had ever really seen her. What people remember afterwards is the stillness, and a distance she keeps even in the middle of a conversation, which strangers find unnerving.

Personality

She reads, and not fiction. Dry histories, battle strategy, ledgers, which she works through the way other people work a puzzle, and she changes her books often enough that a friend’s library is a reason to accept an invitation.

The accounts of her mouth do not agree. Her family, her broker and the one bartender who could see her all describe a talker: pleasant, harmless, a woman who blathers on and lets things slip. The people who have actually sat down opposite her found the opposite, a reserve trained in early enough to look like a rule, and no great willingness to give up anything she holds. She is hard to reach, and she is not stupid about what she says.

What she does instead of talking is listen. She is quiet enough to become furniture, and conversations happen around her because of her name, because of her family, and because she can stand in a room without being addressed. At a party she was seen to cross to a bookcase, take out one volume and push another aside, and watch the room through the gap as calmly as if she were alone in the house. It was a practiced spot. Whent, who grew up in that house, put it plainest under interrogation: she has written down everything that happened around her, her whole life, and she keeps it.

Relationships

Beltran kept her hidden and her mother called her frail. Whent has known her since the two of them were children, and she is the one thing he would not sell. He gave her up once, in a sentence he regretted before it was finished, and then spent the rest of a long night refusing: she is innocent, she is no part of it, leave her alone.

The one person she is easy with is Johanka Materai. She plays down Materai’s hand in the ousting of Sarro Rashid from the bank, out of loyalty rather than ignorance, and much of what stands in Materai’s loyalty-ledger either came from her or was checked against what she already knew.

Current Role

She was first spoken to at Materai’s gala, standing apart from a room she had been watching all evening. She tested a false name herself, out of memory alone, and let it pass: no Breen had banked in Haudh-Gwenn in sixty or seventy years, and the last one she could bring to mind was long dead. Mikhail worked her all evening to open her as a source, starting on clothes and finding books, and got her from cold to merely distant, which nobody else has managed.

That was worth an hour of her time. He took her upstairs to the quiet of the study, which also covered Aldo being up there lifting the ledger, and up there, actually asked, she talked. Beltran had held the town’s bank for a handful of months after Sarro lost it, before the council pulled him out and made him captain of the guard to be rid of him, and those months are exactly the months in which the party’s own accounts were closed as defunct. She named the rest of the council too, seat by seat, including the ones nobody outside the chamber had counted. On the way back down she remarked that Sarro had been conspicuously absent from the party.

Her brother was killed days later. Nobody placed her at that night or at any of the days after it, and where she was, what she knew of it, and what she means to do now that the house is headless were never discovered.