Caelis Vey

Caelis arrives from Luna with refinement, status and a habit of assessment.

Appearance

Caelis wears a white cloak trimmed with gold thread and clasped with a small luminarite sunburst, and boots that have never admitted mud.

In The Highlander

Caelis Vey is Luna's court-bred envoy to the Red Moot. He brought requests for red ore, road-wardens, tournament champions and fifty Highlander blades for Luna's Festival routes, all framed as friendship. Hroth Aegirsson mocked him openly, and Eira corrected him before three clans when he praised Highlander children as vigorous stock. He used Eira's hunger for Ironvale's restoration as bait, offering contracts that, read closely, reserved review of restored rights until after Festival service.

He is not a simple villain. On the outer ledges he told Eira that his grandfather had frozen on a northern road because no authority sent winter cover, and admitted he used her desire because honest need moves people more slowly. He urged her to come south so others would not explain the north to Luna in her place. When he sent a purse for travel expenses, she spent it on supplies for Wolfmere and returned the receipt as a first installment of restitution, which he acknowledged with dry humour.

At the feast Dagna Wolfmere made him drink fermented mare's milk, and Mauda's song of the old pact left him pale. He watched Branok like a man seeing a tool develop opinions, took notes during the challenge for emergency command, and at Eira's insistence recorded that the hall cheered because fear likes direction. He was last seen at the rear of the hall when Eira refused Branok's oath.

After the books

A continuing bridge and friction point between Luna and the mountain communities. The mountain crisis leaves Caelis unable to treat northern lives as an abstraction.