Dagna Wolfmere

Dagna is a feared and trusted Highlander fighter, known for directness and care expressed through action.

Appearance

Dagna is broad-shouldered and wind-burned, with a long dark braid she often ties with a red cord and an old scar beneath her ribs from a southern blade. She fights with an axe. For her final duel she braided wolf teeth and Eira's spare red cord into her hair.

In The Highlander

Dagna Wolfmere is a road-warden of Wolfmere Pass, daughter of Brynna Wolfmere and lover of Eira Ironvale. When the book opens she was on the Red Stair patrol that met Varkhul the Unbent, chopping into the beast's knee and hauling Eira up after she was thrown, and she later stitched Eira's thigh with deliberate lack of sympathy. Varkhul had used her mother's voice against her, something she admitted once and refused to discuss again.

Her bond with Eira was physical, public and unpossessive in the Highlander way: they had shared beds for winters and gone months on insults alone. She refused Eira's plea to come south to the tournament because Wolfmere's patrols were short-handed, but urged her to want glory honestly and decide what she would not sell for it. She distrusted Branok Stoneheart from the start, warning that traps look like doors, and disliked Torin Steelvein's knack for making chains sound like tools. When Eira became involved with Torin, Dagna was hurt and warned her not to mistake being handled carefully for being held well, yet she refused to treat the bond between them as broken.

She was fiercely practical with the young. She dragged Harl, Kelda and other children out of a mock containment oath and set them to scrubbing steps and learning splints, and pulled Harl from the snow eel channel. In the Ink Hollow she slapped Eira out of answering her dead father's voice and struck a demonic tendril from Torin, saving his life. She refused to hand Wolfmere's warden rolls to Torin and spat on Branok's new road markers.

After Torin killed the possessed Bair Stonehand, Dagna accused him of dressing appetite in mercy's cloak and named him oath-rotted. He invoked duel right, and she insisted the duel be fought at Wolfmere Pass before the road-wardens. She punched a young Wolfmere warden rather than let her take the challenge, admitted privately to Eira that she was afraid, and gave Torin a bone axe charm to pass to Eira if she died. She cut Torin twice, but he turned the people she protected into terrain; choosing to shield the wardens rather than yield ground, she took his blade under the ribs. Her last words told the watchers they could now see what his mercy cost, and asked Eira to find other ways.

Dagna died at Wolfmere Pass. Her mother greeted the body with "Show off", Mauda sang her funeral without soft verses, and the pass raised her cairn overnight while every faction tried to claim her death. In Luna, Eira discovered that Dagna had secretly paid for Ironvale's name to be painted on the tournament champion wall, and wrote Dagna's own name beneath it.

After the books

Dies before the end of the books. Killed during the Highlander crisis; her witness survives in the record against Torin. Dagna's death cannot be reduced to an argument in another person's defence.