Eira Ironvale

Eira begins as a Highlander seeking honour within familiar obligations.

Appearance

Eira is a tall Highlander warrior who wears a wolf-cloak and bears the old Ironvale brand on her shoulder. Varkhul's claw left a deep rake across her thigh early in the book, and she gained a further scar along her ribs in her final fight with the beast. She carries Redress, an ancient two-handed runeblade of red ore steel longer than a southern man is tall. By the end of the book its scabbard is braided with a strip of Dagna Wolfmere's wolf-cloak and hung with Dagna's bone axe charm.

In The Highlander

Eira Ironvale is the protagonist of The Highlander. She is Oath-Heir of Clan Ironvale, a small and diminished clan of the Iron Mountains whose cracked oath stone still carries the grievance of a winter when Luna's promised aid never came and her father died holding the road. When the book opens she was leading a patrol on the Red Stair, where she wounded the legendary cliff wyrm Varkhul the Unbent by climbing it and driving Redress into an old Ironvale scar beneath its throat. The beast escaped, and its blood carried a black corruption that Yrsa Flintkiss and Mauda Redbraid recognised as something counterfeiting the weight of an oath.

Eira had been named among the Highlander champions for the King's Tournament in Luna, and much of the book turns on her honest, uncomfortable hunger for that glory and for Ironvale's restoration. Caelis Vey, Luna's envoy, used that want as bait, while Dagna Wolfmere, her lover, urged her to want it openly and decide what she would not sell for it. Her bond with Dagna was deep and unpossessive. Her attraction to Torin Steelvein, Branok Stoneheart's demon-touched oath-brother, became a sexual relationship that she never reconciled with her judgement of him.

She was drawn steadily into the crisis around Branok's return from the sealed north. She witnessed his containment oath, rescued Harl from a rigged rite, helped uncover the corruption of the Ink Hollow mine and its leash-words "stand, guide, return", and fought the oath-eater, breaking it by naming her own desire for glory and by asking the possessed Bair Stonehand what he had truly sworn for. She watched Branok take emergency command from Hroth Aegirsson, and proposed forge and singer oversight for his registry of the marked.

Torin's killing of Bair, and then of Dagna in a lawful duel at Wolfmere Pass, broke the middle of her story. At Dagna's cairn Branok offered Ironvale's restoration if she would kneel, and she struck him instead. When he demanded her public oath beneath Orun's Weight to stand with him in all his burdens, she refused, and Redress woke clean red, proving the refusal true. Branok answered by sending her south as a witness, an exile in ceremonial form.

On the road she killed Varkhul at last, choosing to defend a threatened village rather than ride on for the tournament, and finishing the beast only once her oath was no longer anger. Torin met her afterwards, spoke Dagna's name at her demand and returned Dagna's axe charm. She reached Luna too late for the lists, made a clerk record that she arrived "too late for glory, in time for witness", and found Ironvale's name painted on the champion wall at Dagna's secret expense. On the night the sky tore over the Lightspire she fought at the edges of the catastrophe, guiding and shielding ordinary people. The book leaves her in the wounded city, sending word north and resolved to stand as a sworn witness rather than a champion.

After the books

A witness and survivor whose road from the mountains changes the terms on which power can be claimed. Eira's later legacy is defined by witness, refusal and the costly work of keeping others human. Marik is her cousin.