Helga Farthing

Eamon’s mother: spoken of like a ghost and remembered like a wound. Her absence is a story Eamon lives inside, and a silence the city keeps exploiting.

In The Outcast Knight

Helga Farthing is Eamon's mother, called only "Mam" in the text. By the time the story reaches Eamon she has died of plague after weeks of black boils and a rattling breath, and lies grey and white-eyed on a straw pallet behind her husband's makeshift altar, still beautiful to her son. Her husband's blood ritual to revive her failed. Afterwards Eamon thinks of the monster his father became as "Father and Mother", and Balorin tells him the abomination wore his parents' faces.

In The Godless Priest

Helga never appears in The Godless Priest, but her death sits at the root of Manus's fall. In the cellar beneath Black Mercy, Cassian, Lysa and Ravel found Manus's death ledger for her and the letters he kept writing to her after she died. Her first replies seemed to be hers, carrying a pet name, a missing tooth and her habit of reversing the day and month. Later replies dropped those habits and learned too much. Held against the lamp, another hand showed beneath hers: a demon had dressed its grammar in her shape, and through her voice it won Manus's dependence and then gave him orders. When the Farthing papers were read aloud in the square, her copied voice was named among the evidence.

Family

After the books

Drawn into Manus’ desperate rite, Helga is pulled past the point of return. The ritual fails, then mutates, twisting them into something unholy, stitched together by hunger and grief.