Hess Marrow

Hess's life is defined by work, children and the vulnerability systems exploit.

In The Godless Priest

Hess Marrow was a thirty-one-year-old Crowbrook laundress, widowed when her husband Davren died of ash fever, and mother of three children, Bram, Tam and Orra. During the fever winter she made an agreement with something that offered to hold her fear "until morning", with no morning defined. By the time Cassian arrived she had tied herself to her bed with washing line, using her teeth on the final knot, to keep the thing from using her hands against her children.

The passenger spoke in Davren's voice, then in Witness Mother Edda's, and grew a second mouth behind her tongue and a lattice of cords through her throat and chest. Hess told her children to run, asked Cassian whether it would hurt and accepted his answer of yes. When the cords reached her heart, Cassian named her acts aloud and killed her with the mercy knife. Her death became the book's first case: the agreement she made, the phrases her children later repeated, and the evidence that the route reached her house through language delivered from outside. Her children and neighbours washed her body with ashmilk and soap rather than holy water, and her name recurs in Cassian's ledgers to the end of the book.

After the books

Survives the crisis, carrying both the cost of possession and the responsibilities she chose to protect her children. Her later survival refuses the idea that a person is only the worst pressure placed upon them.