Lysa Farthing

Lysa's arrival carries the vulnerability of a person already wounded by violence.

Appearance

Lysa arrived in Crowbrook with dark hair hacked short with a trade knife, Luna silk tied around a stab wound beneath her left breast and a travel coat stiff with old rain.

In The Godless Priest

Lysa Farthing is Manus Farthing's niece and student, the daughter of his sister Elian and cousin of the possessed child Eamon Farthing. She reached Crowbrook's gate with a Luna knife between her ribs, and when she gave her surname the clerk's pen wrote MANUS by itself. Cassian carried her to Black Mercy, where Ravel stitched her while she laid out the satchel she had carried across the Outer Reach: cathedral statements, guard reports, a sailor's account and Eamon's own words, from which Cassian mapped the demon's recruitment sequence. She could perceive Morrow's presence without tools, and she refused to let the Synod summon her papers without naming her as a witness.

Lysa accompanied Cassian through the Witness Pit, the Red Canal and Saint Drev, and later uncovered Manus's cellar beneath Black Mercy, where letters showed a demon wearing his dead wife Helga's voice and Mother Vey's initials on the supplies for his exile. She admitted she had loved Manus, and she named her own concealment of Eamon's first letter rather than letting guilt travel through blood. When the Luna dispatch arrived she published the full Farthing record in the square despite knowing it would feed the call to war, and she wrote to Eamon in plain words, sealed with ordinary wax.

Lysa is quick-tongued under pain and protective of the choices left to her, refusing at first to name the cathedral priest who gave her the pages. She drew a careful distinction between explanation and acquittal: Manus suffered, which matters to how he chose but not to whether others paid. At Cassian's trial she refused to touch Manus's sealed appointment for fear that Farthing blood would open it, and demanded that the court record what it declined to show. She tested the Luna dispatch against a grain factor, a bookmaker and a Fae trader, entered the name Fi above every report that had erased her, and gave a strip of Fae prison cloth to the people able to read it rather than to Mother Vey.

She marched with the army carrying Manus's map case and copies of Eamon's papers. The book leaves her on the road to Luna, having asked Cassian not to read her letter to Eamon first but to ask whether the boy wants Farthing words at all.

Family

After the books

A survivor and witness in a city where records have been used against the vulnerable. She remains part of the living evidence that recovery is not a tidy conclusion.