Mary Halmund

Haelara’s mother: resilient, watchful, and used to calculating the cost of every decision. Where Tragus burns, Mary endures.

In The Outcast Knight

Mary Halmund is Haelara's mother and Tragus's wife. Before the story she had been the warm heart of the slums, always ready with one more bowl of stew or a mended hem, but her daughter's abduction and her husband's hanging broke her. She withdrew into a bolted house, worrying at a battered locket holding a lock of Haelara's childhood hair.

She returned to the citadel gates again and again until, on her fourth attempt in a week, she faced down Alerion and was admitted to see her daughter. Their reunion was cut short when Alerion dragged both women into the courtyard to watch ten half-bloods executed. Later, as the Queen's overlooked human mother, she carried Haelara's secret message on Astarion's behalf to Ferrin's workshop, arranging the meeting at Usso's tavern.

When Eamon rampaged through the slums, Mary fled not away from him but towards the palace, running through the night on bleeding feet to warn the Queen. Haelara told her she might have saved hundreds. She stood near the front at Astarion's coronation, reported the necromantic sigils she had seen to the war council, and was charged with coordinating the city's refuges, because the slums trusted her more than the crown.

Family

After the books

Left behind to survive the consequences of court politics spilling into the streets. She is the quiet proof that fallout always lands on the poor first.