Mauda Redbraid

Mauda carries ceremony without mistaking it for innocence.

Appearance

Mauda is an old oath singer with a voice like smoke over gravel, a lined face, a travelling staff and wrist beads each carved with an oath name.

In The Highlander

Mauda Redbraid is the oath singer of the Red Moot, keeper of genealogies, boundary judgements, duel verdicts and the exact wording of old humiliations. She first appears at Yrsa Flintkiss's forge, recalling old verses about demons teaching names to beasts, and she sensed without being told that Varkhul had spoken to Eira in her father's voice. Throughout the book she watches crowds rather than speakers and distrusts large words.

At the Red Moot feast she sang the old pact in its rough original form: the north holds the wound and kneels to no light that forgets the road. Branok seized on it, and when Eira asked why she had sung it, Mauda said she was reminding everyone that it belonged to more than him. In the archive loft she showed Eira the fifth verse, which made the pact a bargain between equals, explained that her own teacher had lost her tongue for singing it before a Luna governor, and made Eira sing the pact until she held it as memory rather than argument. When Caelis requested textual clarification she returned his note with a goat drawn in the margin, and she pinned Luna's softened official text to the archive wall with a sausage knife.

Mauda warned that a true oath can still be a dangerous one, sang the boundary verses at Branok's challenge to Hroth, and gave the oath-eater its name. After it was destroyed she made every witness speak one small true thing over a salt bowl, drawing uncomfortable admissions from Branok, Torin and Eira. When large words began to taste of metal in the oath-eater's wake, she declared it healthy for a people to keep a few words that bite if handled lazily, glory above all. She sang Bair Stonehand's names to hold him to himself, and sang Dagna Wolfmere's funeral without soft verses. As the north split, her singers carried the old pact from hold to hold and were stoned at Moss Gate, but she refused to cut the fifth verse. Before Eira left she gave her the old pact copied on thin hide, to read whenever Luna tried to make her grateful.

After the books

A keeper of names and songs when the community needs memory without simplification. She continues to make memory do useful work after the old certainties fail.