Oakren Strom

Oakren ‘Ren’ Strom: already dead when the story opens, but his absence shapes Orwen’s path and the mood of every room she enters.

In The Outcast Knight

Oakren Strom, called Ren, is dead before the book begins, but his memory drives much of it. A son of the noble Strom family and elder brother to Orwen, he served in the royal guard alongside Fi and Usso, who counted him as a brother. He spoke at the trial of Harlen, a man maimed for touching a portrait of the King's dead wife, and was thrown into the crypt for bearing false witness. He was then forced into the King's Tournament and died on its third night. Fi remembers him on his knees in the sand, lungs full of blood, still trying to lift his sword while Alerion taunted him that a human would never be good enough.

His grave, marked with a single iron nail, is where Fi and Usso swore their oath in Old Speak at the start of the book. His sword, Velorith, the Strom family blade, was about to be sold from the family vault, and its recovery set the plot in motion. Ren had warned his sister against luminarite, and wrote to her of his faith in Fi. Fi carried Velorith into the tournament, remembered his training drills as she fought, and killed Alerion with it on the same sand where Oakren had died. On the book's final page Usso seems to hear a laugh that is half Fi's and half Oakren's.

Family

After the books

His memory becomes a compass, sometimes pointing to justice, sometimes to vengeance.