Rowan Reed

Rowan's trade knowledge makes him a messenger between places that official maps fail to understand.

In The Godless Priest

Rowan Reed was a smuggler who had crossed the Iron Mountains often enough to know where snow hid doors, and who reached Crowbrook's army already dead, carrying Sable's warning inside his heel bone. His remains bore red ore burns, black snow beneath the nails and a speaking mark closed with Highlander burden-runes, and his tongue was pinned with an iron weight engraved with his name and the instruction to ask the heel. His left foot was wrapped in red-black cloth, with Sable's outer message carved into the sole. The army kept the carved heel and buried the rest of him facing north, and his passenger went on speaking through the earth in fragments about the north. Following Sable's smuggler mark, the army buried the heel beside a stream.

After the books

Dead before the main events; buried facing north after his body reaches the Crowbrook column. His body arrives carrying warning, and the people who receive it give him his name and a burial facing north.