Tragus Halmund

Haelara’s father: a hard man from hard streets. His love is real, but the world he lives in has sharpened it into something that can bruise as much as it protects.

Appearance

Tragus is an old man, thin as a rake, with ragged grey hair.

In The Outcast Knight

Tragus Halmund is Haelara's father and Mary's husband, a slum dweller whose plight sets the story in motion. The book opens with him staggering, soaked in blood, into the Dwarven Hearth, begging Fi and Usso for help. Royal guards had come with an edict to take his daughter as a bride for the King; trying to flee with her, he had killed a guard who barred the way, and they had taken her anyway. He insisted the King was the true monster. Moments later the King's elite guard arrived and arrested him for murder and for abducting a chosen bride of the crown.

Weeks later he was hanged in the trade square before the assembled city, with Haelara standing crowned beside the King. On the platform he found his daughter's face in the crowd and let his love and regret show for a single heartbeat, but refused to give his captors his tears. Fi felt they had failed him. His memory lingers through his widow, Mary, who recalls him arguing politics in every tavern and railing against his daughter's abduction until the guards came for him.

Family

After the books

Dies before the end of the books. Executed by hanging. In death he becomes a warning: what the crown does to those it deems disposable.