Ussotum Jadebane

Ussotum ‘Usso’ Jadebane: dwarven outcast knight with a soldier’s pragmatism. He measures people by action, not title, and does not scare easily.

Appearance

Usso is a dwarf about four and a half feet tall, scarred and heavily muscled. His black beard, threaded with grey, was once braided with polished gems and hammered gold; by the time of the story the braids are loose and uneven, with only a few dull flecks of stone left in them. Heavy brows shade eyes that still hold a hard, bright intelligence. His armour, once full ceremonial steel, is a jumble of mismatched plate he has hammered straight and riveted himself. He fights with a hammer and smokes a long pipe.

In The Outcast Knight

Ussotum Jadebane, known as Usso, is Fi's closest companion and the other surviving outcast knight. A former member of the royal guard, he and Oakren Strom were thrown into the crypt for speaking at the trial of Harlen, a man maimed for touching a portrait of the King's dead wife, and were then forced into the tournament in which Oakren died. When the book opens Usso keeps the Dwarven Hearth, a tavern in the slums, with no coin even for a fire. He is the only person besides Oakren who dares call Seraphina "Fi", and he speaks with a broad, rough dialect.

Usso followed Fi from the start, though he was the more cautious of the two, warning that a guard's blood was still blood. He led the Old Speak oath at Oakren's grave and suggested Ferrin Stonecleaver as the man who might hold the Radiant's plans. His left arm was shattered at the elbow fighting the creature that had been Eamon's father, until Ferrin's healing draught mended it. At Moonlit Serenity he too fell under Shen's drugged smoke, reliving the memory of Altea, a woman he had loved from afar and never told. Afterwards he became Fi's anchor, telling her the Light had not left her, but that she had outgrown it.

In the Radiant he turned the final constellation lock, recalling a night in a swamp when he spent the last of an Amulet of Veiling to hide himself and Fi from a Zeraph. He carried Velorith out on his back and swore to the chained Fae that no one leaves family behind. During the tournament he went into the castle with Ferrin and Haelara, copying the Festival of Light plans and taking a hidden book and a map showing a stair into the Lightspire, marked with the sigil of the Eye of Luna.

When Fi killed Alerion, Usso broke down in the stands. He kept vigil at her bedside, threatened to throw Balorin through a wall if he called her beyond saving, and fought the idea of the sacrificial ritual until Fi claimed the choice as hers. With Ferrin he built and blessed the traps along the Lightspire approach. He was wounded when the chains binding Eamon burst, and he watched as Fi was thrown into the Eye, her last silent words meant for him. The book closes with Usso alone on the castle parapet under the scorched sky, roaring the knights' oath into the wind and seeming to hear an answering laugh, half Fi and half Oakren.

After the books

At Luna’s highest point, he recites Fi’s oath to the wind and the crowds below: voice cracking where it never does. For once, the dwarf who fears nothing cannot hide what she meant to him.