Jeanne Morin

Daughter of Daviau Morin and sister of Jean. She fights with cold: Ray of Frost from a tree above an ogre patrol, and a hand laid along a blade to leave the bite of the cruellest winter in every cut that follows. At the third-year examination her enchantments on Gyllyn's rapiers decided as much as the rapiers did.

She is also the one who counts. In the field she sits in a wooden hut with the takings and the ledgers while the others argue about glory, which is how a house that trades with Askenon actually works. She reads dwarven grammars for pleasure. When Perennus's class outgrew him, she and Jean split the students between them and taught the rest themselves.

Her rooms at the Academy have rugs, a soft perfume, and one dried flower on the wall, and nobody who has seen the other students' quarters mistakes whose door it is. Long brown hair, usually pinned up with whatever quill was nearest. She smells of apricot.

Gyllyn noticed all of it. He thought Ivana was a silver moon, distant and fascinating, and that Jeanne was a mild sun whose nearness warmed and frightened him at once — and he was certain he had no standing to act on either. Jeanne made him knead bread, put her floured hands in his face, and spent an autumn afternoon walking him to the port. He married Mathilde Leblanc.

Beauty is not softness. She answers a wrong idea with a voice like steel, and an opponent who called her the precious Jeanne Morin, floating above the fray while her brother tears his wings below got her teeth set and her fingers shaking, not her silence. She and Glandir were carried off that field under the silver aura of the examiners' rescue barriers.