The witch who chose

The bait beast

The Ironteeth brought the Thirteen to the Omega at the Ferian Gap to compete for Wing Leader of all three clans, and at the wyvern-claiming Manon was meant to take Titus — the prize bull, the mount a Wing Leader is owed. She didn't get the chance to refuse him politely. The small scarred bait beast, the one kept in the pit to be savaged so the real wyverns could practise, outwitted Titus and killed him. Manon claimed it instead, against every expectation and directly against her grandmother's wishes. She named him Abraxos, after the ancient serpent who held the world together within his coils at the behest of the Three-Faced Goddess. Remember that she chose that name for an animal everyone else had written off as meat. Manon Blackbeak does not explain herself, but she does tell you things if you watch what she names.

Wing Leader, and the first crack

Abraxos balked at the Crossing — the gauntlet through the mountain canyon — and then flew it anyway, which is the entire shape of him. During the aerial War Games, Iskra Yellowlegs sabotaged Petrah Blueblood's mount and Petrah was thrown, falling to certain death. Manon abandoned her own run at the victory to dive after her, and Abraxos caught her. She won anyway, and was crowned Wing Leader of all three Ironteeth clans. But the crack is already there: a witch bred to be a weapon, spending the race she was built to win on someone else's life. Nobody in the Ironteeth has language for what she just did. Neither does she.

The gift, and the word branded on Asterin

At the victory feast the Blackbeak Matron gave Manon a gift: a tortured Crochan witch in a bloodred cloak, and an order to kill her as proof of brutality. The Crochan said something that shook Manon before Manon cut her throat — and the series spends four more books letting us find out what she meant. Then there is Asterin. Eighty years earlier she had loved a mortal hunter and carried his child; the Matron's punishment cost her both, and she was branded UNCLEAN across her abdomen and beaten nearly to death for it. When the Matron finally moved to have Asterin executed, Manon refused — and the Thirteen defected from Morath rather than carry the sentence out. Manon fought her grandmother to the death for it, took iron nails through the gut, and threw herself off a cliff rather than give the old woman the satisfaction. Abraxos caught her. Of course he did.

What she is underneath

She was healed aboard Aelin Galathynius's ship, of all places, with Aelin and Rowan picking shards of iron out of her stomach — and there she gave up the thing she had been carrying alone. Manon is half-Crochan. Her father was a Crochan prince her grandmother murdered for conspiring to end the witch feud and break the curse. She is the last living Crochan Queen and the rightful heir of the Blackbeaks at the same time — the two halves of a war that has run five hundred years, standing in one body. In the witch lands she drew a line in the snow and dared three Matrons to cross it. She killed the Yellowlegs Matron, took back the stolen Crown of Stars, and it woke up and acknowledged her. Glennis Crochan refused the crown when Manon offered it, knelt instead, and named her: Manon Crochan, Queen of Witches.

Chapter 89

At Orynth, Morath sent a witch tower to level the castle. Abraxos was wounded. Manon could not reach them. Asterin said goodbye first. She kissed Manon's brow, told her to Live — twice — and then punched her hard enough in the gut to drop her to her knees, because it was the only way to stop her following. Then the twelve of them flew their wedge through the enemy line and Yielded: the one act of power an Ironteeth witch spends herself entirely on, and never casts twice. It took the tower. It took the Blackbeak Matron, when Asterin went last and tackled her grandmother into the ground on the way out. A Yielding is supposed to come out as an ebony wave — the Darkness in a witch's soul, made visible. Asterin's came out as light. The book does not stop to explain that and it does not need to. Manon alone survived, because her coven decided she would. Afterwards she laid a Crochan flower on the blasted earth where they fell, and white flowers came up across the battlefield — meeting the condition in Rhiannon Crochan's curse. Together it was done; only together could it be undone. Thirteen witches raised to be monsters ended a five-hundred-year curse by refusing, at the last, to be any such thing.

Her grandmother, and everything she was told

The Blackbeak Matron raised Manon to be the best weapon the Ironteeth had produced in five hundred years, and every single thing she taught her was a lie told for that purpose. It comes apart in pieces. Asterin's crime turns out to be that she loved a mortal and lost the child — and that the Matron's punishment took both, then branded UNCLEAN into her stomach for it. The Crochan in the bloodred cloak, presented as a gift to be executed at a feast, says something on her way out that Manon cannot put down. And then the largest one: Manon's father was a Crochan prince, murdered by her own grandmother for the crime of trying to end the feud and break the curse. Manon is not the Matron's masterpiece. She is the evidence of what the Matron destroyed. They fight to the death over Asterin's sentence. Manon takes iron nails through the gut and throws herself off a cliff rather than let the old woman finish it. The reckoning does not complete until Orynth, and Manon is not the one who ends her — Asterin is, on her way out of the world.

Dorian

Hello, witchling. It starts as a taunt between a witch sent to raze a city and the king whose city it is, and neither of them ever quite stops using it. What makes it work is that they meet as equals in the only currency either of them trusts: she spares him over Rifthold and he owes her a life debt; he does not flinch at the iron teeth. Two people raised to be a weapon by someone who loved the weapon more than the person, finding the one other person in the world who does not need the edges explained. The graph on this page calls the arc iron-witch-and-king → witchling-bond → ice-and-shadow consorts, which is about as neatly as it can be put. He goes into the witch lands with her to find the Crochans. He is there for the crown.

Elide

A crippled servant girl in the corridors of Morath, and a Wing Leader with no reason on earth to notice her. Manon notices. She takes an interest she would deny under oath, and when Morath comes apart she gets Elide out. It is the first mercy she extends to anyone outside the Thirteen, and it is offered to the least useful person in the fortress — which is precisely why it counts. Elide calls her witchling back, eventually. Nobody who has read this series needs it explained why a witch bred to feel nothing keeps rescuing people she is supposed to walk past.

Aelin

They try to kill each other on a bridge in Rifthold and bring down a temple doing it. Then Aelin saves her, and Manon — who keeps accounts, because accounts are the only kind of loyalty the Ironteeth permit — owes a life debt to the enemy queen. She wakes on Aelin's ship with Aelin and Rowan picking shards of iron out of her stomach and Aelin sitting with her through it. Aelin claims her to her court. Manon repays it by bringing the Crochan host to Terrasen, which is not a debt being settled so much as a side being chosen. Two queens who were both raised as weapons by the people who should have raised them as daughters. They recognise each other immediately, and neither of them says so.