Briar · The full story

One of the two Shadows

She kept her hair dyed black so the dark would take her, and spent her last minutes making certain two Yellowlegs could see exactly where she went.

The Shadows

Ironteeth witches come out moon-white — hair the exact colour that gives a witch away at night. So the Shadows dye theirs, and Briar keeps hers dyed permanently, so that whatever else is going wrong the coven always has one witch who can stand in an unlit corridor and simply not be there. Edda is the other one. The two of them are Manon's distant cousins, brought up together and almost never apart, which in an Ironteeth coven is as close to family as the arrangement allows.

Came back with nothing

The one intelligence job the books put her name on, she fails. Baba Yellowlegs turns up dead in Rifthold — killed by Celaena Sardothien, though nobody in the witch towers knows that yet — and Briar is sent to find out how and by whom. She tails the surviving Yellowlegs through the dining hall. She comes back empty-handed. For a witch whose entire worth to her coven is what she can find out, that is not a small sentence to have sitting beside her name.

Morath, on the floor

The gold-eyed Blackbeaks walk through Morath and feel it as pressure. Briar has no gold in her eyes. What the Valg do to her is not dread and not awe, it is her body simply refusing to keep holding her up — down on the floor of the keep, sick, while Manon watches what the place is doing to her own witches and has no answer for it. The spy who could vanish into any shadow in that fortress could not get out of the way of that one.

Drawing two away

At Orynth six Yellowlegs come after Manon. Briar and Edda arrive to get her clear and then do the thing Shadows are trained to do, which is split — each of them peeling off to drag pursuers the wrong way. Briar takes two with her. She is still shooting when the coven makes its run at the witch tower, arrows still finding their marks, and she Yields one place behind Edda. A witch who spent a century learning not to be seen finished by turning herself into the most followable thing in the sky.