Ghislaine · The full story

The scholar of the Thirteen

She is the one who explained the Valg to Manon. When the Valg finally walked into the room she was sobbing in a corner, which is the whole trouble with knowing things.

Twelve years among mortals

Around a century before the series, the Blackbeaks sent Ghislaine to a mortal school in Terrasen — twelve years of magic, reading, and whatever else humans were being taught at the time. She came back a bloodthirsty Blackbeak like the rest of them and also, unmistakably, more human than her sisters, which is a thing an Ironteeth coven notices and does not necessarily reward. She is the eldest of the Thirteen and the cleverest, and the one the others go to when something actually needs to be understood.

The Valg, explained

At Morath, when the Thirteen finally have to look straight at what they are serving, Manon asks Ghislaine for the history and Ghislaine gives it. Witches are the children of Fae and Valg — Ironteeth taking after the demons, Crochans after the Fae. Three Valg kings came through at the dawn of time; two were killed or sent back, and Erawan was left stranded here with a small army, went to ground beyond the White Fangs, and spent roughly a thousand years quietly rebuilding before he came at the continent again. Then the part that matters: the Valg have no laws and no codes, and they would look at everything the Thirteen are to each other and see a handle to pull.

Knowing did not help

A Valg-possessed man gets into the room and the witch who could recite their entire history is sobbing in a corner, screaming, and there is nothing scholarly about any of it. This is the thing the books are quietly ruthless about. The Valg are not a puzzle you can out-read. Ghislaine had more information about them than anybody else in that keep and it bought her precisely nothing when one of them was in front of her.

Third

At Orynth she goes third, after Imogen and after Lin — early, with most of the coven still behind her and no evidence yet that any of this is going to work. She goes incandescent with light, which is the detail the books keep circling on the Thirteen: witches in the Valg's service Yield black, and every last one of theirs came out white. The most well-read witch in the coven did not need anybody to explain to her what she was choosing.