Edda · The full story

One of the two Shadows

She spent a hundred years dyeing the white out of her hair so the dark would hide her. In the snowbound north she washed it out, because up there her own colour was the one that worked.

Raised in the dark

The Shadows are Ironteeth witches brought up in darkness and trained to fold into any sliver of it and listen. Edda and Briar are distant cousins of Manon, raised as close as sisters, seldom seen apart — and the way the two of them unwind is by creeping up on the rest of the Thirteen to frighten them. Which tells you roughly everything about what passes for affection in that coven, and why the rest of the Thirteen let them get away with it.

What the Shadows were for

With the Yellowlegs Matron dead and nobody able to say by whose hand, the Shadows go to work — Edda and Briar watching the surviving Yellowlegs in the dining hall at Morath, tracking a rival clan inside a fortress where everybody is already an enemy, feeding Manon a picture of who is moving and where. Then a Valg-possessed man gets hold of her, and a century of training in how to disappear into a wall turns out to have nothing whatsoever to say about that.

Washing it out

After the Thirteen break with the Ironteeth and throw in with the Crochans, Edda scouts ahead of the coven. In the snowbound north she and Briar wash the dye out and let their hair come back silver — moon-white, the colour they were born, the colour they had spent their whole lives covering because white is the one shade that cannot hide in the dark. Against snow it is simply the better camouflage. It is also the only stretch of the books where being what she actually is happens to be the useful thing.

Eyllwe, and then the tower

Between the defection and the end there is a long stretch where the deadliest coven the Ironteeth ever built spends its time burying other people's dead in Eyllwe, and Edda is in it — digging, hauling, working out how witches bred to hunt Crochans are meant to coordinate with them now. Then Orynth. She charges the witch tower with the rest, still shooting, still hitting, and Yields one step ahead of Briar — the two of them going out the way they did everything, within arm's reach and impossible to tell apart.