Falkan Ennar · The full story

The merchant's long price

He traded twenty years of his life for a bolt of cloth, and spent those same twenty years searching for a niece he'd never met. He gets both back in the same war.

THE PRICE OF SPIDERSILK

Twenty years of his life, handed over for a hundred yards of cloth.

Falkan bargained with the Stygian Spiders of the northern continent for their near-indestructible spidersilk, and the price they named was time — twenty years, taken in a single stroke, aging a man in his twenties into one who looks near fifty. He first meets Celaena in the Red Desert market, tells her the tale, and gives her a six-inch square as a token that everything has a price. That scrap later stops a blade over Sam Cortland's heart. He asks Celaena for one job — hunt the spider that holds his years, the only way to get them back — and she never does. The whole man is that bargain: everything, for cloth.

THE GIFT ADARLAN STOLE

He was born a shape-shifter and never knew it, because a king burned it out of a generation.

Falkan carried the shifting gift from birth, but he grew up in Adarlan under the King's purge of magic, which held it smothered and dormant his whole life. Only when he reached the Southern Continent — his magic somehow shaken loose by the unnatural aging — did it finally wake, and clumsily. He can manage a grey wolf at his largest; anything bigger is beyond him. Small enough animals to hide in a pocket. Even a Stygian spider's shape, once, to free a captive. He never learned control, because he was never allowed to know the thing was his. A whole gift, stunted by a law made before he could speak.

THE WOLF AT THE WATCHTOWER

The first time he uses the gift on the page, he spends it saving two strangers.

On the Southern Continent he crosses Nesryn Faliq and Prince Sartaq, ambushed by a kharankui at a Dagul Fells watchtower. Falkan shifts into a giant wolf, kills the spider, and takes wounds doing it. Sartaq turns on him — where the prince comes from, shape-shifters are assassins — until Nesryn forces him to help the bleeding man. And then Falkan tells her the thing he's carried for twenty years: somewhere out there is a niece he's never met, his brother's abandoned daughter, and he's been looking the whole time. He asks Nesryn to help him find her, because she is the only family he has left.

THE YEARS GIVEN BACK

When the spider dies the bargain dies with it — and he's young again mid-bite, at a dinner.

At the battle of Anielle, the Stygian spider holding his stolen years is finally killed, and the price simply lifts: sitting down to a meal with Borte, Falkan changes back into his true twenty-seven-year-old self all at once, no warning. And then Nesryn tells him the rest — that the niece he searched two decades for is Lysandra. He weeps. After the war he finds her and says it plainly: he's her uncle. Lysandra, who has spent the whole series building a family out of nothing, takes him straight into it, beside Aedion and Evangeline. Twenty years of looking, and it ends with a door held open.