The schemer in the collar

THE COUSIN NOBODY WANTED

He arrives angling for a council seat, and Dorian is stuck hosting him.

Roland comes from Meah — a prosperous but politically minor holding — to Rifthold to take a seat on the King of Adarlan's royal council, and Dorian, much to his annoyance, is ordered to entertain his second cousin. He is a practised womanizer, handsome in a sly, vain way, a shorter and slighter echo of Dorian. In the castle gardens he crosses Celaena — introduced under her cover name, Lillian — and immediately starts working out what sort of woman she is and whether he has met her before. Even Chaol's greeting to him is cold and stiff, for reasons three years old. Roland is the kind of man a court produces and then quietly regrets.

THE HISTORY WITH CHAOL

There is a reason the captain won't look at him.

The stiffness between Roland and Chaol Westfall has a specific cause. Three years earlier, Roland slept with Lithaen — Chaol's lover at the time — and Chaol punched him hard enough to knock him out cold. Roland took Lithaen back to Meah for his trouble. It is a small, grubby piece of backstory that tells the reader exactly what Roland is before he does anything on the page: the sort of man who takes what he wants because he can and lets someone else carry the cost. It also plants the low expectation the character spends the rest of his short arc quietly living down to.

THE SEAT HE TALKED HIS WAY INTO

Celaena smells something wrong; Dorian won't hear it.

The King grants Roland a council seat, which surprises the court — Meah is minor, and Roland is inexperienced and far more interested in women than in governance. At a banquet Celaena watches him and grows suspicious of what he and the King are really up to; she tries to warn Dorian about his cousin, and Dorian refuses to listen. On the council Roland is tied to the approved expansion of the Calaculla labour camp — pushing to enlarge it, leaning on Princess Nehemia to bring her father around — then claiming to a disturbed Dorian that he had stalled it. He is a minor schemer swimming toward real power, and real power in Adarlan means Morath.

THE COLLAR AT MORATH

His whole arc exists to show, up close, what the Valg do.

Drawn toward power, Roland goes to Duke Perrington's stronghold at Morath alongside Kaltain Rompier, and there he is fitted with a black Wyrdstone collar and possessed by a Valg prince. When Manon Blackbeak and the Thirteen are gathered, the possessed Roland attacks them, throwing darkness and mind-pain — the demon's power, not his own. Manon kills him. And as he dies, the human Roland surfaces from inside the collar and begs her to end it, which she does. It is the closest, cruellest look the reader gets at what the collars do to an unprotected soul — a vain, minor schemer turned into a man trapped inside his own body, pleading for the mercy of death.