The captain who wouldn't say it

THE CAPTAIN OF THE BERLAD

Young, hard-faced, and responsible for a clan's worth of riders and their missing birds.

Yeran captains the Berlad, one of the ruk-riding clans of the Tavan Mountains on the Southern Continent — black hair, brown eyes, the heavy muscled build of a man who lives on ruk-back, and a serious, unsmiling set to him. He first drops on Prince Sartaq's party — Nesryn Faliq among them — at a ruined watchtower, not hostile, just scouting: three ruk hatchlings have gone missing from the Berlad aerie. Sartaq warns him off going deeper toward the Dagul Fells, where the kharankui are stirring. Like every rider, Yeran carries a sulde — a spear he made himself, part weapon, part standard, the thing that will be planted on the fourth peak to mark him when he dies.

THE FEUD WITH BORTE

He lost to her fair, cheated trying not to, and got engaged to her for his trouble.

Everything about Yeran runs through Borte, heir of the rival Eridun clan. They met as the last two standing in an inter-clan contest, and near the finish Yeran tried to cheat — in a way that nearly got Borte's ruk killed. She saw it coming, dodged, won clean, and pounded his face for endangering her bird. Then his own father announced their betrothal. Ever since, they wage the loudest, most obviously doomed feud in the mountains: she claims to loathe him, he gives it back in full, and anyone watching for half a minute can see the two of them are completely gone for each other and refusing, on principle, to say so.

THE HOST HE FLEW FOR HER

The public disdain is a costume. When she rode into danger, he brought an army.

By the time the war reaches the Southern Continent, Borte scouts the kharankui-infested Dagul Fells for intelligence on the Valg — and sends Yeran word she is going, which is its own kind of confession. When the spiders swarm her party, it is Yeran who answers: he musters a force of Berlad riders and comes down out of the sky just in time to break the kharankui and pull them out. In the wider battle he is shown flanking Sartaq, a battered Borte and Falkan at his side, revealed atop a ruk of the darkest brown feathers, diving to where she cuts through the swarm. The man who insults her to her face crosses a war to reach her.

FIRE OVER THE FELLS

He fights in the strike that burns the spiders out of the mountains.

The riders end the Dagul Fells the way ruk-riders end things — from above, with fire. Borte looses a single flaming arrow high as the signal, it bursts atop a web, and hundreds of riders answer, tipping their own flaming arrows downward and loosing them like a rain of shooting stars until web and tree catch one after another and the peaks fill with smoke. Yeran and the Berlad he leads are among them, raining that fire down. It is a small, hard, funny corner of a vast war — a serious young captain and the girl he will not admit he loves, burning a nest of Valg spiders out of the sky together, before both clans turn north to fight for Aelin over Orynth.