A Breath of Snow and Ashes characters

Also known as Claire Beauchamp Randall, Mistress Fraser

Appears from the start

A twentieth-century surgeon who first came through a Highland stone circle in 1945 and later returned deliberately to live in the eighteenth century with James Fraser. She is the healer of Fraser's Ridge, the North Carolina backcountry settlement Jamie founded, treating everything from broken bones to childbed fever with what she can grow, distil or improvise. Practical, blunt and often impatient with the period's medicine, she is working toward safer surgery and has begun distilling ether. She knows how the coming war between the colonies and the Crown ends, which shapes every decision she and Jamie make, and which she can share with almost no one.

Also known as Jamie, Colonel Fraser

Appears from the start

A Highland Scot in his fifties, laird of Fraser's Ridge, holder of a Crown land grant and, by appointment, an Indian agent charged with keeping the peace with the Cherokee on the government's behalf. He survived Culloden, prison at Ardsmuir and transportation, and he has no wish to fight another losing war, but he knows from Claire which side wins this one. Shrewd, tightly self-controlled and fiercely loyal to the people under his protection, he leads the Ridge's militia and holds together a settlement of Scots, Presbyterians, Catholics, fishermen and former soldiers who agree on very little.

Also known as Bree, Brianna Randall

Appears from the start

Jamie and Claire's daughter, raised in the twentieth century by Claire and Frank Randall and trained as an engineer before she followed her mother through the stones. She lives on the Ridge with her husband Roger and their small son Jeremiah, and turns her education to whatever the settlement needs: water systems, matches, plumbing, drawings. Tall, red-haired and stubborn in the same way her father is, she carries her own history with the pirate Stephen Bonnet quietly.

Also known as Roger Mac

Appears from the start

A Scottish historian and folk singer who came back through the stones after Brianna and stayed. A near-hanging in the past damaged his throat and took most of his singing voice, a loss he is still measuring. Adopted son of a Presbyterian minister, he finds himself pulled toward a ministry of his own on a mountain that has no settled preacher, while trying to be useful to a community that mostly values skills he does not have.

Also known as Ian Murray

Appears from the start

Jamie's Scottish nephew, who spent years living as a Mohawk after choosing to stay with them, and has come back to the Ridge with his enormous dog Rollo. He hunts, scouts and interprets, moves between the settlement and the Cherokee towns with equal ease, and says almost nothing about the wife and the life he left behind in the north. He is closer to Jamie than to anyone else.

First appears in chapter 4

Jamie's foster son, a French orphan he took on as a pickpocket in Paris decades earlier and who lost a hand in Scotland. He lives on the Ridge with his wife Marsali and their children and runs the settlement's whisky trade, and he is quick, charming and better at handling people than most of the mountain.

First appears in chapter 4

Fergus's wife and Jamie's stepdaughter, one of the two girls Laoghaire MacKenzie bore before Jamie's brief second marriage. Sharp-tongued, practical and unsentimental, she works the malting shed and the still alongside Fergus and keeps their growing family fed.

First appears in chapter 3

A young bondservant Jamie brought from Scotland, now grown and settled on the Ridge with her father, Joseph Wemyss. Small, fair and devoted to Claire and Brianna, she is of an age to be married and there is more than one opinion on the mountain about who should have her.

Also known as Murdina Bug

Appears from the start

The Frasers' housekeeper, a small, tireless, endlessly talkative Highland woman who runs the Big House with her husband Arch. She is devoted to Jamie and Claire, formidably competent, and entirely certain of her own judgement about what is owed to the family she serves.

Appears from the start

Mrs. Bug's husband, an elderly Highlander who lost the fingers of one hand long ago and now keeps the Ridge's accounts and stock. He speaks little, was once a factor to a Highland house, and carries the reserve of a man who has lost far more than he says.

First appears in chapter 3

A dour Presbyterian schoolmaster who shared Jamie's imprisonment at Ardsmuir and now farms on the Ridge with his son and daughter. Rigid, learned and openly disapproving of Catholics, of Claire, and of most of what Jamie does, he leads the fishermen's faction of the settlement and is Jamie's most persistent domestic opponent.

First appears in chapter 16

Tom Christie's teenage daughter, raised under a hard father and a harder faith. Quick, curious and quietly determined, she attaches herself to Claire's surgery, learning to grind herbs, hold instruments and read a case, and shows a real aptitude for it. She is admired by several of the young men on the Ridge.

First appears in chapter 16

Tom Christie's grown son, devout, humourless and protective of his family's standing on the Ridge. He works his father's land and shares his father's opinions about the Frasers.

First appears in chapter 12

A young former soldier sent up to the Ridge from Virginia by Jamie's old friend Lord John Grey. He carries a letter M branded on his cheek, the mark of his conviction after the killings in Boston, and arrives half-crippled by an ailment Claire is able to treat. Gentle and eager to be useful, he becomes part of the household and catches the eye of more than one girl on the mountain.

First appears in chapter 20

The head man of Brownsville, the settlement below the Ridge, and organiser of a local committee of safety that answers to nobody. He is a hard trader with a long memory and a family loyalty that outweighs any law, and he wants Jamie either inside his committee or out of his way.

First appears in chapter 20

Richard Brown's brother, coarser and less careful than Richard, and a man with a reputation for taking what he wants from people who cannot stop him. He rides with the committee of safety and resents Jamie's authority on the mountain.

First appears in chapter 44

A man Claire encounters among a band of backcountry raiders, and no ordinary bandit: he tells her he came through a stone circle from the twentieth century, one of a group who travelled back with a political purpose and then lost both the purpose and the way home. He is unreliable, frightened and the only other traveller Claire has met in years.

Also known as the Irishman

First appears in chapter 60

An Irish smuggler and pirate whose path has crossed the Frasers' repeatedly, and who assaulted Brianna years before Jeremiah was born. Charming, superstitious and entirely without conscience, he works the Carolina coast trade and has business of his own with people the Frasers know.

First appears in chapter 60

Jamie's blind aunt, mistress of River Run, a wealthy plantation on the Cape Fear River, and widow of a Jacobite who came out of Scotland with more than he admitted to. Shrewd, imperious and used to managing people, she is married to Duncan Innes, another of Jamie's Ardsmuir companions.