Dragon Haven characters

Appears from the start

A heavily marked Rain Wild girl serving as keeper to the blue queen Sintara, now weeks upriver from everything she knew. She climbs and hunts better than anyone in the company, is steadily becoming more scaled and less human, and is discovering that the rules she was raised under, especially the one forbidding the marked to love or breed, have no enforcement out here and no obvious replacement.

Appears from the start

The Bingtown scholar who came north to study dragons and stayed to travel with them, keeping the expedition's records. Her marriage to Hest Finbok is a contract she now understands the worth of, and her feelings for Captain Leftrin have become the thing she is trying hardest not to act on.

Appears from the start

Captain of the liveship barge Tarman and the expedition's practical authority, responsible for feeding and moving dragons, keepers and passengers up a river that eats boats. He is in love with a married woman, at odds with the hunter he was forced to hire, and keeping a secret about how his barge came to be as awake as he is.

Appears from the start

Hest Finbok's secretary, sent upriver as Alise's companion and secretly commissioned to bring back dragon blood and scales for the Chalcedean trade. Fastidious, homesick and increasingly disgusted with himself, he has taken what he came for and now has to live aboard a small boat with the people he stole it from.

Appears from the start

The blue queen dragon who claimed Thymara, imperious, beautiful and unable to fly. She takes her keeper's devotion as tribute, withholds approval as a tool, and is beginning to find the ground intolerable.

Appears from the start

The small copper queen, the most damaged dragon of the clutch, slow of speech and dim of memory, whom nobody expected to survive the journey and no keeper wanted.

Appears from the start

The expedition's hunter, an old friend of Leftrin's, competent in the wild and unexpectedly patient with people. He notices what others miss, including how badly the Bingtown secretary is coping.

Appears from the start

The tattooed former slave among the keepers, tending the small green queen Fente. He is Thymara's oldest friend in the company and would like to be more, in a group where nobody has agreed what any of that is allowed to mean.

Appears from the start

The strangest and most cheerful of the keepers, devoted past all reason to his small red dragon. Where the other keepers ration their effort, he feeds, grooms and exercises Heeby relentlessly, and is generally regarded as a fool for it.

Appears from the start

Rapskal's small scarlet dragon, unremarkable in memory and intellect but the best fed and best exercised animal in the herd, and enormously fond of her keeper.

First appears in chapter 2

The oldest and most heavily marked keeper, who has appointed himself the company's lawgiver. He argues that the expedition is a new people with the right to make its own rules about property, leadership and children, and he is increasingly willing to enforce those rules on people who did not vote for them.

First appears in chapter 2

A keeper girl who has taken the freedoms of the journey further and faster than the rest, and whose choices become the company's first real crisis when the consequences arrive.

First appears in chapter 2

The golden dragon whose argument set the whole migration in motion, and the closest thing the herd has to a leader. He is the only one of them who consistently thinks past the next meal, and he holds fragments of memory the others lack.

First appears in chapter 3

The youngest of the keepers, Mercor's devoted attendant, small and gentle and largely ignored in the company's quarrels.

First appears in chapter 4

Carson's young nephew, brought along as an extra pair of hands and learning to hunt from him.

First appears in chapter 8

The hunter Leftrin did not choose and cannot get rid of, who takes a professional interest in dragon parts and none at all in the expedition's success.