Dragon Keeper characters

Appears from the start

A Rain Wild girl of about sixteen, born so heavily marked that custom required she be left in the forest to die; her father took her back and raised her instead, over her mother's objections. She has black claws instead of nails, scaling across her skin, and no future her people will acknowledge, since the heavily marked are forbidden to marry or bear children. She works the canopy as a gatherer, climbs better than anyone, and has spent her life being told what she is not allowed to want.

First appears in chapter 2

A Bingtown Trader's daughter from a family with an old name and no money, plain, freckled and bookish, who taught herself everything known about dragons and Elderlings from copied scrolls. She accepted a marriage offer from a wealthy man she barely knew, on terms that gave her an allowance and the right to pursue her study, and she means to use it.

First appears in chapter 3

Alise's husband, a rich, handsome and fashionable Bingtown Trader who is charming in company and coldly contemptuous in private. He married for the appearance of a settled life and treats his wife's scholarship as an eccentricity to be tolerated, or used.

First appears in chapter 3

Hest's secretary, an elegant and fastidious young man who was Alise's childhood friend before he became her husband's employee. He is sent along to keep Alise company and out of trouble, resents every muddy, insect-ridden mile of the Rain Wilds, and is carrying private arrangements of his own that have nothing to do with her research.

Also known as Skymaw

First appears in chapter 4

A large blue queen dragon, hatched malformed and unable to fly, who nonetheless carries herself as the aristocrat she believes she is. She has fragments of ancestral memory, contempt for humans, and an unshakeable conviction that she is owed service. She rejects the name the Rain Wilders gave her and gives her own.

First appears in chapter 5

The captain and owner of the liveship barge Tarman, a squat, powerful river man with a rough manner, an unfashionable crew and an unusual attachment to his vessel. He knows the Rain Wild River better than anyone and is guarded about how far up it he has been.

First appears in chapter 5

A golden dragon, the least deformed and by far the most thoughtful of the stunted clutch. Where the others rage or sulk, he plans: it is his argument that the dragons must leave the swamp and go upriver in search of the old Elderling city, and his patience that persuades the humans to help.

First appears in chapter 6

The liveship barge, built of wizardwood generations ago in a shape nobody builds any more, with painted eyes and thirty-odd legs he is not supposed to have. He is quieter than any other liveship and much older, and Leftrin is careful about who notices how much of him is awake.

First appears in chapter 6

A former slave from Bingtown, tattooed across his face, who came upriver as a boy and has made a place for himself among Rain Wilders who are not sure he counts as one of them. He is steady, practical and one of the few people who has ever treated Thymara as an equal.

First appears in chapter 7

A cheerfully odd young keeper with scarlet scaling and pale eyes, who says whatever occurs to him and appears to be afraid of nothing at all. The other keepers treat him as a simpleton; his dragon is a small, greedy red queen he insists on calling Heeby.

First appears in chapter 7

A young keeper, small for her age and gentler than most, who attaches herself to the golden dragon Mercor and takes his dignity as her own. She grooms him obsessively and defends him to anyone who calls the dragons vermin.

First appears in chapter 8

The oldest and most heavily marked of the keepers, a young man with a hard history who takes it for granted that he will lead. He argues that the expedition is a chance to leave Rain Wild law behind and build something with rules of their own making, starting with the rule that forbids the marked to have children.

First appears in chapter 8

A keeper girl, blonde and confident, quicker than Thymara to decide that the old prohibitions do not bind them once they are beyond Trehaug's reach.

First appears in chapter 8

A small copper-coloured dragon, the weakest and least able of the clutch, half-blind and slow-witted from the damage done to her in the cocoon. Nobody expects her to survive the journey and no keeper wants her.

First appears in chapter 9

A hunter hired to feed the expedition, an old friend of Leftrin's, broad and weathered and comfortable in the wild. He is more observant of people than his manner suggests, and he travels with his young nephew Davvie.

First appears in chapter 10

The second hunter taken on for the journey, a competent enough woodsman whom Leftrin did not choose and does not want aboard. He asks more questions about the dragons than about the game.