Nona the Ninth characters

Appears from the start

A woman in an adult body who has been awake for six months and remembers nothing before that. She learns quickly, but not the way an adult does: she reads badly, takes almost everything literally, and is frightened of very little. She is happiest with dogs, with her friends from the school where she works as a teaching aide, and with the people she lives with. She knows the body she is in is borrowed and that the people looking after her would rather somebody else were inside it, and she would prefer not to think about that. She considers her life close to perfect.

Appears from the start

Cavalier of the Sixth House, who survived Canaan House and has spent the time since keeping Nona alive and hidden. Practical, watchful and almost entirely without small talk, she does the work of holding the household together and does not discuss what she wants out of it.

First appears in chapter 3

A cavalier of the Emperor's original generation, ten thousand years old, occupying the body of the Lyctor she once served. She passes as Nona's father, holds down a job in the city, and gives the household its only adult who has seen the Empire from the inside. She is blunt about what she is and about what the arrangement is costing everyone in it.

First appears in chapter 3

An old dog in the neighbourhood whom Nona loves without qualification and walks at every opportunity. Nona's attachment to dogs generally, and to this one in particular, is the most consistent thing about her.

First appears in chapter 3

The leader of the group of teenagers Nona attaches herself to at the school where she works. Hard, guarded and respected by the others without having to ask for it, she is the person whose good opinion Nona most wants, and she has her own reasons for keeping the group together in an occupied city.

First appears in chapter 6

The Sixth House's Master Warden, who died at Canaan House and did not entirely stop. What is left of him is carried in Camilla Hect's body and can speak and act through it, an arrangement that is neither stable nor sustainable for either of them. He is still the fastest reasoner in any room he is nominally present in.

Also known as the Emperor, the Necrolord Prime, God

First appears in chapter 6

The man who speaks in Nona's recurring dream, telling the story of the world he came from and how it ended: an ordinary life, an unexpected talent for raising the dead, and a planet already past saving. He addresses the dream's listener directly and familiarly, as somebody he has known a very long time.

First appears in chapter 10

A senior officer of Blood of Eden, the armed movement that holds the city and exists to destroy the Nine Houses and the Emperor. She takes an interest in Nona as both an asset and a problem, and negotiates over her accordingly.

First appears in chapter 10

A young Blood of Eden soldier: fast, aggressive and fiercely loyal to the people she is assigned to protect. She has no patience for the Nine Houses or for anybody who came out of them.

Also known as Coronabeth Tridentarius

First appears in chapter 10

A defector from the Third House living among Blood of Eden under a shortened name, golden and charming and useful to them precisely because of where she came from. She is kind to Nona, and her loyalties are not simple.

First appears in chapter 10

The Second House officer who survived Canaan House, now held by Blood of Eden as part prisoner, part source and part collaborator. She is the movement's most detailed authority on how the Nine Houses actually work, and her standing among them is precarious.

Also known as the Resurrection Beast

First appears in chapter 16

A Resurrection Beast, the accumulated ghost of a world that died ten thousand years ago, present in the sky above the planet where Nona lives. It is the largest single fact of the war being fought over the city, and the people underneath it have learned to go about their lives with it in view.

Also known as Ianthe Tridentarius

First appears in chapter 32

The Third House Lyctor, in the Emperor's service, who arrives with the forces of the Nine Houses when they finally come for Harrowhark Nonagesimus's body.

Also known as Gideon Nav

First appears in chapter 32

Gideon Nav, returned in her own body, resurrected and renamed by the Emperor, whose daughter she turns out to be. She arrives with the House forces at the end of the book, on his side.