The Blinding Knife characters

Also known as Kip Guile

Appears from the start

The acknowledged bastard son of the Prism, sixteen years old, heavy, self-mocking and quietly furious about most of it. He survived the destruction of his home town and the fall of Garriston, he can draft more colours than almost anyone his age, and he carries a jewelled dagger his mother left him that drank the magic of the man he killed with it. At the Chromeria he is a Guile without any of a Guile's training, watched by a grandfather who regards him as a mistake to be managed.

Appears from the start

The Prism, and in truth Dazen Guile wearing his dead brother's name, face and office since he won the False Prism's War sixteen years ago. He is losing his colours one at a time, faster than he can hide, and each loss is tied to the prisoner he keeps below the Chromeria. Having failed to hold Garriston, he returns to a Chromeria that blames him for the loss and to a war he cannot fight for much longer.

Appears from the start

The real Gavin Guile, held for sixteen years in a set of nested cells of coloured luxin beneath the Chromeria by the brother who took his name. He has broken out of the blue cell and found another one waiting, and he is already working on that one. Every cell he breaks costs the false Gavin the matching colour.

Appears from the start

A red and green bichrome and a Blackguard, back at the Chromeria after captivity in Tyrea and the retreat from Garriston. Her old betrothal to Gavin is unfinished business for both of them, and she is now one of the very few people whose loyalty he has actually earned. Her family, the White Oaks, are nearly extinct and remain a piece on Andross Guile's board.

Appears from the start

The head of House Guile and the Spectrum's Red, running the Chromeria's politics from a sealed dark room. He uses the card game Nine Kings as an interrogation, a lesson and a trap at once, and he wants Kip either useful or gone. He collects rare things, including the Nine Kings cards themselves, and he has never explained why.

Also known as Orea Pullawr

First appears in chapter 3

The White, head of the Chromeria's administration, ageing and visibly failing, still the shrewdest political mind on the Jaspers and Andross Guile's only real counterweight. She runs her own informants and has begun looking hard at who will come after her.

First appears in chapter 6

Gavin's mother, still managing House Guile's respectable face while her husband works in the dark. She is near the end of her span as a drafter and knows it, and she knows a great deal about her family that she has never said aloud.

First appears in chapter 4

Aliviana Danavis, formerly a Chromeria student, now travelling with the rebellion by her own choice. She has accepted the Color Prince's argument that the Chromeria's rule and its ritual killing of spent drafters are worth destroying, and she is learning what her own colour can do without the limits she was taught.

First appears in chapter 4

The burned man who took over the Tyrean rebellion, whose skin is seamed with every colour of luxin and who now leads an army north out of the ruins of Garriston. He preaches that drafters should be free to become whatever their magic makes of them, and that the Chromeria is the only thing standing in the way.

First appears in chapter 2

Commander of the Blackguard, whose people are being asked to guard a Prism the Spectrum no longer trusts while running a class of raw recruits through the worst training on the Jaspers. He is fair, immovable, and increasingly caught between the offices he serves.

First appears in chapter 15

A Blackguard and Ironfist's brother, put in charge of hammering the new recruits into shape. Scarred, exacting and unnervingly quiet, he carries a reputation from the war that the recruits only hear in fragments.

Also known as Adrasteia

First appears in chapter 34

Adrasteia, a slave girl competing for one of the few open Blackguard places, which would buy her freedom. Small, fast and deliberately unremarkable, she is hiding what she can actually do: she drafts paryl, a colour below the visible spectrum that the Chromeria does not teach and mostly refuses to admit exists.

First appears in chapter 12

The outstanding recruit of Kip's class and its natural leader: disciplined, fast, and sincerely devoted to what the Blackguard is supposed to be. He decides early that Kip is worth defending and does not change his mind.

First appears in chapter 12

A recruit in Kip's class who drafts more than one colour and would rather build things than fight. He makes his own spectacles and gadgets and is the squad's engineer long before anyone gives him the title.

First appears in chapter 12

A recruit in Kip's class, an enthusiastic grappler with no sense of tact and an unexpected ability to blurt out the one thing nobody else has noticed.

First appears in chapter 46

A young red drafter attached to the rebellion, handsome, charming and entirely without conscience. He attaches himself to Liv, and it becomes clear quickly that he is dangerous to everyone around him, including his own side.

First appears in chapter 108

A pirate cannoneer of enormous and erratic talent, obsessed with his guns and with his own legend, who has crossed the Prism's path before and holds a grudge about it.