The Golden Lily characters

Appears from the start

The Alchemist in charge of the Palm Springs assignment, eighteen years old and now responsible for keeping a Moroi princess and two dhampirs invisible at a human boarding school. She is brilliant with chemistry, languages and research, tightly self-controlled, and increasingly unable to reconcile what she was raised to believe about vampires with the people she actually lives among. Her order's golden lily tattoo keeps her healthy and prevents her betraying its secrets. Since discovering that human magic is real and that she has a gift for it, she has been taking reluctant lessons from her history teacher while insisting to herself that she is only humouring the woman.

Also known as Jill Melrose

Appears from the start

A fifteen-year-old Moroi and the illegitimate half-sister of the Moroi queen, hidden at Amberwood Prep because her death would cost her sister the throne. She is settling into human school life better than she did, but she is still lonely, still conspicuous, and still psychically bonded to Adrian Ivashkov, whose moods and experiences she cannot shut out. She has ended her relationship with a human boy and is quietly attached to Eddie, who will not see her as anything but an assignment.

Appears from the start

A royal Moroi in his early twenties and a spirit user, the magic that heals and dream-walks at the cost of the user's mind. He has cut back on the drinking, taken up painting seriously and is trying to make something of himself, largely because of the person he keeps making excuses to see. Sydney is the one Alchemist who talks to him like a person, and he has stopped pretending, at least to himself, that his interest in her is ordinary friendship.

Appears from the start

The dhampir guardian assigned to Jill, posing as her brother at Amberwood. Rigorously professional and hard on himself, he treats his charge as a duty he is not permitted to feel anything about, and he is far better at protecting Jill than at noticing what she wants.

First appears in chapter 4

A dhampir girl sent to Palm Springs as a second guardian for Jill and enrolled at Amberwood as another cousin in the family's cover story. She was raised among the Keepers, a community of Moroi, dhampirs and humans who live outside Moroi law in the Appalachian backcountry, and she arrives with no experience of modern schooling, no patience and an immediate willingness to settle disputes with her fists. Sydney inherits her as a full-time problem.

Also known as Ms. Terwilliger

First appears in chapter 2

Sydney's history teacher and, in private, a working witch. Rumpled, blunt and entirely unimpressed by Sydney's objections, she keeps assigning spells and exercises in the certainty that a talent as strong as Sydney's is dangerous left untrained. She has a family history she does not discuss.

First appears in chapter 2

Sydney's chemistry lab partner and one of Amberwood's star athletes, still friendly and still competitive, but visibly under a strain he will not explain. He is pulled between his family's expectations and the friends he has made at school.

First appears in chapter 3

Eddie's human roommate, cheerful and uncomplicated, who has moved on from Jill and takes up with the group's newest cousin instead - which is awkward for everybody who knows what she actually is.

First appears in chapter 3

The elderly Moroi recluse who houses Adrian and keeps insisting that human vampire hunters killed his niece Tamara. He is treated as a harmless eccentric, and this time the details of his story do not sound like confusion.

First appears in chapter 8

A Moroi spirit user and a former teacher who was turned Strigoi and later restored by spirit magic, one of the very few people this has ever happened to. She comes to Palm Springs to continue research into how the restoration works and whether it can be repeated or prevented. She reads auras, and what she sees around Sydney is not what an ordinary human's should look like.

First appears in chapter 8

A famously formidable dhampir guardian who was himself turned Strigoi and restored, and who now works with Sonya on the research. Calm, courteous and impossible to rattle, he is also the man Adrian lost Rose to, which makes his presence in Palm Springs a daily irritation Adrian cannot admit to.

First appears in chapter 8

A studious, widely read human boy Sydney begins dating. He is polite, encyclopaedic and entirely safe, which is precisely why she chose him: he is the kind of boyfriend an Alchemist is supposed to be able to have.

First appears in chapter 10

A one-eyed self-defence instructor who runs classes out of a shabby studio, given to extravagant claims about the things he has fought. His teaching is far more practical than his stories, and Sydney signs up for it.

First appears in chapter 12

A Los Angeles fashion designer who spots Jill and wants her as a model. The attention is the first thing in months that has made Jill feel wanted for herself, and it is a serious risk to a girl whose survival depends on nobody looking at her.