Ira Coldmere

Backstory

The youngest member of the survey team, Ira is a nineteen-year-old Compact apprentice cartographer from a village that sits on the Valdric side of the pass — a village that will be directly in the path of any military conflict that spills through. She has no military training, no magical ability, and no political connections. What she has is a photographic memory, an almost supernatural ability to navigate by landmark and intuition, and the specific local knowledge of someone who grew up in the mountain communities that both empires have always ignored. She knows the old stories about Karath Dun that the village elders tell — stories about the Stone-That-Breathes, which she dismissed as superstition until three weeks ago. She also knows paths through the terrain that do not appear on any map, because her people have been using them for generations.