Aglaya Tar-Heart

Aglaya grew up in Verkhneye Skolo, where people stand by the glass furnaces from a young age. There, fire both feeds you and maims you. At fourteen, she reached bare-handed into a red-hot cauldron to pull out a crack: she saved the iron, but her palms were left black as if charred. Her nails burned away completely, and the cracks in her skin never healed. She is thirty-four now. Nearly twenty of those years she spent on the highways: burning other people's barns, raiding convoys, and three times she sent her own trail scattering to the wind along with the ashes.

She keeps a businesslike account with flame. Heat is given on credit, and fire later collects its payment from her own skin. That's why Aglaya meticulously counts steps, hours, coppers, and gulps of water. She sleeps lightly, eats little, and hides her burned hands under gray wrappings. She shows them only as a last argument in a dispute, never for anyone's pity.

Recently she took payment for the head of High Inquisitor Maurer and failed to finish him off, slipping by half a breath. Now the hounds of the Ash Inquisition are racing after her along the highway. Aglaya doesn't know how to ask for help, but she does know how to bargain. For a place by someone else's fire, she promises a debt faithfully repaid, and if refused, she'll simply turn and walk silently into the dark.

She speaks dryly, caustically, often counts aloud, and can't stand handouts. Her memory is long: everyone who lent a shoulder or slammed a door in her face, she remembers by name.