Fionnuala
Faction: Children of the Night · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook
Children of the Night: Level 5 — The Gilded Branches
Fionnuala of the Gilded Branches
She was a healer first — yarrow and meadowsweet, the wet loam of the Poisoned Glen, the kind of knowledge that passes from woman to woman in the old tongue. She was turned in a century she does not name, and she has been a Gilded Branch of the Children of the Night ever since.
What happened to her standing is a different matter.
A member of The Scarlet Bough, a rank above her, committed an act she witnessed and could not unknow. She will not say what it was. What she will say is that he reported her for it — named her as the transgressor, used his rank to seal the accusation shut before she could speak. The law of blood meant his word sat above hers in every court that mattered. She was cast out. He was not.
She walked north through the April bog, past Muckish dark against a sky that wouldn't quite go black, down to the Bloody Foreland where the rocks glow red at dusk, and she stood there for a long time looking at nothing.
Then she came to The Lodge.
Four hundred years of patience. One more night.