Klindon Valens
Estaria's mother — outwardly respectable, secretly the architect of ruin across the southern reaches.
To Appledale, Klindon Valens was a person of standing: composed, capable, the steady hand behind a respectable family. Beneath that surface she was something else entirely — a patient and methodical schemer who, with her bookkeeper Burl, bought up the debts of struggling families and called them in at the cruelest possible moment.
Her ambition reached far past money. The pattern of ruin she wove had a shape and a destination: land, and the power that comes with holding it.
Klindon mistook her own hunger for destiny, certain that what she wanted was hers by right. That certainty carries her, in the end, to the edge of a place that does not care what a person believes they are owed.