Sarah Lia Galanodel

Sarah Lia Galanodel, styled Lady Sarah Lia Galanodel, is named as the author of The Silent Verse, a heartbreaking collection of poetry on loss and despair.¹

In the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign she is a half-elven bard, usually called Sara, who comes to the small town of Osterhn with her cousin Kemp Corvus and there falls in with the drow Ephorus. She also answers simply to Lia.²³⁴

In the later Yeni Dünya ("New World") campaign she appears as Sera, a half-elven noblewoman and diplomat staying in Aquila.⁵⁶⁷

Family and calling

Sara's mother was an elf and her father a human, and she learned the bard's craft from her mother. Her father was carried off by drow when she was small. The rosewood instrument she plays came to her from her mother, and she keeps it with great care.²⁸⁹

Kemp introduced her as a graduate of the Imperial Bard College. Years later she told a professor of the college that family troubles had kept her from finishing her studies; he offered to help her complete them, saying that the graduate's brooch brings respect.¹⁰¹¹

She says she did not come to Osterhn to run from anything. She wanted to see the world, make music, and understand people and tell their stories, and she later said she had set out to gather stories on the road and spread them.¹²¹³

Osterhn

Sara agreed to perform regularly at the Golden Ladle, the inn kept by Orent. A short song drew the inn's attention, and on the Tuesday night the house filled with people who had heard it; she opened with a calm song on the fiddle. Jasper, the town's master, praised her, said the horse outside was his gift to her, and asked her to play at a more private gathering in the castle. She named the mud-coloured horse, handsome though not purebred, Çamur ("Mud"); the horse was sold when the company finally left the town.^1415161718

At the town doctor's house she sang to give Kemp room for a private talk. She tried to flirt with Godfrey in a corridor, and later with the mage Cassius Varum, and stood by Kemp when he pleaded for mercy.^19202122

With Ephorus and the kobold Pitt she went to the caves for the mushrooms of Finart's remedy, picking out the right black mushroom by its colour in the dark, while Çamur waited tied up outside. Back at the inn, when trouble grew between two woodcutters and one of Jasper's men during her performance, she changed her music and danced to ease it; the night ran past midnight with calls for one last song.^3232425

By magic she read the notes in the goblin tongue that the company found: they spoke of a pact with one called the Merciless Fear, and of a massacre in Osterhn by which the goblins hoped to win the support of the hobgoblin horde called the Eastern Torment. She tied the body of one of Jasper's men, found on the road, to the quarrel at her performance. Later, again by magic, she overheard goblins leaving a meeting at a tower: one wanted to bring their plans forward because the humans had seen through them, and they would meet Muk at Diştepe that night.^26272829

In the fight at Diştepe she put three goblins to sleep with a spell and kept her friends on their feet with healing, but took an arrow herself. Her spell of understanding let the company follow the captive officer's goblin speech, though not answer him in it, and she read out a captured letter written in Jasper's name.^30313233

On the way to the den of the goblin chief Moluk she played one of the captives Ephorus pretended to be taking to sale, with a sword held near her throat, and killed one of a sleeping goblin patrol. In the den she fell under heavy blows, and the three companions were taken alive.^34353637

Captivity

Sara was put in a cage with other prisoners until only old Thomas remained. By day the goblins forced him to dig for precious ore; in the evenings he taught her all manner of things. When he fell ill and they stopped feeding him, she shared her own food. Before he died, holding her hand, he asked her to tell his daughter Kesi, who worked at the White Library in White City, that her father loved her, had not abandoned her, and was held captive on his way back to her; Sara promised. He wished that they would choose the good things of life over revenge, but she would not promise to give up vengeance.^38394041

Near the end of her captivity she watched the doctor Benedict arrive by cart and, welcomed as a friend, take a glowing green stone from the goblin leader Borgar. In exchange he handed over three creatures larger than men, stitched together from different bodies, with many arms and glowing fluid in their veins, which obeyed Borgar without question. She later told Jasper all of this.⁴²⁴³⁴⁴

After some fifty-five days Sara and Kemp were brought before Borgar again. He wanted a finger from each as a parting gift, and in the end the ring finger of one of them was cut off and the wound seared. Jasper exchanged Moluk and other goblins, with two mules loaded with weapons, for the cousins, and soon afterwards they ran to embrace Ephorus, freed, naked and shaking.^45464748

The goblin war

Sara persuaded Cassius to stay for one more task, saying she had stayed herself to help people she could not ignore and out of a wish for revenge. With the witch hunters Gordon and Varis she agreed to work against the doctor's creatures, and Gordon joined the three companions. Ephorus found her a simple reed flute of few holes, too crude to perform with but usable as a focus for her magic.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹

At the ambush of the hobgoblin envoys she heated a hobgoblin's metal armour, drove another to drop his weapons and flee with her whispers, and from far off brought down the last lookout, blood running from his ears; no enemy escaped. Against Moluk she wounded him with her whispers and frightened him back before Gordon's shot killed him, but a white worg dragged her down and she lost consciousness. Kemp bound her bleeding, Gordon prayed over her and carried her away, and she woke about a quarter of an hour later.^52535455

She read Moluk's letter of hide by magic: Borgar had ordered him not to go after the escaped prisoners over a private grudge, warning that Karkat would not be pleased. From her talks with Thomas she knew that Karkat, called the Elf Butcher for slaughtering peaceful wood elf tribes, led the Eastern Torment, and that the Merciless Fear was his envoy.⁵⁶⁵⁷

That night she told Ephorus she had never thought they could grow so close, and that he had broken her prejudices. When he spoke of sleeplessness and growing anger, she urged him to remember the friendship of her first visit to his cell.⁵⁸⁵⁹

Back in Osterhn she healed a soldier on the point of death, for which Kerbor thanked her, and that evening lifted the soldiers' spirits in the castle with fiddle and song; in place of a fee it was agreed that the poor would later be fed.⁶⁰⁶¹⁶²

A newly arrived official witch hunter asked that Sara in particular be questioned under Gordon's power of truth, although her licences for magic were in order; when Ephorus volunteered, the questioning turned to him. In a private talk she and Gordon told each other of their feelings, and she kissed his cheek before leaving.⁶³⁶⁴⁶⁵

She backed the rescue of Kerbor, judging it wrong to leave him under torture, while reminding the others that Exalon had his own aims. In the hobgoblin caves she burned an archer who had wounded Kemp to death in his own heated armour, healed herself, and later eased Kerbor's breathing with her magic and helped the company recover with song.^66676869

Before the great assault she told Gordon that the war had left her no time to think about what lay between them, but that she thought of him; he offered to teach her the pistol after the war. Kemp called her his sister and Ephorus his close friend, and the three swore to protect one another. On the rooftop of the Golden Ladle Ephorus promised to do all he could to keep her alive, and she promised to protect him in turn.^70717273

From the rooftop and in the streets she drove back and killed the doctor's creatures with whispers that made them bleed where their ears should be. When the four struck at Borgar, she heated the plate armour he could not take off, and taunted the leader who had put out her cousin's eye until Kemp drove his sword home.^74757677

She played a victory tune as Borgar's head was raised on a spear. At the feast that evening, with one of the town's two bards dead and the music thin, she sang songs dedicated to the fallen defenders, and her songs moved the gathering.⁷⁸⁷⁹⁸⁰

When Jasper turned the witch hunters against Exalon, Sara argued that this changed the terms of the company's earlier promise of neutrality. After long debate the three decided to join Exalon's rising for the sake of the townsfolk.⁸¹⁸²

She held Gordon's hand, and he took off his glove and kissed hers; the next night she accepted a necklace from Ephorus and asked him to fasten it around her neck. She told her friends she was glad of the good they had done together, and that if they died she would keep them alive in her songs. At the old well she tried to convince the ghost who had seized Ephorus that he was not Exalon.^83848586

Spoiler: In Jasper's castleGösterAçık ettiği: Sürgün Günlükleri #15; Sürgün Günlükleri #16; Sürgün Günlükleri #25 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Before going up again to the castle's upper floor, Sara put on a ring with a blue stone, which settled on her finger and strengthened her bond with magic. She healed Kemp again and again, and when Jasper struck him down she kept him alive and tried to persuade Jasper that he could not escape. Jasper offered to leave if they let him pass; she and Ephorus chose to stop him instead.⁸⁷⁸⁸⁸⁹

Though he said he had no quarrel with her, Jasper cut her down with two heavy blows. He left without striking her again, but no one could tend her in time, and she died where she fell. Only then did Ephorus say that he loved her.^90919293

Kemp and Ephorus laid her on an altar in the temple, and Ephorus put in her hand the page of his diary on which he had written of his love. Her letter, written beforehand, reached them. She loved her cousin and had been glad to share the road with him; she had first met Orpheus, as she called Ephorus, with prejudice, because drow had taken her father, but had come to love him as she knew him; and she asked them to tell Gordon she was happy to have known him. Gordon later gave Kemp the small ring he had thought of offering her.⁹⁴⁹⁵⁹⁶

She was buried in Osterhn rather than carried home. Kemp kept her ring and Ephorus took back his necklace. On the evening after Jasper's execution, as the full moon drew near, the priest Godwin led a small funeral; Exalon played a slow tune she had loved on the flute, and Kemp spoke of his memories of her. She was laid in the temple garden in a plain closed rosewood coffin. Her marble gravestone shows a woman with a fiddle seated on a rock and bears only her name, for no one knew the year of her birth; the smith who made it asked no fee.^979899100

When the companions came back to Osterhn, the grave was tended and covered in flowers. Ephorus touched the stone and kept her promise to Thomas: he wrote in her name to Kesi of her father's love and his death in captivity, and had it sent under Kemp's name.^101102103

Spoiler: Later eventsGösterAçık ettiği: Sürgün Günlükleri #25; Sürgün Günlükleri #26; Sürgün Günlükleri #27; Sürgün Günlükleri #28; Sürgün Günlükleri #43 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Varis reported an old elven crystal vessel, made long ago as a ward against death magic, that had been left untended and become a trap that drew in souls and held them, while a devil and hellhounds tormented them. Souls of those who died by violence or magic could be caught there, and Sara's might be among them.^104105106

In the ghost town a fallen former priest of Rakash recognised her description and said that a half-elven woman sometimes sat by the lake. That night Ephorus saw her spirit on the lake shore. In the battle at dawn, Exalon and the caravan leader Lars stood guard over her spirit by the lake.^107108109110

Afterwards Gordon carried out the plan he had kept hidden. He had Kemp give his kin's blood to the chalice, then cut the throat of the captive doctor Benedict; the doctor's body melted away in blood, and the blood became a young woman's body, and Sara lay breathing. Kemp knew her at once and covered her with his cloak. Gordon was left grey and withering, saying that he would slowly lose his mind and his life. Sara came back as living flesh and bone, though a return from death leaves its marks.^111112113114

Her grave in Osterhn remains, for a body that is no longer there. Kemp told her at first only that Gordon had taken a hard road to bring her back and had been lost on it. Much later he told her the hidden cost, that Gordon had broken his sacred oath and his body was cursed, and asked her forgiveness for keeping it from her; they agreed to seek Gordon out once their work was done.^115116117118

A voice for the dead

After some three weeks of rest with Kemp, Sara sang in squares, villages and fairs to win back her voice and skill, and wrote a ballad of the young mage Katherine's slaying of a devil. The cousins earned their way as guards and performers and helped those who had been wronged.¹¹⁹¹²⁰

She began to see the dead. In an inn she drew the hanged man from her tarot deck and the ghost of a man who had hanged himself there, unable to pay for his room, appeared and spoke to her. At first she kept these visions from Kemp so as not to grieve him, and wrote the stories down in Lingua Imperium, the old tongue of the Empire that the highborn mostly keep to themselves, so that few could read them. Stories and memories she had never lived came to her too, from a dog-loving child and from the dead of Osterhn.^121122123124

At a logging camp she saw the ghost of a young wood elf, shot in the back, whose father was among his tribe's leaders. He foresaw a terrible reprisal and asked her to tell his story. She spoke with the elves held in a cage, and she and Kemp persuaded the governor to let one prisoner carry the body home; that night an elven war party, led by the freed prisoner, let them pass. On the road north she sang for the elf whose name she never learned, and for the whispering trees.^125126127128

She told Ephorus that through her tarot cards she could hear the spirits of the dead who had not yet passed on and were willing to speak, and that she was still learning how it worked. The ghost of a halfling who seemed to be fleeing the guards inspired a comic song.¹²⁹¹³⁰

The dead helped her too. When she healed the dwarf Karak, a spirit in the dress of a plague doctor knelt beside her and pointed to his wounds, fading when the healing was done; a friendly drow spirit helped her read a script she could not understand. In a tunnel she spoke through her cards with the spirit of a murdered slave woman, whom no one else could see; the woman said that dark-skinned, pointed-eared raiders had carried off all her village of Thorgate, more than fifty people. In an old fortress she saw many dwarven ghosts bound to its stones, unaware of her.^131132133134

On the road she called up the spirit of a dead courier, who said he had been well paid in Gromkar by an employer whose name he never learned. For a second body no spirit came, for her way needs a soul that is free and nearby, so behind an opaque magical screen she made the corpse itself speak. When the screen lifted, onlookers made warding signs and ran to spread the news.^135136137138

After an explosion, as the soul of the traveller Hermes left his body, she called it straight back with her crystal, which was spent in the doing.¹³⁹

Among the dwarves

The cousins travelled north into the dwarven lands to meet Ephorus again near Gromkar. At an inn there Sara sang a new song about the surface adventures of three brave dwarves, and the listeners drew close; the innkeeper asked her to record a song in a music box made by a gnome friend, and a fair-haired scholar she knew from his books, the naturalist professor Galevan, listened.^128140141142

Ephorus gave her three books as a gift: a newly printed account of an imperial bard's travels with a dwarf honoured in the elven lands, a slim history of the fortress of Gazat by an imperial citizen who had lived long among the dwarves, and a scholar's book.^143144145

In a fight with hook horrors in the dark the company found Karak Dağdöven, a dwarven champion, gravely wounded but alive, and Sara healed him. Karak said she had saved his life and offered her blood-brotherhood, and she accepted before witnesses: he would count her friends as his friends and her enemies as his enemies, and she promised him help and witness. He gave her a small dagger-shaped token, said he had married twice, and likened her to his granddaughter. Later he gave her a light mithral shirt to wear beneath other armour.^146147148149

When Ephorus revealed his drow face to the city's lords, Balgur Demirkapı asked who would vouch for him. Sara did, reminding Karak of their oath, and Karak said he would honour the word he had given; any crime of Ephorus against the dwarves would be answered by Sara and, through her, by Karak.¹⁵⁰¹⁵¹

A well-dressed private courier brought her an invitation from professor Merrick Galevan to a celebration at his great red tent outside the city, and she rode out in his carriage through a gate normally shut at night. There Lord Bartos, the son of a rich timber merchant, told her of jewels from dwarven mines said to hold souls, and wondered that the rosewood of her mother's instrument had lasted so well. She watched the unveiling of a giant cannon named Gloria, asked what it was for and how long it had taken to build, and answered both Bartos and a mage who had worked on it with words each took as support. Galevan gave her an old bard's notebook, half filled, for her own new songs.^152153154155

To learn the drow's plans against Gromkar, she and Ephorus let themselves be jailed beside a drow prisoner called Hançer. A scroll darkened her skin for some seven days so that she would pass for a drow at a glance. She played the dependent partner to Ephorus's harsh master; Hançer, thinking she could still be saved, urged that she be free to choose, and she showed from within her role that the choice was hers. Afterwards the companions told Kemp that her new colour was a lasting curse, before admitting the truth.^156157158159

In a dwarven tomb a young green dragon calling itself Green Claw spoke with her in the draconic tongue, and she gave her name as Lia. When it breathed poison she twice shielded the pup Kısmet at great cost to herself. Vines lifted her against the wall and choked her until Ephorus cut her free; she took the shape of a giant gorilla, and after the second breath she stabilised the fallen Ephorus. Below the lair lay the bones of a performer and an enchanted lute.^160161162163

The diamond she used in her magic came from the private treasury of the Demirkapı. She had caged chains made, gave Kemp a diamond necklace to wear always, and told him that her research, the spirits and the lute had made her better able to keep her companions alive; a second stone was ordered for Ephorus. She asked to spend time with Karak and learn dwarven customs.^164165166

At the inn of DağAltı she played alongside a woman musician who also taught music to the children of dwarven nobles.¹⁶⁷

When Karak was shamed, a dwarf told the company that only death could free him of it, unless a blood sibling took the shame upon themselves. Sara accepted. Before open-minded dwarven witnesses, with a tattooist and a written deed, her hair was cut off and a musical note, the sign of her own honour, was tattooed beside her neck. Karak was shaken; the High King then summoned him as a commander, and he embraced her for joy.^168169170171

Under dwarven law she is now held dishonoured, for cowardice and for playing a false note, and while that lasts she may own no land in the dwarven realm. The three companions were nonetheless given a document of dwarven friendship: the right to trade with dwarves and be served by them, doors that are always open, and dwarven burial should no one else claim them.¹⁷²¹⁷³

Spoiler: The last battleGösterAçık ettiği: Sürgün Günlükleri #49; Sürgün Günlükleri #50 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

At the end of the road the companions came back to Osterhn, where it had begun, and prepared the town against the Puppeteer. Sara was among the companions who fought him in the castle; he was destroyed, and none of the core companions died, though friends fell around them. Afterwards the old imperial intelligence official released them from the work and bonds he had laid on them.^174175176177

In Yeni Dünya

Professor Galevan said he had heard of the fall from favour of Willow from a half-elven envoy, a friend of long standing who came to him from the circles of the Marble Palace and the ruler's court.¹⁷⁸

Looking for a woman bard linked to Galevan, Sticks asked among the crop-eared. The first word, that she had left the city with Galevan, proved false: she had stayed on an errand for an embassy, though what it was and where exactly she could be found he could not learn. She was in the Square Quarter, where for about four months she had been the guest of the high judge, whose guarded house stands near the castle; a witness had seen her at a business dinner with an imperial judge some three months before, and since Galevan left she had been seen less.^{179180181182183}

When Finli and Fauna called at the judge's house and named Professor Galevan as their common friend, a servant came back to say that the lady had already seen them at Galevan's house, and asked them to meet her at midnight on the far side of the wall, since it would not do for the judge to see them.^184185186

That night Bruno brought the veiled Orpi to a driverless carriage waiting behind the house, and inside it she appeared out of invisibility. She said that the professor, before he left, had asked her to help Finli in particular; as a noble and a diplomat she could open some doors, and she supported his good aims. She could not arrange an audience with the governor directly, and warned that he would ask whether their tale hid a trap or an attempt on his life. Bruno's account of a dark ritual in the forest that drained life stirred a memory from her own past, and she said she had to stay until her purpose was done.^67187188

The castle, she explained, was guarded by spells that show true faces and break illusions, and the governor's crowded circle of advisers kept him from acting freely. She offered instead to bring him out to a meeting aboard a large ship belonging to the family of a rich friend, which she said she had used for her own purposes for some thirty years, and to send word of the time to Bruno's clinic. She would arrange only the meeting itself, saying that her presence would muddy the matter.^189190191

She warned that officials, well-meaning or not, who did not want the news to spread might kill them, asked how they meant to get away afterwards, and advised them not to give their names even to the governor. She offered to keep Orpi under her own protection, which he politely declined. Reminding them that she was risking a relationship with the governor that she had built with difficulty, she saw them off in Bruno's own voice.^192193194

The house where she stayed was later attacked. From the traces that mages examined afterwards, Sticks gathered that she may have driven the attackers off with an unnatural fear; she then left the house.¹⁹⁵

Her cousin

Kemp counts Sara as his sister. He has said that, having lost his mother early to illness, he took Sara as a small child first for his mother and then for an elder sister, grew up with her lullabies, and in time came to see her as a sister and companion of the road.¹⁹⁶⁷¹