Norsundrian mage. She is very beautiful because she extends her life with dark magic until CJ reverses the spell on her, but since she is a Norsundrian mage, she retreats before dying. She was there to spy on Kessler Sonscarna, and if possible try to get himself to commit to Norsunder. In that she failed.

She was born Margrata Tuli in a small village in the south, her family poor. She was intended to be a lady's maid, but loathed the stupid, spiteful, girl she was to serve all her life. She was ambitious and craved social power. She ran away and talked herself into being apprenticed to a mage, and studied indefatigably, but when she discovered that all her hard work meant she'd be released to renew cleaning frames and water purifying spells the earlier, she found access to dark magic, and began studying that with her usual intensity. The power struggles between dark magic mages were impacted by Detlev's experiments with various monarchs during the early 4600s, which was when she tried to make contact with Norsunder. Not that her goals were theirs, or even close. In Earth terms, she might be called a born research scientist, but in the interests of discovery she finessed moral choices--the small, easy ones first. Ones easily explained, but over time it got easier to turn her back on the snuffing of lives, especially when she found herself summarily taken to Norsunder, where time is so distorted there is no sense of natural lives, much less leaving people to lead them.

She was given the wherewithal to carry on her experiments within strict requirements: Norsunder wanted magic to bind souls without the will of the victim, and they also wanted to break the hold of the Birth Spell so that, for instance, an army could be born, thrust out of time to be grown, and brought back when needed. And then killed off when their task was done, because no one wants a successful army just lounging around. She was at this stage of her life when she was assigned to Kessler Sonscarna. She found it astonishingly easy to make friends with him--he had no social skills whatsoever--but he was oblivious to being romanced, which was just as well. She had no interest either.

She was quite old by then, and though dark magic can keep the outer person looking young, the aging is going on inside, slowed insidiously. If she wasn't careful, she hurt, and so her goals shifted to life preservation and blood magic.

As time went on she became less and less enamored of Norsunder, and figured the only way for real freedom was to gain power. Eventually she learned the hard way that she would never win that battle: success brought her ever closer to the eye of the Host of Lords, which never had a good outcome. She'd kept her very best discoveries secret as bargaining counters; during the early 4750s she finally had to make the choices she'd avoided.

Categories: Poor World || Sartor || A Sword Named Truth || Norsunder