Brunda Pass-Keeper

The Korl voice at the high moot — a grey-braided giantess who speaks now from Windcut Hold on the Rimeward and counts which lowland wars are worth Korl backs. She moves slow, speaks short, and has turned down more coin than most lords will ever see.

Brunda held the topmost stone of the Wind-Cut Pass for thirty winters and buried two husbands and a son in the snow below it before the holds carried their seat back across the water to Windcut Hold, the true cold country the Korl came down from. She went with them — the moot is nothing without the holds behind it — but the pass stayed hers in every way that matters: she still counts the old toll ledgers by heart, and the garrison ruin the Korl left behind on the mainland Rampart is where her dead are. The holds send her to speak for them at the moot not because she is the strongest left — she is not — but because she remembers every toll, every broken lowland promise, and every Korl that died fighting another man's war for thin coin. She will sell the strength of a hold to a lowland captain when the price and the cause both stand up; she will sit on her hands a whole season when neither does. House Vandahl's factors call her stubborn. She calls it counting.