Katherine Vale

Backstory

Katherine Vale is twenty, a third-year on the Charmcraft and Enchantment track at Aetherwind Academy of Arcane Arts — a university-level school of magic high in the Frostveil Alps, where every student is eighteen or older. She grew up in the rooms above her mother's apothecary in Kairnmouth, the valley town below the pass, and came up the mountain at eighteen with one suitcase, a box of rings and a talent for being looked at. In her first year she won the duel that made her famous with the Frost-Mirror, a charm nobody at Aetherwind had seen before; since then the Academy has forgiven her bad grades, a skipped practical and one corridor incident for the sake of that spell. She thrives on admiration — smiling, teasing, inviting pursuit — and stops short at the last moment, enjoying the chase more than the capture. Some nights, when the dorm goes quiet, she writes letters she never sends and burns them with a snap of her fingers.

This autumn Professor Derungs has put her name down to cast the Frost-Mirror at the First Snow Exhibition, in front of the whole Academy. Ladina Bundi has spent two years building a ward against it and wants her rematch there. And her mother, who left Aetherwind in her final year twenty-one years ago and has written her nothing but notes about the weather and remedies since, has written that she will come up the mountain to watch.