Reanne Corly

Reanne Corly kept order among the Kin, a hidden society of women who could channel: wilders who had never gone to the White Tower and women the Tower had put out. In Ebou Dar the Kin lived quietly, taking in runaways and women with nowhere else to turn, and their survival depended on never being noticed. Setalle Anan, an innkeeper of the city, knew where to send a woman who needed them; almost no one else did.

The Kin gathered in an ordinary house across from an inn called The Stranded Goose, where matters were settled in a plain sitting room. Around Reanne sat women like Berowin, Garenia, and Sumeko, and questions of the moment were carried to her by others such as Sarainya Vostovan and Derys. Whatever a woman had been before, in that room Reanne's word settled things. Among the Kin, the years passed lightly over women who channeled, so that a face gave little clue to the life behind it.

Caution ran through everything the Kin did, because the danger was plain: a word reaching the White Tower or the Whitecloaks could bring ruin down on every one of them. Reanne treated that danger as her personal charge. She weighed strangers carefully, believed nothing on a claim alone, and held the Kin's secrecy as an absolute rule, kept for the sake of every woman under her care.