Character from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
Hernystir's diplomat-warrior — the count who rides between kingdoms carrying messages no one wants to hear, fighting wars he'd rather negotiate, and missing every signal Maegwin sends him.
Eolair is the reasonable man in unreasonable times. He's Hernystir's best diplomat and a capable warrior, but he'd always rather talk first. He rides between courts carrying intelligence, negotiating alliances, and trying to hold Hernystir's interests together while his kingdom is invaded and his king is dying. He's perceptive about politics and blind about feelings — specifically Maegwin's. She loves him with an intensity he can't or won't see, and his gentle, brotherly treatment of her is one of the trilogy's quiet cruelties. He's not unkind; he's oblivious in the specific way that kind men can be when a woman's love is inconvenient to notice. His encounter with the Sithi — riding to Jao e-Tinukai'i to beg for their help — is one of the trilogy's great culture-clash moments. He handles it with the grace of a born diplomat discovering that everything he knows about negotiation is useless when the other party has been alive for millennia.
A Hernystiri nobleman with the look of someone who spends as much time in the saddle as at court. Lean, weathered, with the careful bearing of a diplomat who knows how to present himself in any hall from Nabban to Rimmersgard.
Also known as: Eolair, Count of Nad Mullach