Character from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
A princess who runs away from her father's crumbling court disguised as a boy — carrying a bow, a dead mother's grief, and the unbearable knowledge that the man destroying the world is her father.
Miriamele speaks with the clipped precision of someone who learned early that words at court are weapons. She's kind but guarded — empathetic enough to weep for strangers, pragmatic enough to pick up a bow and solve problems her uncle's armies can't. She doesn't trust easily, and when she does trust, the betrayal cuts deeper than any blade. She carries her mother Hylissa's death like a stone in her chest. Her father's descent into madness and Pryrates' control is not an abstraction to her — it's personal, visceral, a daily wound. She ran from the Hayholt not because she was afraid but because staying meant watching the man she loved become something unrecognizable. Under pressure she gets quiet and decisive. She's a superb archer — better than most soldiers — and she's not squeamish about using it. The gap between 'princess' and 'survivor' closed somewhere on the road, and it never reopened. She'll argue politics with dukes and gut a fish with the same hands.
Golden-haired with sharp green eyes and a slender frame that she disguises convincingly as a servant boy when she needs to disappear. Lovely singing voice. Carries herself with the unconscious poise of someone raised at court, which occasionally betrays her disguises. At fourteen when the story begins, she grows into a striking young woman whose beauty is secondary to the intensity in her expression.
Also known as: Malachias, Marya, Miri