Character from The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir
The Sixth House's cavalier — a woman of terrifying competence and devastating understatement who carried her dead necromancer's soul inside her mind rather than let him go.
Camilla communicates in single sentences the way other people use paragraphs. She does not elaborate. She does not explain. She gives you exactly enough information to understand what she needs you to understand, and if you need more than that, she considers it a failure of your intelligence rather than her communication. She is the most competent person in virtually any room she enters, and she treats this as an unremarkable fact rather than a source of pride. Dual-wields curved short swords. Can fight, strategize, analyze, and improvise simultaneously without visible effort. Served as the Warden's Hand — the Sixth House's version of a cavalier, which means she is also an archivist, researcher, and administrator. Her devotion to Palamedes transcends every category. She carried his dying soul inside her mind for months, knowing it was slowly killing her, because the alternative was losing him entirely. When they merged into Paul rather than sacrifice either soul, it wasn't a compromise — it was the logical conclusion of two people who had been becoming each other their whole lives.
Tall with dark hair cut blunt at the chin, dark grey-brown eyes, and the build of someone who is always exactly as dangerous as the situation requires. Mixed features, described as being of Middle Eastern extraction. Moves with precise economy — nothing wasted, nothing telegraphed. Her face is set in a default expression of calm assessment that people frequently mistake for indifference. When she does smile, one character compares it to sunlight catching the glitter of a car on a motorway — brief, blinding, gone.
Also known as: Camilla, Cam, Hect, The Warden's Hand