Caerith Ash-Bow leads the Ash-Bow Host, the militant survivors of burned groves in the north of Eilvaran. He is one of the children who grew up after the Burning of Veyrwood, the fire that destroyed the forest where the eldest Eilvaren had set down their memories. He was raised among elders with holes in their past, and he has never stopped living inside that wound.
Appearance
Caerith is wiry rather than tall, all tendon and stillness, with pale copper skin weathered darker on his face and hands. His narrow, severe face has kept its Eilvaren agelessness everywhere except in his eyes, which are a dark slate gray and rarely blink when he listens. His ash-blond hair is cropped close at the sides and tied back in a short tail, and a single braid behind his left ear is woven with the kind of pale cord that marks the way into Veyrwood. Before a fight he draws a line of gray ash across each cheek, and its faint stain never quite washes out. He dresses in burnt and ash colors and carries a dark ash-wood bow with gray-fletched arrows. At his belt hangs a small pouch of white ash, tied shut, that he never opens in front of others.
What he believes
Caerith loves the generation that grew up beside wounded memory, and every grove that has not yet burned. He has watched restraint tried again and again and seen the forest pay for it. So he wants any invasion of Eilvaran to be unbearably costly, and he wants the communities he holds responsible for Veyrwood to answer for it. His grievance is real, and that is what makes him dangerous. In seeking justice for an old fire, he risks punishing people who never held a torch.
His place in the story
In the Council of Nine Groves, Caerith brings the Host's demands for punitive action, and three voices stand against him. Aelwen Thornsong shares his wish to defend the forest but not his wish to avenge it, and the two need each other more than either likes. Miraleth Rootspeaker opens the groves to the very people he would keep out, and he calls her sanctuaries a gate for enemies. Hardest of all for him is Lethariel of Nine Winters, who lost her own past in Veyrwood and still refuses to let grief write the record. Many Eilvaren fear that his vengeance could start another war with the Skeldr, whom his Host blames for the fire, though Skeldr sagas themselves are divided about it. Those who know the Greenfold will see in him a mirror of Corren Ashfoot, though nothing suggests the two have ever met.