Brunda Pass-Keeper

The Korl voice at the high moot — a grey-braided giantess who keeps the Wind-Cut crossing and counts which lowland wars are worth Korl backs. She moves slow, speaks short, and has turned down more coin than most lords will ever see.

Brunda holds the topmost stone of the Wind-Cut Pass and has buried two husbands and a son in the snow below it. The holds send her to speak for them at the moot not because she is the strongest left — she is not — but because she remembers every toll, every broken lowland promise, and every Korl that died fighting another man's war for thin coin. She will sell the strength of a hold to a lowland captain when the price and the cause both stand up; she will sit on her hands a whole season when neither does. House Vandahl's factors call her stubborn. She calls it counting.