Virae

Virae is the daughter of Earl Delnar of Dros Delnoch, and at about eighteen she is doing more to prepare for the coming war than most of the men responsible for it. She is tall and strongly built, plain by the standards of her class, and was teased for it as a girl, so she has grown a prickly shell that she turns on any man who looks at her too long. She fights with a slender rapier in a quick, dancing style and is a good shot with a bow. Legend sends her out to find allies for her father, which is how she meets Rek, who is perceptive enough to see past the insults, and it is her presence that drags him towards the fortress he had meant to avoid. Together they go to ask the Thirty for help. Their romance is one of the book's pleasures, sparky and unsentimental, and it matters to the plot as much as to the two of them. With Virae, Gemmell gives Legend a heroine who belongs on the walls.

Appears in

1. 1Legend (1984)In Gemmell's first novel, an ageing axeman and a reluctant soldier help hold a six-walled fortress against a Nadir army half a million strong.