Character Dossier: Darius Blackwood, Called The Raven

I get more letters about Darius than about any other character in Fallen Hearts. Most of them ask the same two questions, in different orders: where does the mask come from, and did he and Aria really love each other or was that obligation. The answers turned out to be the same answer, and that took me four books to admit.

This dossier is the one I keep at the back of my drafting folder, the one I reference when a Darius scene refuses to land. Not the published bio. The real one.

Origins

Darius Blackwood was not born to that name.

His birth name was Daren Vellis, son of a journeyman armorer in the Eastern Marches town of Thornfield Crossing. His father drank, his mother died of fever when he was nine, and by twelve he was apprenticed to a swordmaster who took him because he had an arm and no objections. By fifteen he had killed his first man — a roadside thief who tried to take a delivery wagon Daren was guarding for two coppers and a hot meal. He did not enjoy it. He also did not flinch from it. That combination, in the late kingdom of Valdoria, was a marketable trait.

By eighteen he was in Lord Varen's personal retinue. Not a guardsman — Varen ran a smaller, deniable corps of operatives who handled what Varen's official forces could not. They had no insignia. They wore plain steel. The Eastern Marches knew them as the silent post, and people who saw them coming generally did not see them go.

I want to be clear, because some readers have asked: Daren Vellis, in those years, was a bad man. Not a monster. A bad man who had decided early that the world was a transactional place and that the transaction had been settled in his favor by virtue of his having a sword and most other people not. He killed for Varen. He took bribes from the Merchant Consortium for warning Varen about specific shipments. He was once, briefly, married to a tavern-keeper's widow in Greymarsh; she died two years into the marriage of consumption, and Daren did not grieve her so much as note the fact and continue.

The man who became Darius Blackwood was forged in one night, three years before the events of Stolen Hearts. The night Varen's coup came down on the Stormborn family in Crownhaven Castle.

The Coup

Daren Vellis was assigned to the West Wing that night. The West Wing was where the king's two younger sons slept — Aria's brothers, ages eleven and fourteen. The plan, as Daren understood it, was a clean coup. The king would die. The boys would be taken into custody and re-educated, which was a word Varen used because saying killed aloud cost him something even he was not willing to pay.

Daren stood at the door to the West Wing for the entire coup. He was the man between the assassins and the boys.

What broke that night — and broke him — was a man named Lieutenant Brenn. Brenn was Daren's sergeant. Brenn had been bought by Varen a month earlier, in a transaction Daren did not know about. While Daren was holding the West Wing door against what he believed were unauthorized attackers, Brenn unlocked a service passage from the inside and let the assassins in around him.

Daren killed eleven men in the West Wing that night. He took two crossbow bolts through the left side of his face — the burns on his cheek and jaw are not from fire, despite what most readers assume; they're from a cauterizing iron a battlefield surgeon used to stop the bleeding fourteen hours later, because he was hemorrhaging arterial blood and a clean dressing would not hold. He arrived at the boys' bedroom thirty seconds after the assassins did.

The older boy was already dead. The younger was hiding behind a chest, and lived for another fourteen seconds before Daren could reach him. Both Stormborn princes died in Daren Vellis's arms. He did not save them. He was, by his own count for the rest of his life, thirty seconds and a barricaded door from saving them.

Aria's mother was killed that same night. Aria, by sheer accident of being on a horseback errand to her uncle's estate, was not in the castle. She survived because she was not where the assassins thought she would be.

Daren Vellis walked out of the West Wing that night with two crossbow bolts in him, eleven dead men behind him, two dead children he had failed to save, and the certain knowledge that his sergeant had sold him for a Varen contract. He killed Brenn the next morning. He took a horse. He rode east into the Eastern Marches and did not stop riding for nine months.

Somewhere in those nine months, Daren Vellis died, and Darius Blackwood — the Raven — took his place.

The Mask

The ceramic mask was not theatrical. Daren had a face that did not heal. The bolts had taken muscle, and the cauterization had taken skin, and the resulting wound was the kind of disfigurement that, in the Valdorian kingdoms of that era, marked a man as dangerous in places where dangerous men got refused service in inns and turned away at city gates. The mask was a way to enter rooms.

It also became, very quickly, a way to not be Daren Vellis anymore. The mask was anonymity. The mask was — and I write this knowing how it sounds — a kind of mercy. Daren could not look in a mirror without seeing the West Wing. The Raven could.

He spent the next three years in the Eastern Marches doing the only job he was qualified for, with a single rule he had not had before: he would only work against Varen. He killed Varen agents on the trade road. He intercepted Varen messengers. He built a small reputation as a masked mercenary who would not negotiate with the Iron Crown for any price, and Varen, who was busy consolidating his stolen kingdom, never quite got around to having him killed.

When Edmund Hale tracked him down, in the months before the events of Stolen Hearts, and asked him whether he would serve a Stormborn princess attempting to retake her throne, Darius said yes before Edmund finished the sentence. Edmund tried to negotiate compensation. Darius told him — this is in my drafting notes, not in the book — that his compensation was that he would be allowed to die in Aria's service, if Aria would have him.

He was, it turned out, very bad at dying.

What He Wanted

Most readers who write to me about Darius assume his arc is a redemption arc. I want to push back on that, gently, in the dossier where I can.

Darius does not redeem himself in the seven books of Fallen Hearts. He cannot. The two boys he failed to save remain dead. The role he played in Varen's apparatus before the coup remains a fact. Redemption is a story we tell about people who can balance the ledger; Darius could never balance his.

What Darius does instead — and what I think makes him work as a romantic lead in a series that takes its romance seriously — is witness. He stops trying to atone and starts trying to see. He sees Aria. He sees Lyra. He sees the soldiers under his command, by name, in the order he learned them. When Aria reads the 177 casualty names aloud to him at Valley of Sorrows, in the worst night of her queenhood, he stays awake for all of them. That is not redemption. That is the only thing a man who failed to save two children in the West Wing ever has left to give: presence. Full attention. The willingness to be the person in the room who refuses to look away.

He and Aria love each other. The question I get most often is whether their early relationship — built in the camp scenes of Stolen Hearts, between Millbrook and the Iron Ring — was real, or whether it was the kind of bonding two people do under the pressure of war. The honest answer is both. They loved each other in the only way available to two people who had been shaped by violence. It was real because they made it real. It survived twenty-two years and three Korrathi wars because they kept making it real.

The Captivity

I wrote the Korrathi captivity scenes in Iron and Flame twice. The first version was longer, more graphic, and made the rescue feel earned because Darius was so visibly broken on the page. My editor pulled me back. She was right.

The captivity is on the page now in three weeks of professional torture, which is what it was historically — Korrathi interrogators were trained, and Theron was a moderating influence on what was done to Darius's body. What Theron could not moderate was the psychological corridor: the threat against Elena. Darius bites the interrogation commander on the throat when Elena is named. He is forty-four years old. His hands are tied. He bites the man hard enough to leave a scar that the commander is still wearing in Shadows of the Crown when Elena meets him at Ashfield, and yes, that is intentional, and yes, Elena recognizes the scar without knowing where it came from.

The torture left marks. Darius does not return from Korrath whole, and the four books following his return are partly about him assembling a man who can hold his infant son without flinching. He gets there. It takes years. The Mercenary's Price — that quiet chapter where he laughs for the first time at a cat trap — is the chapter I am proudest of in the entire series, because that laugh was the first one Darius had let himself have in five fictional years and probably ten authorial ones.

The End

Darius outlives Aria. Not by long.

In The Weight of Legacy, when Elena's grandmother Aria dies in chapter eighteen, Darius is the man holding her other hand. He survives her by eleven months. He spends those eleven months writing a manuscript — a private one, never published in-world — addressed to his three children. The manuscript is the document I most regret never being able to fit into the books. Some of it appears as the epigraphs in the final book. Most of it does not.

The manuscript opens with a sentence I have written down in three drafts and finally cut, because it belonged here, in the dossier, and not in the book itself:

I was thirty seconds from saving your uncles. I have spent forty years learning what to do with the rest of the time.

That is who Darius Blackwood was, in the part of the work no reader ever sees.

— Elara