Mira Doyle

The quietest introduction in ch. 257, and the one Arthur reads correctly without being told anything.

The surname is in the text. Ch. 257 and ch. 258 give only "Mira", and this entry once took Doyle from the author's notes. Ch. 263 has it: Sutton calls "Doyle. Pryce." and gives the match "to Doyle, by concession". Her home province is confirmed in text at ch. 258.

The introduction

Two words.

ART: Arthur. MRA: Mira.

Everything else is description.

a quiet girl with pale, unusual eyes and a faint iridescent sheen along her cheekbones that caught the light strangely had settled into her seat without a word

And what Arthur notices about her posture:

the particular careful stillness of her posture, the way she seemed to be bracing for something before anyone had said anything at all

[...] the specific wariness of someone accustomed to being looked at for reasons that had nothing to do with kindness

He does not push for more. That is the point of the scene: the boy who spent his childhood being looked at for the wrong reason recognises it instantly in someone else.

The courtyard

Ch. 258. She arrives last at the midday meal, "with the particular careful economy of someone who had clearly debated whether to join at all", and Arthur makes the offer without making it a thing.

ART: There's room here, if you want it.

She sits, but angled:

her posture still slightly turned away from the group's center, angled toward the option of leaving without needing to push past anyone.

What she gives

Finn asks her a direct question about the eastern coastline near Eskandar, and she answers it.

MRA: It's true. Something in the current, near the reef line. My mother used to take me to watch it. FNN: SEE. I knew he wasn't exaggerating for once. What color does it turn? MRA: Gold, mostly. Sometimes green, if the season's right.

Arthur watches her audit herself immediately afterwards:

the careful stillness of someone monitoring exactly how much of herself she'd just offered and whether it had been too much

Eskandar is confirmed here in text, along with her mother.

The laugh

Twice, and the second one gets out.

Mira, watching the exchange, made a small sound that might, if Arthur hadn't been listening carefully, have gone entirely unnoticed, a brief, quiet huff of amusement, quickly suppressed.

[and later] Mira made the small sound again, and this time she did not entirely suppress it.

The duel that does not happen

Ch. 263. She is paired against Talon and he concedes rather than swing at her. See his entry for the exchange.

What the chapter records about her:

Mira went very still at the sound of her own name, her hands tightening briefly around the practice sword she'd been holding with the particular loose, uncertain grip of someone who had spent considerably more time reading about combat than practicing it.

Her stance is "charitably, more theoretical than practiced, her weight distributed wrong, her grip too tight". So her track is not the blade.

And her reaction:

something in her expression, guarded as it usually was, cracked just slightly at the edges, a small, reluctant curve at the corner of her mouth that she seemed to be actively fighting against.

Ch. 267

Her midterm results sit "comfortably near the top of the entire cohort", and her study habit is total stillness with a single volume open.

her earlier shyness entirely absent, replaced by something quiet and confident that Arthur hadn't seen from her before.

Her own account of it, to Talon:

MRA: I like knowing things properly. It's easier than knowing people. TLN: That's fair.

He settles beside her "without much fanfare" and stays.

What she says she is

Ch. 272, on a rooftop she found in her second week and told nobody about, to Talon, who followed her twice before admitting it.

This is the fullest statement of identity anyone in Acts 12 to 14 give, and she gives it "evenly, without self-pity, the particular careful precision of someone who had turned the thought over so many times in private that it had worn itself smooth".

MRA: I am not simply an outsider here, Talon. I understand that word. I have heard it applied to Arthur, and I understand what it means when people use it for him, someone who does not fit the shape the world expected of him. But I am something else. I am an outsider among outsiders, someone who does not fully belong even among the people who do not fully belong, because I am not only unlike the ordinary students who were born with the ordinary gifts of ordinary souls. I am unlike the other monsterkind too, half of something and half of something else, too human for the tribes my mother's blood comes from, and too strange, still, despite everything, for the humans whose approval I was never actually seeking in the first place.

So: monster blood on her mother's side, confirmed in text. Ch. 258 already had her mother taking her to watch the water change colour off Eskandar.

Her working rule, and the reason her guard is not neurosis:

MRA: I have spent my whole life learning exactly how much of myself to show people, and when, and to whom, because showing too much, too soon, has never once gone well for me. So when you say you didn't want to be one more person who approached me carefully, from a distance, I need you to understand that careful, distant approach is the only kind that has ever actually kept me safe. TLN: I understand. MRA: I don't think you fully do. Not yet.

What she offers

Not much, and she says exactly what it is.

MRA: You can keep following me up here. If you like. TLN: I'd like that. MRA: But you have to keep being patient. I don't know how to be anything other than careful yet. I'm not certain I ever will. TLN: I have nowhere else I need to be.

She wins the strategy tournament

Ch. 291, in the academy's smaller eastern hall, which she finds "immediately, genuinely comfortable in a way none of the morning's louder events had managed".

The event is chess. Her fourth-board opponent is Aldous Renn, who had dispatched his previous three opponents efficiently.

The turn is a rook sacrifice on move twenty-four, against every conventional evaluation of the position, which begins a sequence that drives Renn's king from a7 across the entire board to the opposite first rank. Wattpad has a8, where his bishop stood. See The Sports Festival.

She could see it. Not the immediate move, but the whole shape of what came after, six moves ahead, eight, the entire arrangement of pieces rearranging itself in her mind.

REN: The rook. On move twenty-four. Why did you do that? MRA: Because I could see what came after it. REN: All of it? From that far back? MRA: Most of it. The rest arrived as the position developed.

Other competitors abandon their own boards to watch.

REN: That's genuinely one of the most extraordinary games I've ever been part of, and I lost it thoroughly. MRA: You played well. The position was considerably closer than the ending suggests. REN: That's kind of you to say. It's also not remotely true.

What it does for her

She wins first place, and then does something she has not done anywhere else in the volume:

she did not notice, until the proctor called her name for the final standings, exactly how long she'd been comfortably, unselfconsciously talking to strangers.

it was considerably easier to be seen when the thing people were seeing was something she had built herself, deliberately, across years of patient, solitary work.

And the last line of the chapter, which is the whole of her arc so far:

She thought Talon would probably want to hear about the rook sacrifice. She found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she genuinely wanted to tell him.

The cat cafe

Ch. 297. Talon proposes it "with such total, unassuming casualness that Mira had agreed before she'd properly considered whether she wanted to". A grey cat installs itself in her lap uninvited.

She then explains what monsterkind are, at length, unprompted. See Monsterkind.

Her lineage, confirmed: her mother is "Eskandar coastal lineage, closer to the avian side"; her father is "ordinary human stock from further inland". The author's notes guessed "likely aquatic or avian".

The thing she says that nothing else in the saga says

MRA: Nobody in my entire family has ever once been cruel to me about it, and it has still shaped absolutely everything about how I move through the world. TLN: Because it's not cruelty that does the damage. MRA: No. It's the careful. It's watching people be careful around you your entire life and understanding exactly what that carefulness means.

Why she told him

TLN: Thank you for explaining it. MRA: You didn't ask. TLN: I know. I've been deliberately not asking for a while now, actually. MRA: Why? TLN: Because you'd tell me when you wanted to. And you did. That seemed considerably better than pressing for it earlier and getting something you'd rather not have given.

MRA: You're strange, Talon. TLN: I've been told. MRA: It's not an insult. TLN: I didn't take it as one.

She then tells him about the rook sacrifice the whole way back to the gates, "in considerably more detail than most people would have tolerated", which is what she wanted to do at the end of ch. 291.

What she can do

Ch. 328, and the first time in three hundred chapters that the thing she is for is shown rather than guessed at. The notes had said her track was Soul. They did not say what it did.

The party is on a ledge in the dark with a wounded arachnid twenty feet across, Yseult on the floor behind a cracked wall and Arthur on his knees with one arm useless. Mira walks out onto open stone and stops fifteen feet from it.

She did not raise her hands. There was nothing to raise.

What she says is not to the spider.

MRA: Look at me.

MRA: I've only ever done this with birds.

MRA: Foxes once. A dog that wouldn't stop. Nothing that could kill me.

MRA: Look at me properly.

Four seconds of nothing, and then the front of it comes down, "not a collapse", the forward legs folding by degrees until the whole shape settles against the stone and the clicking stops.

MRA: Good girl.

She scopes it herself, and the scope is small

This is the whole definition, and she gives it on the way out.

ELS: Will it come after us? MRA: No. ELS: How do you know? MRA: Because it doesn't want to. It will be as friendly as I am to anyone who enters its' home. That's the entire scope of my ability.

So it is not control and it is not command. What it does is hand a creature her own disposition toward a trespasser, and she is not hostile, so it is not. She does not order it to stand down. She takes the fight out of the room by making the room stop being something to defend.

MRA: It's done, Briar. It's stopped thinking it owns this room.

It has no name, and ch. 330 has her say so. Corin has Severance and Yseult has Catalysis, both named in text. Hers is "It doesn't have a name. Not one I've been given, anyway", which is a stronger statement than the author not having named it: nobody has handed her one. The infobox above says so rather than inventing one.

What it costs her

She cannot stand afterwards, and she says so before it happens rather than after, which is the same self-audit ch. 258 opens her with.

MRA: I would very much like someone to come and stand near me, please. I'm going to fall over shortly and I'd rather not do it alone out here.

Talon "was there before she finished the sentence".

The girl who told him in ch. 272 that careful distance was the only thing that had ever kept her safe asks out loud, in front of seven people, for somebody to stand next to her.

Ch. 329: what she works out on the way down

She insists on walking. She does it "with Talon's hand closed around her upper arm the whole way and did not once suggest he let go".

At the beck she settles the question nobody else can:

MRA: It won't come down. RUF: You know that, do you. MRA: Yes. RUF: How? MRA: Because it never has. You just told me so yourself. It's been up there longer than your grandmother and it has never once come down this hill, and that isn't luck, that's a creature that has everything it wants and no reason at all to walk further than it has to.

Said "quietly and without any particular force", and it is reasoning rather than her ability. She is not reading the arachnid at fifteen feet. She is reading fifty years of a thing not happening, and Rufus Hale asks her name because of it.

RUF: Mira. That's the first sensible thing anyone's said about that hill in eighty years.

He goes looking for her name. In ch. 324 he and Corin trade names the ordinary way round and he tells Corin that Ashby is a Castelgard name. Mira is the one he stops to ask.

Ch. 330: she says it out loud, to everybody

Two days of nobody mentioning the spider. Finn breaks first.

FNN: I've held it for two days, Briar, which is the longest I have ever held anything in my life, and I'd like some acknowledgment of that before I say the thing. BRR: Acknowledged. Don't say it. FNN: Mira stopped a spider.

She had been counting, which is its own answer about how much she wanted this.

MRA: I wondered how long you'd last. FNN: Two days. MRA: I said four hours. Briar said a day and a half. BRR: I want it noted I was closest.

Then she does the thing the whole entry above says she does not do.

MRA: Ask, then. You've all been very careful for two days and I'd rather have the questions than the careful.

That is ch. 297 answered by the person who said it. There she told Talon that it is not the cruelty that does the damage, "it's the careful, it's watching people be careful around you your entire life and understanding exactly what that carefulness means". Here she is being handled carefully by seven people who mean nothing but well by it, she recognises it, and she asks them to stop.

The ability, in her own words

The fullest statement of it in the saga, and it is narrower than ch. 328 left it.

ELS: What is it? MRA: It doesn't have a name. Not one I've been given, anyway. It works on animals and it only works on animals, and what it does is not what people assume when I describe it, so I'd like to describe it properly rather than have it be more impressive than it is.

MRA: I can't command anything. I can't make a creature do a thing it doesn't want. What I can do is hand it my own disposition toward whoever's standing in front of it. It will be as friendly to a stranger as I am. That's the whole of it. I didn't tell that spider to lie down. I made the room stop being something it had to defend.

Two things here are new. Animals, and only animals, which is the hard limit and which ch. 328 did not give. And the mechanism stated as a mechanism rather than as one result on one ledge.

It is also the ch. 258 self-audit performed in public: she describes it carefully so that nobody leaves the table thinking it is bigger than it is.

Briar reads it correctly at once, and she tries to shrink it before he can.

BRR: That's- MRA: It's small, Briar. BRR: I was going to say that's the most efficient use of an ability I've ever heard described and I'd like to write it down, but if you'd rather I said it's small I'm happy to.

Why nobody had seen it

COR: Why has nobody seen it before? MRA: Because I've only ever done it with birds.

MRA: Birds, mostly. A fox. A dog that would not stop barking at my mother's gate for a summer. I have never in my life used it on anything that could kill me, and I'd like everyone here to understand that I did not know it would work and I walked out there anyway, because Elsie said it was hurt and I said those aren't the same thing, and I was the only person in that room who could tell the difference.

Ch. 328 has her say the first half of that to the spider, as a list of what she had done before. This is the second half, and it is her reason: she did not walk out because she knew it would work. She walked out because a hurt animal and a hostile one are not the same animal, and she was the only person on that ledge who could tell which one was in front of them.

YSE: You could have died. MRA: Yes. YSE: You did it anyway. MRA: Yes. YSE: I'm not criticizing. I'm establishing the facts so I can be properly impressed by them.

She tells eight people what she told one

Ch. 272 was a rooftop and Talon. Ch. 297 was a cat cafe and the same person. This is the long table at Beckwith with the whole party round it, and she opens it herself with nobody having asked.

MRA: There's a second part. It's the part I'd normally not say, and I'm going to say it, and I'd appreciate it if nobody was kind about it immediately afterward.

MRA: My mother is monsterkind. Eskandar coastal lineage. My father is ordinary human stock from inland, and I am the thing in between, which is why you've all been very politely not asking about my eyes since the first week.

Her eyes are the first thing ch. 257 gives about her: "pale, unusual eyes and a faint iridescent sheen along her cheekbones that caught the light strangely". Seventy-three chapters later she says what they are, and says that the whole table had worked out there was something there not to ask about.

Nobody says anything at all. Then Finn does.

FNN: I wasn't not asking politely. I genuinely just thought they were nice.

Mira laughed. It came out wrong and startled, and she put a hand over her mouth immediately

The third laugh, and the first that gets out before she can rule on it. Ch. 258 has a huff "quickly suppressed", then the same sound again which "this time she did not entirely suppress". Here it is out before the hand reaches her mouth.

MRA: That is the single most useful thing you have ever said. FNN: I say useful things constantly. Nobody records them.

What Talon does not say

Elsie notices what nobody else does, "without any particular emphasis, which is how she said everything": Talon did not ask. He knew, and he will not say for how long. Arthur, watching Mira rather than Talon, reads her face as this:

probably the closest thing to being safe that a person like her ever got: seven people finding out at once that somebody had known for months and had simply never once mentioned it to any of them.

She dates his silence, and it runs back further than the cat cafe.

MRA: He's been deliberately not asking things since before the harvest market.

The harvest market is ch. 269, so his deliberate not-asking starts before the rooftop in ch. 272 where she first told him anything at all. See his entry.

Ch. 332 and ch. 333: three lines, and the arrangement

She is counting Rufus Hale's sensible remarks. In ch. 329 he called her reasoning about the hill the first sensible thing anybody had said about it in eighty years, and on the last night she returns it:

MRA: That's the second sensible thing you've said about this village. RUF: I've got eighty-three years, lass. There'll be a third one along in a decade or so.

On the eastern road, when Elsie cannot work out what to call the week and Briar points out that the one interesting thing is the one thing they cannot tell anybody, Mira settles it in six words:

MRA: The sacks are the true answer anyway.

That is the same instrument as the hill and the spider: she declines the impressive reading and takes the ordinary one, which in all three cases turns out to be the correct one.

And one clause, unremarked: "Mira walked next to Talon. Nobody remarked on it, which had become the arrangement." Ch. 328 has her ask for somebody to come and stand near her and Talon get there before she finishes the sentence. Ch. 329 has her walk down a hill with his hand round her arm. Here it has stopped being an event.

Ch. 335: she says yes before anybody can talk her out of it

She is one of the three hundred and eleven students who cannot go home. Arthur expects a negotiation and gets the whole thing at speed, in one go, before he can get a word in.

She would like to come, if the offer was genuine and not politeness, and she would like Arthur to tell her honestly if it was politeness, because she would rather spend eight weeks in an empty academy than four days on a road with somebody who was regretting having asked.

MRA: People do that. They mean it at the time and then they get eleven miles down a road and start doing arithmetic about beds.

She shakes his hand, "with the particular stiffness of someone performing an unfamiliar action", which neither of them acknowledges afterward.

Her reading of how the academy handled the closure is the sharpest anybody gives:

MRA: it's the largest thing that has happened at this academy in the year I've been here and it has been handled as a catering problem.

Ch. 336: what she braces for

In a barn near Ainsley, in the dark, she asks the question she has been not asking since Solmere, and she asks for the honest answer rather than the kind one.

MRA: How many people in the village have seen a hybrid.

Arthur tells her none, and that they will look at her, and for how long. See his entry.

MRA: Nobody has ever asked me about it who wasn't already uncomfortable. ART: He'll be uncomfortable. He'll do it anyway. That's rather his entire method.

She almost turns round on the second afternoon when she learns the letter said one person: "I have spent two days constructing a version of this where I am an expected guest in a house that has prepared for me, and it transpires I am an unannounced person arriving at a farmhouse in a village of ninety with a woman who has cooked for one son."

Ch. 337: the model is wrong

The largest thing that happens to her in the saga is that a man gives her bread.

She had spent four days on a road constructing, refining, and stress-testing a model of what arriving in Hollowell would be like, and the model had been built almost entirely out of eleven years of accurate experience, and the model was wrong.

People stared. That part was correct. [...] But the staring did not do the thing it had always previously done.

MRA: He gave me bread. He has known me for eleven seconds and he has given me bread and then insulted his own bread so that I would take it. ART: That's the technique, yes. MRA: Nobody has ever done that. YSE: Given you bread? MRA: Been kind at me without any of it being about what I am. Everyone is either uncomfortable or determinedly not-uncomfortable and both of those are the same thing wearing different coats, and this man simply established that I had been on a road and gave me a loaf.

That is the ch. 297 statement about the careful, met by a village that has never heard it. She keeps the loaf and receives another the next day, and Gregor informs her that yesterday's was Tuesday's and today's is Wednesday's and these are entirely different situations.

MRA: I have been running it through repeatedly and I cannot find the angle on it [...] every part of the approach has turned out to be equipment for a problem that isn't here. YSE: Same. MRA: It's extremely disorienting. YSE: Yes. MRA: I don't like it. YSE: No. MRA: I'd like it to keep happening, though.

Ch. 339: she asks to be told the truth

Calder explains what a closed Serenity means and is stopped by his wife for turning it into a lecture. Mira stops her.

MRA: I have spent eleven days being handled very carefully by people who are frightened of upsetting me, including, and I say this with real affection, everybody at this table under the age of twenty. Your husband is the first person who has told me what it actually means. I would rather know.

She also laughs, which Arthur has heard perhaps four times in a year, at Calder assuming she cannot fly because she walked here.

Ch. 341: the field nobody wrote down

She is the first person in the saga to find the flower field strange, and she is strange about it in exactly her own way.

MRA: They're not in anything. I've read a considerable amount of provincial botany, because it was in the library and I had a bad month, and there is nothing in any of it that is a knee-high golden composite growing in a single unbroken stand at this altitude on a western aspect.

MRA: it's a field of something nobody has written down. On a mountain. Four miles from a village of ninety-one people who apparently all know about it and have collectively decided it isn't worth mentioning. ELS: It's just the flower field. MRA: THAT is what I mean.

She takes the second flower and goes "completely still for it, in the manner of a person who does not have a procedure for being touched gently and is not going to make it anybody else's problem", then puts a hand up, feels it, and leaves it.

On the walk she also takes Arthur's bag off him by measurement rather than by argument: "I have catalogued eleven separate adjustments in your gait since we entered the trees." "You've been counting my walking?" "I count everything. It's not personal."