Rosalind Brenner is the matriarch of the oldest pyromancer family in Savannah, and she has fed the fire wards on her house since she was six years old. Her parents fed them before her. She lives on one of the historic squares in a rust-red brick house with a crenellated roofline and a gas lamp that burns in full daylight, and every hearth inside it burns without a log. She is tall, spare, and straight-backed, and she wears her age the way the house wears its centuries. Her voice is as cool and dry as a good martini. She tells Conclave agents to wipe their feet.
Her grandson Brayden was taken from his second-floor bedroom nine weeks before the book opens, and she has not slept a full night since. She is certain a rival family did it, she has already burned two of their warehouses, and she has told the Conclave exactly how long it has to prove her wrong. Rosalind is grief with a very short leash. When the leash snaps, what comes down her front steps is a figure of solid flame in the shape of an old woman. She does not apologize. She is too old to bury a child, and she will burn the world to its foundations before she does.
