Darrow's blunt, stroke-marked Red mother, who knows her carved son at a glance and grounds his cause in hard truth.
Darrow's mother, aged twenty years by four of grief and a stroke that slurs her speech and clenches one hand, is woken in her Lykos home to find Darrow returned as a towering Gold. She knows him instantly—'How could I not? I would know you anywhere'—and, warned by Uncle Narol that he lived, hears his whole story over tea without flinching.
Blunt as ever and never false, she tells him she never quite trusted Eo's love of a fight, yet loved her, and that she cares not what is right but only for her son. She challenges his dream of freedom with the miner's hard questions—where will the Reds go, what will they do, will they even leave the mines—forcing him to admit no one person holds the answers. Cradling Darrow's little niece, named Eo, on the stairs, she gives the book its heart: 'The dead can always hear us.
Why else do you think we sing?'
An aged Red woman worn far beyond her years, thin-lipped and loose-skinned with sooty-gray hair, hands like oak roots, one twisted clenched by a stroke, a sluggish left eyelid and slurred speech.
Darrow's mother; the moral bedrock who tempers his cause with a miner's hard wisdom.