Rowan Tanner

Elsie's brother, and an upperclassman at Solmere before she arrives.

Named at the gate

Ch. 255. The woman with the ledger supplies him before Elsie does.

WOM: Tanner. You'll have a brother already here, then, an upperclassman. He's been asking after your arrival for weeks. ELS: That sounds like Rowan.

What was said about him before he had a name

Ch. 242, when Elsie is five, describes him twice without naming him.

ELS: My brother can do much bigger things. Makes me feel a bit small, next to him.

And:

ELS: My brother's going to teach me how to make the wind carry sound further. Like, all the way across the village. He says I'm not ready yet but I think he's just being annoying about it.

Ch. 244 adds the timing: his ability arrived "by the time he could walk, practically", where Elsie's took until she was four.

Ch. 254 confirms he delivered on the promise. Six years on, Elsie's wind carries voices "further now than Arthur imagined she'd once thought possible".

What he says about his own ability

Ch. 273, to Elsie, on the training ground before dawn.

RWN: You know I didn't earn mine. My ability, I mean. It arrived when I was barely old enough to walk, and it's simply been getting stronger the way a tree gets taller, without any particular effort on my part beyond existing and getting older.

RWN: I think you've spent your whole life measuring yourself against something that was never a fair comparison to begin with. [...] That's not skill. That's luck, mostly, dressed up to look like something else.

He knew she had been coming out alone for a week and deliberately did not say so:

RWN: A while. I wasn't going to say anything. I figured you'd tell me when you were ready.

And what he leaves her with:

RWN: Whatever you're chasing out here, alone, before anyone else is awake to see you fail at it. I hope you find it. I mean that. You've always had more patience than I ever did. Patience builds things luck can't.

He walks off to his own session without waiting to see what she does with it. She finds it the same morning.

His ability is wind

Confirmed in ch. 289, and it is the same ability as Elsie's at a different scale.

• Wind gathered visibly around him, "the kind of easy, effortless precision that had defined his ability since childhood".
• Flight, or something close to it: "wind gathered beneath him too, lifting him into a brief, controlled hover that let him cut directly across sections of the course rather than following its winding path".
• Raw output: he does not aim at the precision targets. He "simply blew them away entirely, wide gusts of raw power that obliterated the targets' wooden frames outright".

He wins the precision navigation course on time, and says so:

RWN: I've got four years and considerably more raw output than you do. That's simply arithmetic.

What he says afterwards

RWN: I'm impressed, Elsie. Genuinely. I've had four years of head start and you very nearly matched my speed today, on top of hitting precision I don't think I could manage even trying.

RWN: I don't think that's going to stay true forever, if you keep finding things like that.

He asks where she learned it and does not push when she will not say.

From the author's notes

Open questions

• His ability. Ch. 242 says it is bigger than Elsie's and does not say what it is, and nothing so far states whether it is wind at all.