Who's who in Fourth Wing, without spoilers and up to where you are (from the parapet to the door of the Threshing)

If you search for “Fourth Wing characters” today halfway through the book, what comes up is curious: notes uploaded to Studocu, Scribd documents, Pinterest boards and, if you search in Portuguese, the Wikipedia list for Quarta Asa, which is exhaustive and for exactly that reason tells everything. In reader forums the question comes up in almost the same words, where is there a character list that doesn't give anything away, and a lot of people ask it after they've already swallowed the spoiler, not before. So this guide has a frontier and states it right here: it goes up to chapter twelve, just before the Threshing, and says nothing about what happens from thirteen onward.

The most widespread idea is that a character list is either complete or not worth making, and that whoever doesn't want spoilers shouldn't look one up. I'll grant half of that (and gladly). For anyone who has finished the three books out so far, Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm, a complete profile is exactly what's useful. But someone searching halfway through the first doesn't need to know who everyone is at the end; they need to know who everyone is on the page they're on, and in a novel that lives on not knowing whom to trust, that difference is almost the whole book.

Let's start with the one telling the story. Violet Sorrengail is twenty and thought she was going into the Scribe Quadrant, to live among books and old histories, until her mother, Navarre's commanding general, sends her to the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College. Violet is smaller and frailer than almost every other candidate, and at Basgiath that is no small detail: dragons don't bond with weak humans, and there are more riders than dragons. Do you see why half her classmates look at her as a problem?

Her older sister, Mira, is already a rider. She's the one who trains her during the six months she had to prepare (six months, when most of those arriving with her have spent years at it), and the one who gives her the advice repeated most at the start of the book: stay away from Xaden Riorson. The riders' code, which the book uses as its epigraph, sums it up without anesthesia: a rider without their dragon is dead.

The first stretch runs from chapter one to three, the ones about the parapet, the narrow, dizzyingly high bridge every candidate has to cross on the first day. There they meet Dain Aetos, her childhood friend, a second-year and squad leader who wants, above all, for her to leave the quadrant before they kill her (and tells her so bluntly). Rhiannon Matthias, also a first-year and the first friend Violet makes there. Jack Barlowe, a first-year who tries to throw her off the parapet and makes it clear he intends to kill her (not a metaphor). And Xaden Riorson, a third-year, leader of the wing they belong to, son of the man who led the rebellion against Navarre and whom General Sorrengail had executed. He doesn't hide what he thinks of that family, and in chapter three Dain's squad ends up transferred to Xaden's wing of all places, the last place Dain wanted to see her.

The second stretch runs from chapter four to twelve, and it's the training. Sawyer appears, who is repeating his first year, and Ridoc, who provides the squad's humor (in a book like this, someone had to). Imogen, a second-year, dislocates her shoulder in a sparring match, and Nolon, the healer, is the one who fixes whatever breaks in her, which is plenty. Around chapter seven comes Liam Mairi, a first-year who grew up alongside Xaden and who, from one moment to the next, is glued to Violet on his orders. Why would someone who can't stand her family want her watched? The book takes its time, and we're not going to rush it here. And there's the obstacle course of chapters ten and eleven (the book calls it the Gauntlet), where being clever is no longer enough.

That's as far as this who's who goes, and it's on purpose. In chapter thirteen the Threshing begins, the day the dragons choose, and from there on every name comes with its dragon and a piece of plot attached. If you're further along and need to place someone, my advice is the usual: put the chapter in your search, don't open the Wikipedia list hoping to look at just one line, and don't read the back cover of Iron Flame either, which takes things from the end of the first book for granted.

For anyone who'd rather not depend on a list written by someone else, Kai LoreSafe, the tool I built, does this same thing with whatever book you're reading, so read this with the bias of the person who made it. You tell it where you are and it puts together the who's who up to that page, with what the book has already told you and without what it hasn't yet.

There's one question I can't quite settle. Maybe in a book like this part of the pleasure is precisely not being sure who's who, and a guide, however careful, takes something away from that feeling of being surrounded by people who want you dead. Maybe, but I think the tension the book builds is one thing, and closing the book because we no longer know whether it's Ridoc or Sawyer talking is quite another.

Which name did you struggle to place in the first chapters, and what page were you on when you went looking for the list?

See you next time. Mauro Z.