Ireena Kolyanovich

Who

Ireena Kolyanovich, daughter of the late burgomaster of the village of Barovia and sister of Ismark. Since the Festival of the Blazing Sun, acting burgomistress of Vallaki.

Where

The burgomaster's mansion in Vallaki, with guards around her, trying to keep a town from falling apart.

Status

Alive and unbitten. In charge, not yet inducted, and not happy about it. The devil has told the whole town, to her face, that he is being patient with her.

First met

Session 4, coming down the stairs of her father's house.

The burgomaster's daughter

"Ireena," Ismark called, "we have guests," and a striking young woman came downstairs. Sirius got to the front first: "I am Sirius, and I am at your service, my lady." She asked us what the sun looks like; she has never seen it, or the moon, except in books. She listened, rapt, while Drew explained every symbol tattooed on her arms, down to the terminal velocity of a sparrow and the one that is there "just because I really like chickens." Then she made us tea, and it was dreadful, and we were polite.

Ismark told us why she had to leave. She is bright and full of life, "a curse in Barovia. Strahd takes an interest." Strahd had come courting; her father refused him, and the devil came back every night until the old man died of it. Her red hair is reckoned bad luck on top of that. She knew it too: "We have a devil who lives amongst us. He cannot be stopped… He is coming for me. We must live with what we can do."

She was not going to be managed. Barred from her own father's funeral, she said her brother was "treating me like a doll." When she found out Ismark had sent us into the crypt as a test, she dragged him in by the arm to confess it: "I will not travel under false pretenses with people. Ismark, tell them what you told me." Then she offered us a way out of the job, and we did not take it.

The night Strahd called, she stayed out of sight in the back room. When he had gone, she was the one who knew what had happened: "You all need to go to bed. This happened to my father as well. This will wear off."

The road

She was thrilled to be outside: "I've always thought there must be more than this provincial life." She had barely left the house before; her brother had never let her. She taught us a Barovian saying ("everything dangerous wants to kill you"), asked what a volcano was, and was the one who insisted we find shelter before dark. The shelter was a hags' windmill. When the fighting started she did exactly the right thing and shouted at us to run.

The letter

A dire wolf stood in the road in broad daylight with roses in its mouth and a letter wrapped round the stems: "My love, why do you tease me so?" It ended with an offer, that if she spoke his name three times he would come and whisk her away to "our castle, Ravenloft", and the signature "Your destined future lover." (It is in the handouts.) She would not read it herself ("Just tell me what it says. Or maybe not"), and when Sirius immediately suggested using her to summon him and kill him, she made the one reasonable request in the conversation: "You are the best of people. But, harebrained schemes, have fun, but wait until I'm safe."

The angel

At an abandoned farmstead, Sirius spread his wings to frighten three zombies, and when the fight was over she asked him straight out whether he was an angel. "It seems likely that my family interbred with celestial creatures some time ago, yes." She dropped to her knees: "Oh, thank you, Morninglord. Thank you, angel." And, "I can't believe I'm surrounded by an angel of the Morninglord. We're blessed. We can't fail." Sirius knelt and prayed with her. She has believed it ever since, and Sirius, who is still convinced that the town's famous angel of the Morninglord must be somebody else, has never quite noticed.

Vallaki

She entered Vallaki openly as the burgomaster's sister, and the gate guard offered her condolences and welcomed Lady Ireena by rank. In St. Andral's she sat in the pews and glowed: "I'm so glad I am safe here now finally." The priest had just told us the bones were gone and the church was only a building. We talked her into a night at the inn instead, and decided not to tell her. That was the beginning of a long mistake.

Some good days followed. She asked to stay in our room rather than alone. One evening we came back from Lady Wachter's dinner to find her on the Blue Water's stage, singing with the band for the first time in her life ("My brother never let me out with people as backup"), flushed and delighted. The song was the thing. "I've had it in my head forever. I think I dreamed it." Two brothers, one in morning gold and one in night blue; a whisper in the stone and a hunger that came back down the mountain; a brother's wine drunk; a cloak nailed across the sun; a girl beneath the lake, and "a raven on the shoulder of the shadow of a man." And the refrain none of us has stopped hearing: "They'll snip it, and they'll spin it, and I'll wake another girl." She jumped off the stage and asked if we'd had a nice day. We had had a day. She doesn't know where the song came from. We are afraid we do.

Lady Wachter asked us to pass on an invitation for her to live under Wachter protection. We never did.

With the Martikovs sent west, she took a job waiting tables at the Blue Water: "Urwin has found himself short-handed and asked me to help, and I'm quite enjoying pitching in." Then, on the morning the church burned, Ernst walked into the Blue Water and invited her to Wachterhaus, which had just opened as a hospital. She went. We had known everything for days, and told her none of it. The minutes record our full assessment: "Oh, fuckballs."

Why didn't you tell me before?

We found her in Wachterhaus that evening, behind a door with someone moaning inside it, nursing Lady Wachter's catatonic daughter Stella. "Oh, hello, Drew. Welcome. I assume you're here to help, too… I must say, she's a saint."

So Drew, at last, took her aside and told her everything: the vampires, the crates, the pentagram in the cellar, the dead man from the Reformation Center, the letter from the devil. Ireena argued back, and fairly: Lady Wachter had just rescued someone from the Center. "Yeah, he's dead now." The bandages, though, she could not argue with: "We are burgomasters back home. We don't have this much supply." Drew apologised for treating her the way her father had, as someone to be protected from things, when she is a grown woman. Ireena asked the only question that mattered: "Why didn't you tell me before?" We did not have a good answer.

And then she paid us back in full. "I can't believe Lady Wachter would've done this. If there's anything important, she was getting supplies out of a room off the library. There's a secret door in there." She led Drew to it, and behind it lay the bones of St. Andral. She would not leave Stella for long ("I can't leave Stella. She's infirm"), and when a raven came circling up the stairwell and Drew told her it was a fiend, she said, "This cute thing is a fiend?"

We went out through a window with the bones. Ireena stayed behind in the little storeroom, and Drew felt terrible about it.

Burgomistress

We found her again in the festival crowd the next day, safe. We did not plan what happened next. With the square listening to us and both rulers refusing to yield, we proposed that Ireena govern Vallaki, with Father Lucian beside her. Sirius made the speech. Lucian gave his careful blessing. Ireena stood in the crowd looking, as one of us put it, very fear-in-the-headlights, and did not say no. By the end of the hour the Baron and Lady Wachter were both dead, and hers was the only name anyone had agreed on.

When the devil came down into the square, she was charmed with everyone else, and he talked about her as if she were not standing there. "Ah, Ireena, my love." He said he had always given her her space; that he could no longer watch over her in Vallaki now the bones were back; that "I do not like to force things. I have tried such things before, and they did not work particularly well. So I know she will come around eventually to my charms." And on making her burgomistress: "I suppose that is not too untenable. She is of the right stock rather than this rattle, this cattle that surrounds us." We have written those words down so that we never forget how patient he sounded.

Afterwards she found her feet. She let us have the great map of Barovia from the mansion wall, stammering, "Guards, on my authority, unhang this map." She gave her first order in her own words: "Please stop. Please dismantle the Reformation Center as much as you can. I do not want it to be going on. As burgomistress, I suppose I need to get inducted." She means to think hard about how the town is to be run, and to keep it from sliding into anarchy, "which it might do. It's gonna be tricky." Izek told her, "I am at your command," and left men to guard her.

She said it was creepy to learn Strahd had been watching her all this time, and a relief that the bones stop it now. When one of us suggested writing home to her dad, she corrected us gently: "My brother. Dad, dad is dead." She will write to Ismark. And when she apologised to Sirius for not genuflecting more to an emissary of the Morninglord, he told her she was doing the Morninglord's work as much as he was, and they prayed together.

What we promised her

• Escort her safely to Vallaki: kept, on the evening of our fourth day on the road.
• Keep her safe: harder than ever. We have put her in a chair the devil can walk up to whenever he likes, and we mean to leave town soon.
• Carry her letter to Ismark: she will write it, and we will find a way.
• Carry out her first order: we are inside the Reformation Center now.

What we still don't know

• Where does her song come from, and why is it in her head?
• How long will the devil's patience last?
• Can she hold a starving, grieving town together once we have gone west?