Lilli-grai "Lily"

Lily is three foot one, weighs about as much as a sack of flour, wears patched clothes and very well-kept boots, and keeps a green ribbon double-looped round her right wrist. She is thirty-seven. "I'm not a child." She is shy with strangers ("I'm not much of a talker to strangers, really") and will hide behind Sirius's legs in company. She is also the person who ran into three hags to pick two frogs up off the ground.

"Just Lily's fine."

From Daggerford

She was raised in poverty by her great-grandmother Euphemia, Granny Effie, who "did a lot of reading", said a lot of things, and died a couple of winters ago, delirious with fever. Three is the magic number: that's what Granny Euphemia said. Lily mends boots for coppers and is a trained cobbler who really knows shoes (she has been asking about everyone's shoes, on purpose). She has done "odd job locksmithing on occasion".

She has never been in service, "but I definitely know people who have". She knows exactly what happens to people who sell things from noble houses, and she once knew someone who took something from the Duchess's castle and was whipped and hanged for it. "Certainly where I come from, hoarding wealth like this is theft in itself." Authority, in her experience, always ends badly for people like her. Drew has promised her "a little chat" about how she knows so much about fencing noble goods. It has not happened.

The tooth

A lacquered wolf's tooth on a cord (a dire wolf's, Lily says) that pulled her through the mist like a magnet. Euphemia's last words about it: it "will help keep mending what cannot otherwise be healed." In Lily's version: "cure that which cannot otherwise be mended."

At Tser Pool, Eva told her there was no past card, because "Your past should be known to you." Then she drew the Charlatan and the Beast:

"Something sweet has taken root in you, little one. Starve it. It is not yours." "The tooth you carry mends what otherwise cannot be healed. Far to the west there is a den of beasts. One who howls there will need it."

The first came true within a week. The second is still waiting. We know there's a werewolf pack far to the west whose alpha is a woman called Kiril. Whether that's the den, and who there will need the tooth, we can't yet say. See The Reading.

The pies

In the village of Barovia we bought pies from a kindly old woman called Granny, and they were the best thing any of us had ever eaten. Three of us dreamed bright dreams that night. Only Lily woke up already eating one.

• For days she woke hungry, and every morning, without a word, she was eating pie. At Tser Pool she raided Osric's pack like a raccoon and won the slap-fight for it. For her, the DM said, getting that pie had become more important than breathing.
• Fëanor's magic showed the pies were enchanted, and so was the air round Lily's head. Offered a pie to keep if she'd promise not to eat it, she gave the most honest answer any of us has heard: "I don't want you to be kind to me, and me to tell you a lie in response."
• Granny turned out to be a hag, one of three, and they called Lily their best customer. The pies were made from the arms of two captive werewolves, hacked off and grown back again and again. "I feel bad about having eaten a person while also still wanting to eat a person."
• We cremated every pie. For night after night Lily let us tie her to a tree. Sirius had himself tied up beside her so she wouldn't be alone in being punished for something that wasn't her fault. Every dawn brought an hour of pie-madness; one night she couldn't sleep at all. She passed a test with a pie that didn't exist.
• One morning in Vallaki she woke up and the magic was simply gone. She apologised for stealing. She still asked to be tied up, just in case. The rope is retired now. She still sings, sometimes, a little song: "Pies, pies, pies, pies…" It's hard when the world is made for people who are too big.

In Barovia

• Death House. A natural 20 on the impossible stairs. She forced the weapons cabinet, spoke with Lancelot ("Trapped. It's been time. Hungry"), and promised to keep him safe. She finished the animated armour with a natural-20 stab of her awl, and then worried whether it had died. She sprang the spiked pit with a femur and apologised to its owner. At the flesh mound she poured her own potion into Osric's mouth, and was the first to chip the crystal heart. She took two of the cult's relic daggers, one of bone and one with a bat's skull, as throwing knives.
• Doru. She sent word ahead that we shouldn't make his father watch us give up before we'd tried, ran up the crypt wall with her new climbing legs, and pinned him.
• The windmill. She opened Granny's cart hoping for pies and found a woman in a silver net. Her disappointment was overcome by her natural niceness. Then, with the hags turning our knights into frogs, "I care for my friends more than I care for pies," and in she went.
• The raven. Her gnome's gift for talking to animals didn't connect with the raven that followed us from the village. "It's not an animal."
• The orphanage. A luck-boosted natural 20 on a shadow demon, which barely noticed. She ran ninety feet to reach Drew when it took her.
• Wachterhaus, the first time. The footman knew her ("Lily from earlier"). Lady Wachter asked if she'd turned on her, and two waves of magical sleep rolled over her. She shook off both and ran. "Technically, I did not fail my mission."
• The canapé party. She hid where only a three-foot-one gnome could, and threw her voice into the kitchen with an illusion: "Fire, fire, fire, fire!" She hadn't told any of us.
• The vampire night. She threw herself in front of a window to stop the spawn escaping, and was bitten down to nothing, with fangs in her neck and one foot over the line. She woke with a potion bottle in her mouth "like a baby". Within the hour she had sprinted the length of the burning church alone to reach Father Lucian, who put a sanctuary on her that she didn't want. She is, she admits, "leaning far too hard into rogue paladin".
• Wachterhaus, the second time. She liberated the beets for people who needed them and left the silver: "We're not common crooks." She rolled a thirty on a door that wasn't locked at all. The master of unlocking. Then she opened an iron chest the right way, exactly as asked, and a poison needle put her on the floor. She put a thrown knife into the fiend raven, and when Ernst looked straight at her she was a scampy little child in a commoner's cloak. "Me baby. Just a baby." He shoved her out of the way and never knew.
• The festival. Her first public speech ("All of you are good people, and it's important to do the right thing") moved nobody. Her leap onto the stage moved everybody. She hung a little illusory sun over Sirius's head while he spoke, and questioned the Baron about his letter under Sirius's spell of truth. In the riot she wouldn't hurt the guards: "My heart is not in it." She threw a knife at the devil himself, and missed. At the Reformation Center she tied up the guards with her own rope, and the knots only tightened when they struggled.

What Barovia has done to her

It put something in her that wasn't hers, and she starved it out. It has tried, more than once, to make her a killer, and she keeps declining: "I'm not a killing person normally." She will stab a vampire, a demon or a skeleton without a second thought. She will not stab a guard for doing his job. She gave up her crossbow: "that's an assassin's tool."

In her own words

"People who know what suffering is like are inherently good people."

"Nobody who describes themselves as your dread lord is going to be a stand-up guy."

"And we didn't eat him." (Returning Lancelot to Mary.)

"I, with the greatest of respect, I am not sure that's true." (On not seeming the sort to steal pies.)

"I don't like talking to people in authority because it always ends badly for people like me."

Sirius, after the armour: "You're hiding your light under a bushel there, little lady."