Aelwen Thornsong is a Grovewarden of Eilvaran and one of the most prominent voices in the Council of Nine Groves. There she speaks for the Open Bough, the Eilvaren who believe the forest cannot stand alone against the Crown of Ash. Her answer to the Crown's roads is a defensive coalition with the Hearthkin, the Stonebound and chosen Skeldr clans, strong enough that no empire can take Eilvaran grove by grove.
Appearance
Aelwen is tall even for an Eilvaren, lean and long-limbed, with warm copper-brown skin, high cheekbones and a face that looks ageless until she is tired, when two fine lines appear between her brows. Her clear gray-green eyes rarely leave the person she is speaking to. Her long dark hair is braided back into a single heavy plait threaded with white thorn twigs and a short length of green-and-blue cord, and an old pale scar crosses the back of her left hand. She dresses like a patrol leader, not an envoy, in bark-fiber cloth of leaf and earth tones reinforced with plates of hardened living wood, under a gray-green cloak pinned with the Council's sign: nine leaves around an empty center. She carries a pale recurve bow and a satchel of letters sealed with wax and thorn. When she speaks in council, she sets the bow down point-first and leaves it there, so everyone can see where it is.
What she believes
Aelwen fights for a forest that stays a living place of memory, farms, workshops and arguments, not a fortress. She knows that allies are the only way to keep it so, and that every alliance also brings the war nearer to home. She refuses to let defense become vengeance, and she refuses to let any ally, however kind or powerful, manage Eilvaran on her behalf. To her, the title of Grovewarden is a burden accepted, not a rank owned. She means to set it down when the crisis ends, and she is no longer sure it ever will.
Her place in the story
Aelwen stands at the center of the Council's hardest quarrel: defense or vengeance? Her chief opponent is Caerith Ash-Bow. She needs his archers and fears what his grief will make of them, while he thinks her restraint has been tried for centuries and never rewarded. Miraleth Rootspeaker shares her belief in friends beyond the trees, but the two argue over how many warriors the groves should promise, and to whom. Lethariel of Nine Winters supports her restraint and warns that allies tell flattering stories about themselves, and Sylvaren the Pale Leaf calls her coalition the road by which war will walk into the forest.