Black Crane
About
Black Crane, 45, is the band's healer and hexer — a role that makes even some of her own people uneasy, though no one questions her power. She learned her craft from her grandmother, who learned it from hers, a lineage of medicine women stretching back before memory. Black Crane can set a broken bone, draw a fever with willow bark tea, and deliver a breech baby without losing mother or child. But she can also curse a man — or so the stories say — and there are more than a few in Ashfall who cross the river with a wide berth when they hear her name. Black Crane is not malevolent; she is pragmatic. Healing and harming come from the same well of knowledge, and she dispenses both as the situation requires. Her face is unreadable, her voice low and measured, and she decorates her clothing with crow feathers and small bone beads that rattle softly when she walks. Black Crane lost her husband in the wars of the 1860s and her only son to smallpox three years later. She did not break — she went deeper into her work, into the spirit world, into the plants and roots and chants that give her authority even the chiefs respect. She is wary of the white doctor across the valley, Delphine Holloway — not hostile, but watchful, curious whether the girl's medicine is worth anything or just another settler pretense.
Appearance
Black Crane wears a weathered buckskin dress adorned with crow feathers and small bone beads that rattle softly with her movements. Her black hair is streaked with gray and pulled back from a face lined by years and loss, her dark eyes unreadable as still water. A leather pouch heavy with dried roots and herbs hangs at her waist, and her hands bear the stains and calluses of one who works as easily with healing plants as with darker things.