Content Warning: This section mentions graphic violence, execution, intimate partner violence, and abuse.

Rune Winters is one of the novel’s protagonists and the antagonist to Gideon Sharpe. Rune is described as a beautiful girl with strawberry-blonde hair, gray eyes, and a pale complexion. Rune has a carefully crafted a reputation as “an informer. A witch hater. A darling of the New Republic” who betrayed her grandmother to the Blood Guards (4). Another aspect of her crafted persona is “the silly, shallow heiress she pretend[s] to be” (31). Orphaned shortly after birth when her parents drowned in a terrible shipwreck, Nan, a witch, adopted and raised Rune.

Mere months after the Red Peace when Rune was forced to turn her grandmother in and watch her execution, Rune discovered that she, too, is a witch. To avoid capture, Rune doesn’t scar her body for casting. Rather, she uses the blood from her monthly cycles. This method considerably weakens her magic but keeps her body free of the silver scars that will condemn her as a witch.

Kristen Ciccarelli describes Rune’s magic as like the sea. Her magic’s distinct scent is the salty ocean breeze, and the feeling of her magic is either a wave she crests or a tidal wave threatening to pull her under.