Conté royal family
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The Conté royal family are the royal family of the kingdom of Tortall in Tamora Pierce's Tortall series. Members of the royal family appear in every book in the series.
[edit] Members
[edit] King Baird III of Tortall
Mentioned briefly in Terrier, he founded the Provost's Guard in 127 H.E. (human era). He may appear again in the following two books of the trilogy.
[edit] King Roger II of Conté
Roger II of Conté is the king of Tortall in the timeframe of the Provost's Dog trilogy. He appears in Terrier and may appear in the following two books of the trilogy.
[edit] Queen Alysy of Conté
Alysy of Conté was the first wife of King Roger II. She is mentioned in Terrier but never appears, as she died tragically before the series started.
[edit] Queen Jessamine of Conté
Jessamine of Conté is the second wife of King Roger II, and the mother of his unnamed heir. She appears in Terrier and may appear in the following two books in the Provost's Dog trilogy.
[edit] King Jasson of Conté
Jasson of Conté, also referred to as "the Old King" and "the Empire-Builder", is King Jonathan IV's grandfather. He is mentioned in The Song of the Lioness and the Protector of the Small novel Squire, but never appears as he is deceased.
[edit] King Roald of Conté
Roald of Conté, also referred to as "the Peacemaker", is king of Tortall throughout most of the Song of the Lioness quartet. He is the father of Jonathan IV and the uncle of Duke Roger. Notable events during his reign include the Drell River War and the treason of Duke Roger of Conté, his nephew (In the Hand of the Goddess). Following Alanna of Trebond's successful masquerade as a boy through eight years of knighthood training, King Roald instated yearly tests for the pages. While he allowed Alanna to retain her shield, following her knighting she left court and did not return during his reign.
When Duke Roger was woken from the Sorcerer's Sleep by Thom of Trebond, King Roald overlooked his treason and reinstated his titles and property. Following his queen's death, King Roald died in a riding accident. The accident was suspected, but not confirmed to be, a suicide.
[edit] Queen Lianne of Conté
Lianne of Conté, born Lianne of Naxen, is the wife of Roald, the mother of Jonathan IV and the sister of Duke Gareth of Naxen. Queen Lianne's health was irreperably damaged by Duke Roger's treason on two occasions: in Alanna: The First Adventure, she contracts the Sweating Sickness along with then-prince Jonathan, survives, but remains infertile, leaving Jonathan as the sole heir; in Lioness Rampant she dies of the after-effects of Roger's sympathetic wasting spell.
Lianne has two namesakes, Alianne of Pirate's Swoop and Lianne of Conté, the latter also her granddaughter. The name of her great-granddaughter, Lianokami, is also contracted from her name.
[edit] King Jonathan IV of Conté
Jonathan (or "Jon" to his close friends) of Conté is a prominent supporting character in The Song of the Lioness quartet, with smaller roles in The Immortals and Protector of the Small, and passing references in Daughter of the Lioness. Born in 416 Human Era,[1] he was the only child of King Roald and Queen Lianne, and heir apparent. He trains for knighthood and receives his shield in the Midwinter after his seventeenth birthday, according to the custom wherein princes are eligible for knighthood a year earlier than their peers.
Once knighted, Jonathan takes Alanna of Trebond as his squire, as he had promised to her in the finale of Alanna: The First Adventure, when he first discovered her to be female. During his tenure as her knight-master, Jonathan and Alanna have a romantic relationship that becomes sexual on Alanna's seventeenth birthday. Prior to their involvement, Jonathan has a relationship with young noblewoman Delia of Eldorne, who is rumored to have been the mistress of his cousin, Duke Roger. Jonathan proposes marriage to Alanna during The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, she rejects his proposal and they fight and part in anger. During their separation Jonathan carries on a brief courtship with Josiane Rittevon, princess of the Copper Isles, at his mother's behest.
In The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, during his visit at the Bloody Hawk Tribe in the Great Southern Desert where Alanna has been adopted as a Man of the Tribe, Jonathan is mentored by Ali Muhktab, the current Voice of the Tribes (the leader of the various Bazhir Tribes in the desert who remain resistant to the Northern King's rule). Jonathan becomes the Voice of the Tribes in a ceremony in which Ali Muhktab dies. At this point, it is assumed that Jonathan is the first man with northern blood to become the Voice, and he continues his duties throughout his reign.
Following the deaths of his parents in Lioness Rampant, Jonathan passes the Ordeal of Kings and ascends to the throne. His coronation is marked by a battle against the resurrected Duke Roger and his attempt to destroy Tortall. Jonathan uses the Dominion Jewel, brought to him by Alanna, to counteract Roger's spells, which results in a famine the following year. He subsequently marries the exiled Saren princess Thayet jian Wilima and they have six children, Roald, Kalasin, Liam, Lianne, Jasson and Vania.[2]
In Wild Magic, Jonathan's daughter mentions that King Jonathan and Queen Thayet passed a law allowing noble girls to train for knighthood alongside the boys by saiyng "Papa said girls can be knights, so that's what I'll do." However, this new law isn't verified until First Test. Jonathan argues with the pages' training master, Wyldon of Cavall, and Alanna of Trebond, now his King's Champion, over the admittance of Keladry of Mindelan to training under the law, and eventually concedes Lord Wyldon's request of probation. When she discovers this, Kel becomes angry with King Jonathan over what she perceives as unfairness and hypocrisy, and her attitude towards him remains negative throughout most of the quartet, despite her sharing his politically progressive ideals.
Jonathan's character is displayed in many different aspects throughout the Tortallan series. As mentioned above, Kel is angry with him, as she does not know the pressure he was under to make the decision to put her on probation, and this presents his person in a negative, somewhat biased manner. However, in The Immortals, the main character, Daine, is coming to Tortall from a much stricter society in her homeland and sees Tortall as a much more liberating country, giving her a better first impression of the king. She also likes him because of his particularly good looks. This can portray him as a much nicer person. It could be said as an opinion that the main character who provides a truly unbiased vision of Jonathan would be Alanna the Lioness, who, throughout the books inher quartet, goes from his best friend, to his lover, to being hurt and angry at him after their break up, to being a friend and his loyal subject. This gives the most widespread vision of his true personality both as king and behind the scenes.
[edit] Queen Thayet of Conté
Thayet of Conté, born Thayet jian Wilima and referred to as "the Peerless", is a Saren-born princess of mixed ancestry. Her father is Adigun jin Wilima, a lowlander warlord, and her mother, Kalasin, is K'miri; the lowlanders of Sarain hold the K'mir people under conquest. During the civil war in Sarain, Princess Thayet left the country and requested political asylum in Tortall. There she meets Jonathan of Conté, who woos her and eventually persuades her to marry him.
Thayet is the founder of the Queen's Riders, a military body of pony-riding archers. She holds official command of the Riders, having relinquished her administrative command to her previous guard, Buriram Tourakom when her other royal duties interfered with her ability to ride with the groups. As co-ruler of Tortall, Thayet is also responsible for starting a widespread network of schools and promoting literacy within the lower and peasant classes. A political progressive, she is disliked by many of the more conservative members of the nobility.
She was given the epithet "the Peerless" because of her matchless beauty and is considered by most to be the world's loveliest woman. Thayet is described to have Persian or Indo-Aryan features such as fair skin, black-as-night hair, hazel eyes, and blood-red lips. Her face is described to be a combination of supreme regality, grace, and kindness.
[edit] Duke Roger of Conté
Though it is not certain, Roger is believed to be the equivalent of a Black Robe Mage (the same rank as Numair Salmalín) and his Gift is orange. He attempts to kill members of the royal family several times, and after Alanna discovers this she kills him in trial by combat though he reveals her true gender before dying by cutting the special corset she wore. Lord Master Thom of Trebond (Alanna's twin brother) raises Roger back to life in The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, where Roger plots to kill Jonathan. After his resurrection Roger appears to be less concerned with his appearance and supposedly has no magic as he did in life, though this proves not to be the case when his magic is revealed to be a blood-like colour that is a combination of his own Gift and Thom's purple Gift. After realizing his true intentions, Alanna kills Roger again, but not before seeing her brother Thom die as a result of having his power corrupted by Roger. It is revealed in the last confrontation of Alanna and Roger that he was not actually dead, as such, but in a "sorcerer's sleep," a powerful and strange spell to keep him in a kind of limbo between life and death until his mistress Delia of Eldorn could trick someone into raising him. He tells Alanna that he had taken this precaution because he knew that she was suspicious of him.
[edit] Prince Roald of Conté
The crown prince of Tortall, Roald is two years older than the heroine of Protector of the Small, Keladry of Mindelan, and one of her closest friends. He is engaged to and later marries Princess Shinkokami of the Yamani Islands in Squire and they have a daughter named Lianokami, also called Liano, who will be the heir apparent to Roald after he is crowned.[3]
[edit] Kalasin of Conté
Named after Thayet's mother, Kalasin was at one point interested in becoming a page like Keladry, but eventually marries Kaddar, the Emperor of Carthak in Daughter of the Lioness. They are said to have one son so far.
[edit] References
- ^ Tortallan timeline
- ^ Vania and Jasson have rarely been mentioned, because Pierce's publisher "(doesn't) like me to bring them in". SheroesCentral, "The Royal Family."
- ^ SheroesCentral "Lianokami."
