Duncan

Duncan is a golem maker and former Coterie member whose quiet habits conceal both formidable power and a history in the organization’s struggle for leadership. To Ava, he is less a political rival than the closest thing she has to a grandfather: a generous presence in the kitchen, a maker of impossible toys, and a man whose refusal to rule does not mean he will let Venus rule unopposed.

Identity and Everyday Presence

Duncan lives on the rocky coast of Maine, where Ava encounters him amid a small collection of motorcycles, an ancient four-wheel-drive vehicle, and an old black van. His appearance invites an easy comparison to a woodland Santa: in one early image he resembles Santa dressed in L.L. Bean, and his weather-beaten presence is often associated with the woods. He is frequently whittling, but the carved wood is never merely decorative. Ava knows that the objects he shapes can become more than they appear.

His manner combines hospitality with an authority that Ava finds difficult to explain. When she arrives at his door, he greets her with a large hug and offers her a hot meal. Yet his presence carries a sense of command, strong enough to make her want to tiptoe around him, even though she resists doing so. That quality sits alongside his warmth rather than replacing it: Duncan can make a guest feel welcome while still seeming like someone whose judgment and power deserve caution.

Duncan’s everyday rituals make him familiar to the people around him. At a shack used during sugaring, he joins a cribbage game, brings Allen’s Coffee Brandy, and pours himself a small measure. He also brings Moxie for those not old enough to drink the brandy; Lock is the only one who takes it. Cade serves coffee instead, making the table another small scene of their contrasting temperaments and long-standing companionship. Duncan’s whittling continues through these gatherings, a domestic pastime that quietly signals the magic underneath his ordinary life.

A Place in Ava and Cade’s Family

Duncan is one of the few people who regularly enters Ava and Cade’s kitchen. He brings what he has: fish after fishing, jam when he makes it, and eggs from his many chickens. These visits are not presented as grand gestures. Their repetition is what makes them meaningful. In a household shaped by secrecy and flight, Duncan’s practical generosity establishes a durable connection to home.

For Ava, that connection is personal and protective. She thinks of Duncan as the closest thing she will have to a grandfather, and she clings to him because she has already lost her mother and never knew her father. Her attachment is also bound up with Cade’s: Cade loves Duncan, and that is reason enough for Ava to hold on to him. Her determination not to lose anyone else makes Duncan’s safety more than an abstract concern, even when Venus puts him in the role of a target.

Duncan had already become part of Ava’s idea of home when she was five. During one return to Currant for the holidays, she and her mother were snowed in for a week with Cade. It was the first Christmas tree Ava had of her own. Cade supplied new pajamas and showed her how to string popcorn and cranberries; lacking ornaments, they decorated the tree with those chains and paper snowflakes. Duncan visited and gave Ava four carved animals: a five-inch pony, a dog, a cat, and a tiny bird no larger than his thumb.

He tapped the figures, and the wooden animals sprang to life, lined up from largest to smallest, and pranced through the house to the beat of Ava’s clapping. When the parade ended, they froze in mid-prance. Ava fell asleep in Duncan’s lap, clutching them, and had to leave them behind when the family left at the end of the week. Cade kept the carvings on a shelf in her room. Ava still resists asking Duncan to make them dance again, afraid that seeing the magic repeated might somehow diminish it. The memory gives his craft an intimate meaning before it becomes a matter of combat: his magic first makes a child’s temporary home feel enchanted.

Cade, Lilia, and the Meaning of Family

Duncan’s bond with Cade reaches back to Cade’s adolescence. Cade’s parents were distant from him and disapproved of his friendship with Lilia, whose parents belonged to the Coterie. They forbade the friendship, but Cade ignored them. At sixteen, he left home with a bag and a car he had bought himself, intending to live in the vehicle. After a week, Duncan found him camping in the woods and took him in. Cade lived with Duncan until he was old enough to establish a place of his own.

Cade’s parents later moved to Vermont. Their Christmas cards, signed only with their names, offered little warmth; Cade read each one aloud, folded it into a paper airplane, and let Ava burn it in midflight. Duncan seemed to know when one had arrived. He would turn up with stout for Cade’s birthday or mulled cider and whiskey during the winter holidays, sit by the fire, and tell Ava stories about Cade as a teenager. Their ritual makes Duncan’s role in Cade’s life legible through what he does: he notices, arrives, and provides the family care Cade’s parents did not.

Duncan also remained close to Lilia’s story through Cade. Cade’s parents objected to Lilia because of her family’s Coterie ties, but Duncan’s later account places him within that same organization’s history. The contrast is consequential: the Coterie is not only a source of danger surrounding Ava and Lilia, but also the institution Duncan once served and eventually chose not to lead.

Golem Maker and Coterie Rival

When Venus presses Ava to accept a contract against Duncan, Ava recognizes that the assignment is unusual. Venus must know that Ava will refuse, yet she pushes the matter twice and in public. Venus claims to have well-substantiated reports that Duncan is building an army close to her territory. Ava struggles to reconcile that claim with the Duncan she knows, whose interests seem more suited to fishing than overthrowing the Coterie. She asks whether Venus means an army of golems. Venus dismisses the threat of wooden creatures beside Owen, but her insistence reveals how badly she wants Duncan dead.

Duncan explains the political history behind the conflict. After Venus’s predecessor died suddenly, there was no clear successor. Venus wanted the position, but some senior members disliked her, and she had been with the Coterie for only a year or two. Several of them approached Duncan and asked him to step in. He recalls that the organization was already dangerous, but not then as lethal as it became under Venus. With different leadership, he thought it might have become something like a new Council; Venus took it in the opposite direction.

Ava eventually learns the fact that reframes the contract: Duncan had been Coterie before retiring. Until he was removed, Venus could see him as a competing threat, regardless of whether he actually intended to take power. Duncan’s answer to the question of what he would do if offered leadership again is consistent with his final explanation: he does not want to lead. He acted to prevent Venus from leading, not to claim her position for himself.

Power Revealed and Final Choice

Duncan’s abilities become unmistakable in the island battle. As fighting spreads, Ava sees a wooden bear knock down an attacker and recognizes the grain and swirl of its body. She finds Duncan throwing his carvings into the air; they expand as they fall, unfolding into life-sized forms. Among them are the bear and a wooden lumberjack whose axe cleaves through the combatants. Ava had seen him animate carvings before, but she had not known he could enlarge them. The scale of the gift explains why he could be considered a serious military threat and why Venus might fear him as a rival.

The battle also makes Ava reconsider Venus’s attraction to firebugs. Firebug power could help protect Venus against someone capable of sending deadly wooden golems against her. Ava imagines that Duncan could make weapons still more dangerous, such as a figure that launched large wooden stakes, and understands why ordinary wards might not stop such an attack. She suspects that Venus had dreaded confronting him since taking the Coterie leadership in his stead, and that Venus mistook Duncan’s lack of ambition for a victory over him. Duncan’s power and his intentions are distinct: he can command an army of animated wood, but he does not want the office for which Venus feared him.

After the conflict, Ava asks who now leads the Coterie, Duncan or Alistair. Duncan says he had not lied to her, though he had kept parts of his personal life private. He repeats that he is tired and does not want to lead; he had only wanted to keep Venus from leading. Looking through the window at Cade, he explains that he has no children of his own and regards Cade as the person he is proudest of. He believed Venus would eventually kill Cade, either to spur Ava or punish her, and made his choices to protect his family.

Ava recognizes the logic because it resembles her own defense of someone she loves. She remains aware that Duncan was one of the small cogs that set events in motion, but cannot bring herself to be furious with him; in his place, she believes she would have made the same choices. Duncan leaves after tipping his weather-beaten hat. His ending is not a return to leadership but a reaffirmation of refusal: power is something he possesses, while family is what determines how he uses it.