Myfanwy Thomas

Myfanwy Thomas begins her new life with a name, an office, and a body that belong to the same person as before, but without the memories that would make those things feel familiar. The distinction becomes the central problem of her tenure as Rook: she must act convincingly as the Checquy official others recognize while discovering which parts of that identity she wants to keep. As the Grafters return and betrayal reaches the organization’s highest levels, her practical answer is to learn her powers, do the work, and make a family and future of her own.

Identity and the Inherited Office

Myfanwy is also addressed as Rook Thomas and Myfanwy Alice Thomas. Her identity is not a disguise: she recognizes that physical tests would confirm she is Myfanwy Thomas, even as she worries that the Court may notice how differently she behaves. Her predecessor’s life is therefore both hers and not hers. She can occupy the same position and body, but must decide how to inhabit them without memories to guide her.

The uncertainty is sharpened by the inconsistent descriptions of the former Myfanwy. She had seemed painfully shy in some settings, yet bold in policy; quiet and withdrawn, yet capable of rising to the demands of the Court. The new Myfanwy’s willingness to take the lead at a meeting unsettles the Court, but she sees no need to imitate a personality no one can describe consistently. She reduces the problem to a working principle: if she gets the job done, she can behave as she chooses.

The fragments left by her predecessor make that inheritance concrete. At home, Myfanwy wakes in Thomas’s comfortable bed and explores a house she has entered only the night before, after a car brought her from a meeting. She remembers deactivating the alarm with the code 230500, then wandering upstairs to find a bed; even the room’s ownership remains uncertain to her. The closets offer no revelation, only more of the same boring clothes she has found in the flat and her Checquy chambers. A familiar address and a private home do not, by themselves, restore a past.

Learning the Power and the Threat

Myfanwy’s bodily-control ability makes her both more capable and more dangerous than she initially understands. During a car journey she realizes she can affect the driver’s body without touching him, potentially cutting off his sight and causing a crash. Her predecessor’s letters had led her to believe touch was necessary; she concludes that Thomas underestimated the reach of the power. The gap between their abilities is not simply strength: years of training at the Estate gave the predecessor much finer control, while Myfanwy can currently manage only basic bodily functions.

Rather than recoil from this difference, Myfanwy is eager to learn. Each use gives her a more intuitive understanding of how bodily systems connect. She imagines that examining someone’s system at length would teach her more, although she cannot think of an appropriate way to do so. Her approach is exploratory, but it is not carefree: she recognizes that losing control over the driver could have ended in a collision. The power offers knowledge and agency while making other people’s bodies a direct site of risk.

Her first confrontation with the Checquy’s history of the Grafters is mediated by fear and incomplete information. When Gestalt apologizes for losing his temper during questioning at the mention of them, Myfanwy has no idea what he means. She writes down the name and later studies her predecessor’s copied material. The old sketches show glittering carapaces and jagged barbs; an account of scaled, fanged horses bred in 1677 makes the threat feel physically imaginable. The Checquy had kept the stories from its wider ranks because memories of the invasion were still terrifying, even though the Grafters had not surfaced for decades. Myfanwy’s discovery changes that history from institutional rumor into a present danger.

She also develops a firmer willingness to question the organization’s habits. When a response to a fungal crisis raises the possibility of wiping out a building, she objects that people are still alive inside. Later, she uses her powers to read Security Chief Clovis Steele’s heightened sense of smell: chemical and fungal odors reach her through his senses, matching the smell associated with an earlier incident but now mixed with formaldehyde. She identifies the events as linked and asks him to keep the information private. Her developing ability serves investigation as well as coercion, letting her connect evidence that might otherwise remain separate.

From Office Suspicion to Open Accusation

Myfanwy’s authority becomes visible in the way she moves from reading other people’s bodies to directing their actions. When she learns that Ingrid knows about her memory loss and her newfound ability to seize control without touching anyone, Myfanwy immediately clamps down on Ingrid’s body, leaving her voice, sight, and hearing intact. She reminds Ingrid that she made a man stab himself with a knife before the Court, using the incident as a warning as well as proof of her reach. Yet Myfanwy does not simply treat this capacity as a weapon: she later releases Ingrid’s muscles and listens to her account of the predecessor’s disappearance, making bodily control part of a difficult negotiation over what can safely be told.

That conversation leads Myfanwy to disclose how she came into the Rookery: she opened her eyes standing in the rain. Her explanation is selective. She omits Bronwyn and conceals how much information the former Myfanwy left behind, preserving parts of her private life even while seeking Ingrid’s trust. Ingrid admits that she had wondered whether the apparent change signaled an invasion of the body snatchers. Myfanwy’s new identity is thus not only a private question; to colleagues who know the old official, it can look like evidence of an external takeover.

At a Checquy gathering, Myfanwy turns suspicion into a public charge. After hearing a casual reference to the fungal incident and sensing Gestalt’s tension as he reaches inside his coat, she identifies him as a traitor against the Checquy and the United Kingdom. Gestalt draws his gun and aims at her face, but cannot pull the trigger: Myfanwy has already taken control of his body. The accusation makes the concealed conflict unmistakable to the room, while the failed shot demonstrates that her power can interrupt violence at the instant it is about to happen.

Betrayal, Resistance, and Survival

Myfanwy’s abilities are tested against threats that attack not only her life but the boundaries of her body. During the Reading flesh-cube attack, she cannot even draw breath to scream. Flesh and muscle pulse around her, crushing and burning her, while the nervous impulses of dozens of people overwhelm her senses. She recognizes a resemblance to the colony in Bath, but the difference is decisive: those bodies had been anesthetized and were comparatively willing, whereas the people inside the cube are lashed together and enslaved. The weapon is trying to absorb her into the same forced union.

In the confrontation with Bishop Grantchester, Myfanwy’s immediate command to her bodyguards to shoot him fails. Grantchester remains unharmed; her two guards lie dead from shots to the backs of their heads, and the guards behind her turn their guns toward her. She redirects their weapons so they shoot one another, then clamps down on Grantchester’s body as its chemicals and enzymes churn and his eyes darken. Her reflexes have beaten his, but the victory is costly and precarious: Grantchester has already shown that he can arrange the room around her with lethal precision.

Later, as Norman Goblet probes her mind and the memories she has built are about to dissolve, Myfanwy reaches into her coat and finds the emergency epinephrine injector her predecessor had placed in every coat because of her bee-sting allergy. She drives it into Norman’s thigh; the spring-loaded needle pierces his trousers and delivers 0.3 milligrams of epinephrine. A preparation made for an ordinary medical emergency becomes the instrument that breaks the attack. The scene binds the two Myfanwys together through an inheritance that is more useful than memory: the former official’s precautions give the new one a chance to survive.

Family, Continuity, and the Life She Chooses

Myfanwy’s recovery of a personal identity comes not from reclaiming the former official’s memories but from recognizing a living bond. When she embraces Bronwyn, her sister, Myfanwy feels her powers flare and senses their genetic ties: patterns in Bronwyn mirror her own. The moment changes the meaning of the body she inherited. She had thought of the rest of Thomas’s life as something belonging to a predecessor; now this sister belongs to the body and to her, too. Their tearful laughter and repeated embrace give her a sense of belonging that office, house, and title could not supply.

That connection also gives Myfanwy a reason to keep parts of her life private. When she later recounts her arrival in the rain to Ingrid, she deliberately leaves Bronwyn out and withholds how much her predecessor had prepared for her. Her disclosure is an act of trust with limits, not a full surrender of what she knows. By the end, however, the future she describes is no longer defined only by inherited duty. She looks forward to seeing Jonathan, her brother, after twenty-two years, and names a brother, a family, a job, and a rabbit as the good life she has unexpectedly found. The list joins kinship to ordinary domestic prospects: Myfanwy can serve as Rook without treating the role as the whole of who she is.

Narrative Role and Resolution

Myfanwy’s arc turns the mystery of a missing past into a question of chosen continuity. She is physically the same person her colleagues knew, but her changed conduct unsettles them; she must establish authority without reproducing a personality that even its witnesses describe inconsistently. Her answer is practical at first—do the job—and becomes more personal as she learns her abilities, protects others, confronts betrayal, and forms relationships of her own.

The novel repeatedly makes bodily control carry that conflict. Myfanwy can seize another person’s systems, interrupt a gunman, or read a colleague’s senses, but her power also exposes her to the danger of losing control and to weapons that turn human bodies into instruments. Against that violence, the epinephrine injector in her coat represents a quieter form of continuity: a precaution placed there by the predecessor saves the person who has no access to her memories. Myfanwy’s new self is neither a simple replacement nor a recovered original. She builds it from inherited protections, present choices, and relationships that become hers through experience.