A disgraced royal duelist reassigned to the humiliating role of royal observer at the battle in The Heroes, which means he watches the fighting rather than participating in it. Gorst is the finest swordsman in the Union - possibly in the world - and is entirely aware that his skills are wasted in his current role. His interior monologue, bitter and self-lacerating, is one of Abercrombie's funniest and most uncomfortable achievements: a man consumed by violent fantasies who applies to them the same sardonic intelligence he applies to everything else. In combat he becomes something else entirely.

A young woman trying to run a farm on the frontier and build a quiet life, who is forced back into violence when her younger siblings are taken. Shy has a past she has spent years running from - she was not always a farmer - and the journey to find her siblings in Red Country puts her back in exactly the situations she has been trying to avoid. She is Abercrombie's most emotionally direct protagonist, less armoured against feeling than most of his characters, which makes her arc in Red Country both more painful and more earned.

A former convict from Safety - the Union's prison island - who counts everything and has strict rules about how things must be done. Friendly is one of the most consistently surprising characters in the series: apparently simple, actually precise, occasionally terrifying. He appears first in Best Served Cold as part of Monza's crew and recurs across the standalones. His comfort with violence and his discomfort with social interaction are presented without judgment and without explanation, and the result is one of Abercrombie's most original supporting characters.

Shy South's stepfather - a quiet, gentle man with scarred hands who does the farm work and says very little and does not want to fight. Readers of the original trilogy will recognise Lamb. His real identity is one of Red Country's central dramatic ironies: the most dangerous man in the book is also the one most desperate to avoid violence, and the gap between what he is and what he is trying to be is where the novel lives. He is one of Abercrombie's most carefully handled characters.

A Styrian mercenary captain of considerable charm and negligible reliability, Cosca appears across nearly every book in the First Law World. He is funny, self-aware, genuinely skilled when sober, and almost never sober. His arc is one of Abercrombie's long games - a man whose capacity for self-destruction is matched only by his capacity for survival, and whose final trajectory is deeply unpleasant.