Althea's elder sister whose marriage to Kyle Haven and deference to his authority over the family ship and business creates much of the trilogy's initial conflict. Keffria's arc is about the gradual recovery of her own judgment and agency after years of subordinating both to her husband, and her development across the trilogy is quieter than Althea's or Malta's but no less real.

The younger daughter of the Vestrit family whose passionate connection to the liveship Vivacia and refusal to accept her exclusion from seafaring drives much of the Liveship Traders Trilogy. Althea's arc is one of the sequence's most satisfying - a woman who earns her place through genuine competence in a world that would prefer she stay ashore - and her relationship with Vivacia is one of the trilogy's emotional anchors. Her path crosses with the wider Elderlings sequence in ways that reward the full reading of the universe.

A disgraced Bingtown Trader's son who serves as first mate on Vivacia before his dismissal, and whose subsequent history with cindin and the docks of Bingtown forms the backdrop to his eventual role in the rescue mission. Brashen's relationship with Althea is one of the trilogy's most carefully developed romances - complicated by circumstance, pride, and the genuine equality of their regard for each other. His captaincy of the Paragon is one of the trilogy's central plot threads.

A Bingtown woman whose expertise in Elderling lore has been the purpose of a life otherwise constrained by an unhappy marriage and social expectation. Alise's journey with the dragon keepers to Kelsingra is the fulfilment of everything she has studied and the beginning of something she could not have anticipated. Her arc examines what happens when a person who has been living entirely in their mind is suddenly required to live in their body and in the world, and her relationship with Leftrin and with the dragons reshapes her understanding of what her life can contain.

Alise's husband's secretary who accompanies the expedition under circumstances that are not initially what they appear, and whose arc across the Rain Wild Chronicles is one of its more surprising. Sedric's relationship with his dragon Relpda and the discoveries the expedition forces upon him require him to confront aspects of himself and his situation that he has been evading, and his development from reluctant participant to committed keeper is among the Chronicles' more quietly affecting character journeys.