Jeremy

Jeremy is the captain of the Crimson Scar (Алый Шрам) assassin band — by her own account, one of the finest assassin groups in the demon world. She is an elf with sky-blue hair and a face whose left half is hideously scarred by burns. Her defining trait is a profound emotional flatness: she smiles, jokes and flirts constantly, yet Dantalion can barely sense any feeling behind the mask. Beyond killing, she is a thorough alchemist who travels with a case of potions, surgical knives, incense and herbs — "the tools of a herbalist, a physician and a perfumer at once." She is also a master of poisons, an expert torturer, and, before her scars, was her group's honey-trap specialist, known by the alias the Black Rose of Prantapans.

**Arrival under Dantalion (ch 165-172)** — Paimon dispatches Jeremy and her twenty assassins alongside Jacques Bonhomme's mercenary band, the Double Axe, to serve Dantalion in the human realm. Because the two captains squabble over the chain of command, Dantalion simply takes sole command of both, becoming head of some fifty fighters. From the first, Jeremy is the perfect professional: she never questions his orders, prepares his disguises (including the absurd priest's robe), and quietly relishes his schemes as he ignites civil war in the Frank Empire.

**The slave-branding of Daisy (ch 175-178)** — As an absolute expert in slave brands — the procedure was performed on her as a child, and she later performed it on dozens — Jeremy carries out the harrowing operation that brands the heart of the ten-year-old hero-candidate Daisy. She is fascinated by how much the cold, defiant girl resembles her own childhood self. Afterwards she becomes Daisy's appointed teacher, instructing her in poisons and the assassin's craft, and tending her wounds after Dantalion beats her — the first soul to learn the full secret that Daisy and her brother are destined heroes.

**Confidante and instrument (ch 182-212)** — Jeremy settles into Dantalion's inner circle as his most candid sounding-board. Posing as his noble "lover" at the opera, she even pleasures him beneath the cloak to keep up appearances while he negotiates with the disguised Demon Lord Leraje. Playful and "rotten to the core," she teases everyone around her, yet her competence is beyond doubt. On Dantalion's order she also seduces his ward Luke, an entanglement that will warp the boy's whole notion of love for years.

**Gaoler and court physician (ch 334)** — By the height of Dantalion's empire Jeremy serves as his warden, head of the prison and his personal court physician and apothecary. When Dantalion sentences himself to sixty lashes to spare Laura the death penalty, it is Jeremy who must wield the whip. For an assassin who would gladly kill herself on his word, her open reluctance and her plea — not as his vassal but as his doctor — to lighten the punishment reveals a rare crack of genuine feeling.

**The branding of Luke (ch 407-410)** — Years on, when Dantalion finally brands his heir Luke as a slave, he forces the boy to choose his brander between Jeremy — the woman who seduced him and helped author his guilt — and Daisy, the victim of that guilt. Either choice, Dantalion notes with relish, lays bare Luke's true heart. Throughout, Jeremy remains exactly what she was at her arrival: a smiling, hollow-eyed professional whose loyalty to Dantalion is total and whose cheerful cruelty never wavers.

Jeremy's two most striking features pull against each other. Outwardly she is warm and irreverent — forever smiling, teasing, cracking jokes — yet Dantalion, who reads the emotions of others, notes again and again how faint her actual feelings are behind that face. Even when she laughs in a room soaked with a child's blood, her emotions barely stir. The sky-blue hair and the burns that ruin the left half of her face complete a figure that is at once disarming and unsettling. Only twice does the mask truly slip: when she pleads against Dantalion's flogging as his physician, and when her old pride as a seductress flares into wounded disbelief at the opera.

Jeremy embodies the novel's idea of the assassin as a polymath of death. Her travelling case holds potions, a surgical knife, incense and herbal powders — the kit of a poisoner, a surgeon and a perfumer. She insists that any assassin worth a deputy's rank must master medicine and toxins alike. Her rarest skill is the slave brand: scarred onto her own heart as a child and later inflicted by her on dozens, it lets her cut a living heart open and keep the victim alive with a table of potions. This single expertise makes her indispensable to Dantalion — first to enslave Daisy, finally to enslave his own heir Luke — and underpins her later post as his court physician and apothecary.