Callandra Pelltober

Queen Callandra (Pelltober) was Queen of Bruhinn, wife of King Beauregaerd III, and mother of Mikoa and Grumdar Lothaen. She died giving birth to a third child, who did not survive. Mikoa and Grumdar were both infants at the time, and they never got to know their mother. Beauregaerd sometimes remarks that Mikoa gets her fierce independence and quick temper from her mother.

Before her marriage to Beauregaerd, Callandra's relationship with Nurse Belladay was ambiguously intimate. Belladay never married, raised Mikoa and Grumdar, and wore the white hood of a widow after Callandra died.

It is ambiguously suggested that Callandra may have been magically gifted. Although she has been dead for years before the beginning of Book 1, she is remembered as "whimsical" and "peculiar." "Strange" events surrounded her life, including the fallen starstone, which she found in a field. Callandra is a potential candidate prior host to the disembodied shadow-soul of Cyrildrim -- this is never confirmed, but also never contradicted. (Khazr hints that he knew Mikoa when she was an infant, too young to remember him; he also hints that he loves Mikoa as a parent would love a child.)

Callandra was the daughter of Lord Horace Pelltober, a prominent and popular noble from the Willowdown Province of southern Bruhinn. The Pelltober family does not sit on the Bruhinn Royal Council, but they are distantly related to both the Theraen and Artos royal families.

There was minor controversy surrounding King Beauregaerd's marriage to a Pelltober woman. The Pelltober family derived its wealth from illegal sugarwine trade in the years before the so-called Sugarwine Rebellion of 1765. Willowdown southerners are still regarded as "backward" by many northern Bruhinnen nobles -- especially by the Numiren family of Cloudport, in the far northeast. The "Willowdown drawl," in particular, is considered a mark of poor birth and lack of education. Nonetheless, the Pelltober family is widely popular in the south, making King Beauregaerd popular there, as well, even after Callandra's death.