Çedamihn Ahyanesh'ala

Çeda is the main protagonist of *The Song of the Shattered Sands.* She is a young woman who fights in the pits under the pseudonym White Wolf to make a living. She lives with her best friend, Emre, in the west end and occasionally shades for Osman, the Pit owner.

She is a daughter of Ahyanesh and one of the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai. She is a new member of the House of Maidens. At the start of the book, she is nineteenth years old.

### Appearance

Çeda is often described as being very pretty or even striking or beautiful. At one point, King Ihsan said that she was pretty in a "rough and tumble sort of way" but as he suspected then, when she was primed up she was found to be quite stunning. In their point of view, most men mention her attractiveness sometimes more than once.

Çeda has the dark tanned skin of Sharakhani and long dark brown hair. She also has deep brown eyes. As she has been trained to "dance the swords" since childhood - like most Sharakhani - and then trained under the tutelege of Djaga and then Sumeya she has a very muscular build. She considers herself relatively tall for a Sharakhani.

### Personality

Çeda is bold, confident, and obstinate. At 14, she worked out a deal with a former pit fighter to sneak her into a Pit Tourney in order to get revenge against a huge man in his prime. Despite being struck with fear multiple times, she has forced herself to act. She is clearly confident throughout the first book, confident in her fighting abilities as others around her are also confident in her skill. Throughout the first book, she remains steadfast to her oath of revenge for her mother and follows this drive with little thought for others, as with her betrayal of Osman or the danger she put Emre in. She claims to think of others, trying to keep her secrets to keep them safe, but her actions have shown her to do otherwise.

### History

Çeda was raised by her mother Ahya until she was 8 years old. They moved constantly during her youth, and Ahya was a strict and hard mother, hardly as gentle as other mothers were. After being taken to Saliah where she and Saliah both saw clipped visions of Çeda's future, Ahya had decided something and left Çeda with Dardzada to assassinate a king, however Ahya failed and was killed.

For four years, Çeda remained with Dardzada and worked as his assistant in his potions shop. Çeda describes him as having been extremely strict and sometimes even cruel. Dardzada did not want Çeda to follow in her mother's footsteps and wanted her to have a good life which he could have provided if she was not so obstinate. She was friends with Emre before her mother passed but Emre continued to be her friend and was sometimes the reason Çeda was beat by Dardzada, for he did not want Çeda to run around like the other "gutter wrens". Some days after Çeda collected her first petals, Dardzada had forceably tattooed an ancient symbol that she interpreted as "bastard" however it was later revealed to her that it originally mean "One in many, many in one." Çeda felt this was unforgiveable and stuck a knife in Dardzada's bed while he slept and ran away to live with Emre and his older brother Rafa.

At thirteen, Emre's brother Rafa was killed by a Malasani bravo. A year later, when he returned, Çeda began training under Djaga and entered her first Pit Fight at Osman's pits. That is also when she began shading for Osman to make a living while she paid off her debt to Djaga.

1. ↑ *Twelve Kings in Sharakhai*, Chapter 1, page 1