Blood at the Root

Alexis is Malik’s friend and love interest. He first met her when they were in foster care at seven years old. She was the only other person he met—until he went to Louisiana—who also had magical abilities, making her an extremely important figure in his early life. However, after she was adopted, Malik did not see her again until Caiman. In contrast to Malik, she was adopted by a magical family that supported her magical ability and gave her a comfortable life. Malik notes how intelligent she is, as she is one of the strongest students in class and one of the best conjurers. Although the revenge she seeks on Katia’s kidnappers shows her dark side, it also emphasizes her magical ability, as she can cast difficult bane magic beyond what she should be able to do at 17.

One important component of Alexis’s character is her dedication to helping the Black community. Throughout the novel, she is passionate about helping missing girls outside of the magical community, calling out the ruling magical class on their hypocrisy by refusing to help. She is a dedicated activist, she is strongly opinionated, and she is not afraid to speak out to authority to pursue what she believes is right. However, despite all of this, she is also a complex character, as she puts this activism above her relationship with Malik. She turns to dark magic, using Kumale and the Bokor to further her magical ability and thereby betraying Malik. In this way, Alexis is representative of the theme of The Corrupting Nature of Power. She becomes fixated on her perception that the magical community is not doing enough to help, so she abandons Malik and the entire community to improve her skills and take matters into her own hands.

Mama Aya is Malik’s grandmother and Lorraine’s mother. She is one of the most powerful conjurers in history and was largely responsible for defeating the Bokor over a century earlier, sending them into hiding and putting the Kwasan tribe into power. She is almost 200 years old and uses her magical ability to sustain her life. Although Malik is initially bitter toward Mama Aya for not saving him sooner from foster care, she shows Malik that she has always done everything she can to help him. She searched for him for over a decade but still regrets that she didn’t do more. In the end, Mama Aya sacrifices her own life as part of the spell that revealed Malik’s location and brought him to her. In this way, Mama Aya is a key component of the theme of community and belonging. She gives Malik a home and a family for the first time in her life—even sacrificing her life to do so.

Kumale is a professor of magical history at Caiman University. Malik notes that he is not much older than Malik is, despite being a teacher. Unlike most authority figures in his life, Malik immediately connects with Kumale through their similar histories. Like Malik, Kumale lost family years ago and still suffers from that loss. He also understands Malik’s hotheadedness and resistance to authority, encouraging him to channel his anger into his magic in their training sessions together.

In the novel’s climax, it is revealed that Kumale is one of the story’s primary antagonists. He has been working for years with bane magic and the Bokor to try to bring back his brother from the dead and views Malik’s sacrifice as the key to bringing him back. Given Kumale’s history and relationship with Malik, he is a round character, giving him depth instead of being a stereotypical villain. Additionally, his brother’s death and his overwhelming need to get revenge complicate his work with the Bokor, as his motives are based in grief and trauma.

Kumale serves as a foil to Malik to emphasize two of the novel’s themes; both suffer from a family member’s death and the subsequent sense of unbelonging, emphasizing the lasting effects of trauma. However, it is also important where the two characters differ. Kumale turns to dark magic and the Bokor to try to rectify what happened to him. Conversely, Malik repeatedly resists the urge to turn to darkness, refusing to kill Carlwell or Donja and resisting the temptation to join his mother. In this way, their two characters also highlight the theme of the corrupting nature of power. Kumale is representative of the dangers of the allure of magic, as he gives into the temptation to try to bring his brother back.

Lorraine is Malik’s mother. She went to Caiman University where she was one of the school’s top students. She is portrayed as smart and committed to her magic. While at school, she was invited to join the Divine Elam, a secret society of powerful conjurers that has been in existence for centuries. As Malik uncovers Lorraine’s personal history, his understanding of the pivotal scene in the Prologue, in which Lorraine is allegedly killed in her home by a group of dark conjurers, changes. Throughout the novel, Malik learns that the other Divine Elam members exiled her because she was obsessed with bane magic and the Bokor. As a result, Lorraine becomes one of the novel’s antagonists at the conclusion of the text. Although she only appears briefly during the battle before leaving with the Bokor, she is set up as one of the central antagonists in the future novels of the series. Her journey from bright student to villainous antagonist exemplifies the corrupting nature of power.