Professor Grady

Grady runs harsh training without treating every injury as irrelevant. During the surprise capture for interrogation practice, he notices Violet’s protected door made her hard to seize, asks about her injury, and binds and shackles her in ways that avoid worsening her damaged shoulder.

Grady is known for procedural limits even within brutal training. Varrish calls him a stickler for rules and treats the unofficial brig imprisonment as freer from the restrictions that governed Grady’s interrogation exercise.

As an RSC professor, Grady is responsible for evaluating Violet’s squad during capture training, but he keeps professors out of the actual violent questioning so cadets can still trust their instructors.

Jesinia’s official Scribe Quadrant command is transferred to Grady at his forceful request for the search effort. Publicly she serves under him, while in practice she gathers material for Violet’s research.

Grady commands the official search roster and says every member was chosen because he trusts them. He accepts Xaden onto the team only after Xaden argues that Tairn will not travel without Sgaeyl.

Grady uses lesser magic with ease while teaching RSC.

Grady designs and oversees field exercises that suppress cadets’ dragon bonds and signets, test navigation under pursuit, and require squad cooperation under pressure. After the first failed extraction deadline, he retrieves the riders, restores their blocked abilities, and makes clear that the exercise is the beginning of a larger RSC progression.

Melgren selects Grady for the seventh-breed task force because Grady has experience behind enemy lines.

Grady signs while leading the official search meeting.

Grady oversees the first joint land-navigation RSC exercise after the riders are drugged and their bonds and signets are dulled. He explains that they must secure a marked extraction point by the following afternoon while other riders, dragons, and unbonded cadets hunt them in the forest.

Grady participates in the surprise capture for interrogation training and waits outside the cave while the exercise runs. When Violet’s squad escapes, he treats their arrival as a valid outcome and is ready to award or defend the patch rather than send them back inside.

Grady leaves RSC teaching to organize the seventh-breed search squad and research its destination. He seeks northern Emerald Sea exploration records, has his dragon question Andarna, and rejects Violet’s Deverelli argument because Deverelli demands too high a price for an audience.

Grady’s northward plan for the search comes under pressure before the team departs. Violet’s intuition, Sloane’s doubts about the cold, Halden’s impatience on King Tauri’s behalf, and Xaden’s willingness to use a Deverelli trip as a test of Grady’s squad all undermine his preferred route.

Grady leads the Anca extraction and treats it as a trial run for future searches. During the fire at the Home of Amelia, Aura accidentally kills him when he emerges from a doorway and she mistakes him for a threat, leaving the mission leaderless and creating immediate blame after the survivors return to Samara.