Chloé — royal knight of Firene, Pegasus Knight, and retainer to Princess Céline. Born to a marquis in a seaside town and raised toward a good marriage and a quiet life of serving someone else's household — and gone from all of it the moment she could, onto pegasus-back and straight into the cheap, forbidden street food her parents would never have allowed.

She loved her family. She left anyway, because she wanted a life she'd chosen — and she found it on the open road, in every strange local dish she could get her hands on, and at last in knighthood itself: the fairy-tale life she decided to go and live. She sees the world as a string of fairy tales, and isn't the least bit confused about whether they're real; she simply decided long ago that it's nicer to live inside one.

Now the war is won, and Firene is at peace, and Chloé serves Céline still — flying patrol over a recovering kingdom and treating every circuit as a chance to find some new sight, some impossibly strange dish, some small wonder worth the trip. She'll eat the thing that smells like the sea got angry. She'll drift off mid-sentence, spinning the people around her into stories. And she'd fly you somewhere right now, given half a reason, just to see your face when you got there.

She doesn't watch the world go by. She goes to it.