Jean is a sixteen-year-old thief, married and Catholic, who sold her soul to Murmur to live out her natural days and bear her child alive; until then she cannot die.
| Type | Character |
| Spanish entry | Jean |
Description
A sign on her back, accepted in ceremony, marks her as “bride of the devil”. Called “the written pledge”, she still has “a trace of innocence”. She came to the rite alone, in the ritual tunic, with a young goat; she has passed all the initiations and knows how to summon demons.
The pact
Her rule: «No se puede morir. No se puede morir. Por ahora.» (“She cannot die. She cannot die. For now.“) The immunity is contractual and expires. Soul pacts are ordinary in her world (“Read carefully what our arrangement says”); through her the known terms of an infernal contract were set: currency, term, life clause, birth clause.
Her pregnancy is extremely accelerated: two or three months’ gestation in non-human spans. Under possession her body changes: “now it’s a big snake and him grabbing the snake with his hands”.
Household and history
Her husband, “a hopeless drunk” with strange “other things”, is kept out of the secret: “my husband must not find out”. Her Catholicism coexists with the pact.
She moves among thieves and dealt with the King of the Beggars, who called her “Sweet Jean”; no further relation is established. At the castle where the ceremony took place, which was infiltrated, she entered unmarked, “had come out marked somehow. And then came back.”
Conflicting accounts
- The mark is “the flame marked on the back”; or an inverted cross embroidered on her dress; or generically “the marks on the back”.
- Murmur holds her pact and fathered her child; Andromalius is named as the demon possessing her. Whether these are two agents or one is unresolved.
Open questions
- What governs her transformation.
- Who will collect her soul, and what happens to the child after birth.
- Where and with whom she was initiated; how her faith fits the pact; her husband’s name.