Tristran is a half-faerie, half-human boy who grows up in the small border village of Wall with his parents—a birth father and an adoptive mother—though it’s not until the end of the novel that he comes to understand the truth about his parentage. He comes from the Stormhold line and shares some of their sparse magical ability for locating places within Faerie. The name Tristran may be an allusion to the romantic story Tristan and Isolde, spelled with multiple variations, including “Tristram” and “Yseult.”

Tristran is an “everyman” character archetype: a relatable, realistic young man whom many readers (male or female) will be able to see aspects of within themselves. Like most teenage boys, Tristran is “half the way between a boy and a man, and was equally uncomfortable in either role […]. He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times” (44). He’s presented as having a dreamy, fantastical quality one might attribute to his inherent faerie blood but might also be due to his being a restless teenager in a small, isolated village filled with people he’s known all his life.