Who is Mal Kekapania (and how is she alive)?

March 2, 2025 Lady K

When finally reading my ARC of Wicked Problems last year, I tweeted a couple of initial thoughts. I did not intend to liveblog the entire book, though I ended up doing just that after reaching page 37. I won’t link the tweet because ew X, but it went along the lines of:

Wha

What did I just read

I

...

This tweet was not inspired by the world-ending stakes, the destruction of the spirecliffs, the Tara-and-Kai romantic tension, or the skazzerai, but this character (re-)introduction:

Hold up.

Did she just say Mal? As in, Mal Kekapania? Caleb’s manic pixie dream girl from Two Serpents Rise, who destroyed half of Dresediel Lex and appeared to be incinerated by the Twin Serpents? Mal, who we haven’t heard from in seven books, over a decade in real-time and either eight or fifteen years of book-time depending on which references you believe?

THAT Mal??

Yes, that Mal.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader to have a similar reaction. In fact, I know I wasn’t because google search data tells me that a fair few people are searching “Craft Sequence Mal”.

So, let’s dive in. Who is Mal Kekapania, and how is she back??

Disclaimer

First, I need to give my own biases. I’m something of a Two Serpents Rise anti. I simply don’t enjoy that book. I think it adds little to the overall sequence (well, until now when you kinda need to know more) and cut it out of most of my reading orders, and advise most of my friends not to read it (in my experience, the people who tend to really enjoy that book are straight men, and I know very few of those).

I can see the appeal of certain elements, particularly themes and secondary characters. I’ve almost definitely read the book more times and in more detail than you have, unless you were personally involved in its publication. I say more about my thoughts in my review here, but to sum up, I really struggle with Caleb and Mal individually and in their relationship. Mal particularly suffers from her lack of POV time. I understand WHY Gladstone wrote the book this way, but I don’t like it. I keep meaning to write an essay about how I would fix the book, but I have about fifty essays on the list so it has never quite reached the top.

I also think Gladstone somewhat agrees with me. Partly because of some things he said in our interview the other year, and partly because of what he did with Mal in Wicked Problems. I wouldn’t quite call the subplot “the redemption of Malina Kekapania’s character arc” but it’s close.

Right, disclaimer over.

What is Mal Kekapania’s story in Two Serpents Rise?

We meet Mal being EXTREMELY suspicious, hanging around the scene of a crime wearing an amulet that is supposed to protect her from being seen. She is quite clearly responsible for said crime, but as Caleb thinks with his dick rather than his brain, he is convinced she is there by sheer coincidence. This lack of thought colours Caleb and Mal’s entire relationship across the book.

Caleb chooses not to tell the authorities or his superiors about her presence (which, fair enough, ACAB, but also Caleb, my dude, let the blood go back to your brain for five seconds) but instead hunt her down in secret. He correctly surmises that she is an adrenaline junkie cliff runner, and finds some of her fellow runners, who end up telling him her first name and a race she is likely to run.

He literally chases her down, which may seem romantic to the young straight men amongst us, but is also super problematic. Caleb. Wtf, man. To quote Teo, “You’re an idiot” (Two Serpents Rise, page 64). They have some sort of bet about him catching her. Whatever. We can move on.

In the midst of their weird near death flirting, the company Caleb works for is merging with another one, and it turns out Mal is the lead Craftswoman. Caleb discovers this at the merger. They start a sort of fling.

You can read the full plot here, but a quick summary: Mal turns out to be old school religious, Caleb isn’t and judges her for it, they help take down Mal’s old colleague who has apparently gone mad and is poisoning the city, but in doing so Caleb unwittingly helps Mal poison the city even more (because she’s a bad guy, obv), they fall out over religion, Caleb basically let’s Mal into a facility that lets her shut down the city, she wakes the Twin Serpents and plans to destroy the city and the King in Red, he saves the day and seems to kill her.

It’s a bit interminable tbqh.

What do we know about Mal’s upbringing?

Okay, this bit is more interesting (to me, at least).

This is what Mal tells Caleb relatively early into their relationship. We later learn that her parents died slowly and painfully in the Skittersill Rising (see Last First Snow for more on that).

Gripfire is essentially Craft-napalm. A God Wars weapon, the King in Red uses it against the Skittersill protestors in Last First Snow, to Elayne’s horror. It is this choice that seems to ultimately push Elayne towards defending the Skittersill as much as she is able to; she saw the destruction of gripfire in her youth, and knows what it will do. Gripfire burns brick and stone and things that ought not burn; it does worse to those alive when it hits.

No wonder she has a vendetta against the King in Red.

We learn little more about her childhood, other than its impact on her. She was a high flyer at University. Seemed popular, had friends to go on spring break with. The Craft is not an easy discipline to master, requiring both innate talent and significant study. Mal appears to have excelled in it, despite her religious leanings.

It is unclear when she became embroiled in Alaxic’s plan to take down the King in Red and Dresediel Lex. Most of what we know of Mal comes from dialogue, spoken to Caleb - and we know she was hiding a lot. We get some brief POV passages towards the end of the book, but they focus on current action rather than Mal’s own life.

Mal at the end of Two Serpents Rise

At the climax of Two Serpents Rise, Mal is aloft leading the Twin Serpents to 667 Sansilva, the King in Red’s headquarters, where Temoc, Teo and Caleb are attempting rituals to send the Serpents back to their slumber. Caleb, channelling an incredible amount of soulstuff, rises to fight her.

Caleb sends thousands of years worth of souls through Mal to the Serpents and, in doing so, shows her sides of the city and its people she was cut off from by her fanaticism. Ultimately, she chooses to end the fight:

This seems fairly definitive, but you know the old adage: if you don’t see a body, the character isn’t dead. And, in the Craft Sequence, even if you do see a body, and even if they are dead, they can most certainly come back. This is a series about necromancers, after all.

She certainly seemed dead, however, both to readers and to the characters who knew her. We see very little of Caleb after this point until Wicked Problems, so we don’t get any insight into his thoughts about either Mal or the events of Two Serpents Rise. His next point of view pages are early in Wicked Problems, and he mentions Mal by name three times in one chapter. We know she’s still alive before he does, but when he finds out he doesn’t seem especially surprised.

How did Mal survive, and what has she been up to since Two Serpents Rise?

We meet Mal again via Dawn, whom she rescues-slash-kidnaps after Dawn steals the skazzerai shard Mal was paid to acquire. Mal has been a security contractor (AKA thief) for hire, and has worked with Mr Brown and his network for quite a while. As she and Dawn bond (partly before the Mr Brown incident, but mostly after) she reveals a bit about how she came to be where - and what - she is now.

Okay, the ‘how did Mal survive' thing is kind of handwavey, but remember this is a series of gods and miracles and necromancers. This isn’t ‘somehow Palpatine returned’ territory. In fact, we hear people wondering how on earth she survived enough times that I wonder if it’s going to become a plot point in the future. I can believe Mal surviving, but what’s this about waking up in a back-alley chop shop rather than a hospital? Her co-conspirators were dead by this point.

Given that she also says Brown and his people “needed someone like me”, I wonder if they were involved in her survival, somehow. They’ve obviously been working on their plan for a while, and Mal has proven she can access the Serpents’ power.

Speculation aside, Mal has been a pirate, thief, and security contractor ever since she woke up in that back-alley chop shop. She was severely injured: we hear that she has a clockwork and chrome arm, is severely burned down one side of her body, and is missing a leg. We get a lot more detail about the arm than the leg; her arm is described as “an arm of silver and clockwork built around a core of scorched bone.” The clockwork detail is particularly interesting, given what we know about the gray men and their clockwork metal; however, clockwork is not solely the purview of skazzerai in the Domain, so this is an interesting comment rather than a hard and fast theory.

(Also, I now count three major characters missing an arm: Tara, Raymet, and Mal. Are we going full Star Wars here?)

Mal also has access to what Temoc calls a ‘god-blade’. It’s unclear where she got this, but he goes all High Quechal when he sees it, so one imagines it’s related to Alaxic rather than anything she’s been up to since Two Serpents Rise; but, we have just heard how Mr Brown had her acquiring artifacts, so it could be a more recent development.

Overall, Mal has been in something of a holding pattern over the past eight-to-fifteen years (I will NOT accept the stated timeline). She was raised to be a fanatic revolutionary, then her revolution failed and her co-revolutionaries are dead. She was supposed to die. And now she’s here, with a skillset only good for one thing, and no friends in the world.

How is Mal’s past recontextualised in Wicked Problems?

I said at the start that part of Wicked Problems could almost be called “the redemption of Malina Kekapania’s character arc.” Through both getting Mal’s own POV, and her reflecting on her path with Dawn, we see a new side of Mal. Her backstory isn’t retconned, but Gladstone has filled in the gaps.

We first see this from Caleb’s POV, when he tells Tara, Kai, Abelard, and Jax who Mal is, and recontextualises part of her background and story:

Mal's parents had died in a riot in Dresediel Lex, a religious uprising Caleb's own father had instigated. The King in Red, the city's deathless lord, responded to civil unrest with the levelheaded and mediation-forward approach typical of undead war-wizards: he mounted his iron dragon and rained fire from the sky. Abelard had been a kid at the time. He remembered schoolroom collections for orphans of the Skittersill Rising. Malina Kekapania had not received any of that charity. She had been adopted by a priest of the old religion, trained as a weapon against the King in Red. In the end, she tried to raise the Serpents that slept under Dresediel Lex, to overthrow the city and forge a new order from the ashes of the old. Caleb had met her while she was undercover, preparing to strike. “Let me guess. You never found her body.” “There was a lot of lava. And I never went looking. I heard rumours, but you always do, when someone dies trying to change the world. Back home, to a certain sort of kid, she’s a hero. They have her face on T-shirts and everything.” “You hoped she was dead.” He looked out at the horizon. “I hoped she was out of it. Away from gods and Craftsmen and the Wars you all talk about like they’re over. She was not a good person or a nice person and she hurt a lot of people including me. Including herself. I didn’t want her to hurt anyone else. Whenever I imagined her alive…I hoped she found a quiet beach and was smart enough to stay there. She was deep down a hole. So was I. Maybe that’s what we saw in each other. I climbed out. It took time and work. But it looks like she’s still down there.

Wicked Problems, page 109

There’s not really any new information here, but the way it’s shared gives us a new perspective. “She had been adopted by a priest of the old religion, trained as a weapon against the King in Red” doesn’t disagree with the story we heard in Two Serpents Rise, but it adds new flavour - Mal wasn’t just sponsored by Alaxic through her childhood and studies, but essentially adopted by him and raised as a weapon. I often compare Wicked Problems to Avengers: Infinity War, and in this analogy Mal is a Black Widow, brainwashed and turned into a gun pointed by someone else.

Mal herself tells us more about this later on:

I was raised to own my mistakes. The old man, I guess you could call him my foster father, he had a particular approach to responsibility. Miss a syllable of your litany, and spend a half hour kneeling on the sharp reed mat, drawing blood in penance.” “That’s awful.” “But you learn fast. He raised us as weapons, Allie and me. His instruments of revenge against the King in Red. When the plan was almost complete, I met Caleb. He was working fo the King in Red back then. The old man told me Caleb was a mistake. He was right–but you can imagine, after a childhood like that, the appeal of a mistake. And I was too important for the plan for the old man to stop me." ... “I was raised as a weapon, I said. But for the plan, I needed a resume, a past. Skills. A diploma. I spent years in boarding school and university. I put on a mask. Driven student. Scholarship kid. Fun at parties. Friendly but not easy to get close to. I wrote term papers for rich kids to fund my holidays, People liked me. I screwed a round, in a send-a-raven-at-two-am-to-ask-if-you’re-up sort of way. I just…let people see what they expected. And it worked. The mask stayed on. Not because it was a good mask, but because no one cared enough to notice it was there.

Wicked Problems, page 191

Mal’s upbringing after her parents died was a bloody mess of punishment and penance, a girl being carved into a blade, grief being channelled into a thirst only for vengeance. Abelard talks about sending money to support orphans of the Skittersill; there are probably many children like Mal and Allie out there, who were given love rather than a knife, who were able to grow past their trauma rather than dwell within it. But not Mal.

We saw her ‘foster father’ Alaxic briefly in both Two Serpents Rise and Last First Snow. A priest like Temoc, he learned the Craft and pretended to have given up on the old ways, while really seeking to undermine the King in Red and the city. Temoc, when broken out of Shenshan Prison, tells us this:

Temoc, the man who carved religious scars into his seven-year-old son’s body while he slept, who wants to bring human sacrifice back to Dresediel Lex, who worships bloodthirsty gods. Temoc thinks Alaxic was abusive and cruel to ‘his girls’.

Even with Mal’s decade or so of reflection after Two Serpents Rise, I think we can surmise that her upbringing after the Skittersill Rising was far more brutal than even she is willing to confess.

Does this redeem Mal? No. Mal herself talks about choices time and time again. She certainly thinks she could have chosen differently (though we could have a conversation about radicalisation and how much free will is possible).

She’s not wrong, of course. Plenty of people do manage to question their programming. But plenty of people don’t. Is that their fault, or a quirk of psychology reinforced by one’s environment? There are much bigger questions here than simply whether Mal was at fault for what she did in Two Serpents Rise.

Her relationship with Caleb is also recontextualised. I particularly like how we are finally seen her perspective on the whole thing. I could never quite understand WHY Mal was seemingly into Caleb throughout Two Serpents Rise, but here we are told expressly: he was genuinely, actually interested in her as a person.

He wasn’t some great nemesis, you know? He didn’t even figure out our plan until it was too late. But he saw the mask. He wondered what was underneath. “We danced. We traded barbs like characters in an old mystery play. Sometimes he tried to come off as hard and bitter and sometimes he carried his heart in his hand. And those hands–long and careful fingers. Especially when he shuffled cards. “He was a goof. He assumed his problems were the most significant pens in the room. He had a gift for saying the wrong thing, for pissing me off, for showing up at the least convenient moment. But, you know. He’d been carved into something, like I had–Temoc carved him, or tried. And Caleb shrugged and went to live his own way. Of course, both his parents were still alive. But all my life, I never had anything of my own. Just the glorious revolution. Now I had him.” “Did you ever think…” Dawn hesitated. “Did you ever think about not going through with it?” “Once. The night of the eclipse. I wondered if I could just walk away. Sure, I’d been lying to him, but maybe we could work through that. He wasn’t perfect–but I knew perfect. Perfect was the altar and the knife and the sharp reed mat. “I imagined being someone else. Really being, not pretending. We could get a dog. It was easier to imagine a dog than kids, but hells, why limit myself to what I could imagine? “But then I looked at him. Lying there asleep, this beautiful idiot caught in the trap of the dying world. I had the chance to break that trap. Could I throw it all away and jump in beside him? “I tried so hard to dream a different future for us. But I never could dream while waking. I was an arrow. I had been drawn, and loosed. “So I kissed him and I left. And he went after me and stopped me. And the rest of our lives happened.

Wicked Problems, page 191

Both of them wish that the other one had found a way to stay out of the fray. Caleb wishes Mal had found a beach somewhere, and had the sense to stay there. Mal hoped that Caleb was happy, and had been able to remain something other than a weapon. But here, so many years later, they find themselves fighting in a cavern above the Serpents. How much choice went into either of their paths? Were they always destined to end up back here?

What will happen next for Mal?

Through Wicked Problems, Mal becomes the first acolyte of Dawn and her new semi-goddess-ness. Mal truly believes in Dawn’s goodness and her desire to change the world. She ties herself to this nascent goddess, and Dawn ties herself right back. These bonds are not simply metaphorical in the world of Craft; a goddess and her devotees are literally tied together. We see all the way back in Three Parts Dead and Four Roads Cross how a goddess can be attacked through her worshippers; it’s how Seril almost died in the God Wars, and was nearly killed again above the streets of Alt Coulumb.

Dawn asserts a claim over Mal, fighting against the Twin Serpents, who have a prior claim from the Mal-and-Caleb-sacrifice in Two Serpents Rise. Ownership, agreements, and contracts are key parts of the Craft and Applied Theology, and Dawn sets herself against the Serpents as they try to bring Mal to their place beyond time:

They returned to the depths, to the warm and healing heart of the world, and with them they brought all that was theirs. Including Mal. It began as a void in her heart: a gap that grew as her flesh and fire and soul spun into a thin stream of plasma flowing back toward the Serpents. Dawn could see through her now .Mal came apart like a loose-knit scarf, the yarn reclaimed for another purpose. She fell back, hand outstretched. On her face: fear, and rage, and worse, surrender. No. To all the hells with tragedy and destiny and sacrifice, with the Quechal and their Serpents, with Mal and the guilt she kept failing to assuage. Dawn would not let this be. … She had felt this once before–and torn herself from serenity. She deserved no rest, no welcome. She had failed. What greater and more fit punishment than to live with the consequences? She wept and raged and cast herself from grace. Not this time. … In the hollow where her heart should have been, there was a glimmering cord.

Wicked Problems, pages 425 and 431

Interestingly, we get a potential explanation for how Mal’s soul at least survived the end of Two Serpents Rise. She turned away from the security and peace of her sacrifice. Doesn’t quite explain how her body survived, but this is intriguing.

Dawn literally pulls Mal out from the Serpents’ grip - something that should be almost impossible, yet she succeeds. She merges with Ajaia to do this, gaining new power. Yet, there is another force claiming Mal: the King in Red.

Kopil traps Mal in demonglass, crushing her into a marble. Dawn throws her magical weight against him, and Mal chooses to free her.

She remembered all her old drills–the response time of each branch of DL public service, how long it would take the King in Red to summon the powers asleep beneath the sand, the deathless legions and inhuman magics stored against wartime need. Dawn had to go. Now. And she couldn’t. Not with Mal stuck here, in the palm of her past. The bubble was smaller now. Her head curled down between her knees. But she could still move, barely. Could raise her hand, the hand that wormed, to the half-melted glyph above her heart. She had never been a good Craftswoman. But she had been one. It had been a long time since she drew her knife. It was broken and blunt, but it would serve for this. “Give ‘em hell, kid." She brought her blade to the silver cord and cut.

Wicked Problems, page 436

So, where does that leave Mal?

She is no longer connected to Dawn, but I can’t imagine Dawn will give her up that easily. She is in the possession of the King in Red, trapped in demonglass. The implication is that he will torture her for information, though given that he has immediately shown both Elayne Kevarian and Tara Abernathy his hand, I can’t imagine he’ll manage that too easily. Mal is definitely an enemy combatant rather than a civilian, but there is a Craft equivalent to the Geneva Convention, the Rift Accords.

Mal is a true believer in Dawn, but she is also intimately connected to Caleb, who is present with the King in Red, Tara, and Elayne. I can imagine various characters connecting with Mal in nightmares, particularly Caleb trying to bring her to the light, so to speak. Without her silver cord connecting her to Mal, will the link with Caleb be stronger? Will she turn from Dawn and join Dawn’s enemies?

We also know that Dead Hand Rule is set up around a massive international conference, bringing together various powers of the Domain. Will Mal be paraded before them? Interrogated by them? Speak before them?

Whatever comes next, Mal is going to be important. Will she survive the next two books? About that, I’m less convinced.

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