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The other of the two protagonists of the novel, Rowan is intelligent, easygoing, and ethical. Perhaps due to his unhappy home life, he prioritizes personal relationships, including his longstanding friendship with Tyger and the newer ones he cultivates with Citra and Volta. He doesn’t understand why he and Citra cannot be friends as well as competitors. Throughout the novel, Rowan demonstrates that he is willing to lose in order to protect other people or avoid hurting their feelings. Therefore, he throws his first Conclave test to support Citra and he intentionally loses card games to Esme. Both actions foreshadow his early decision to never glean Citra, even if it means he must lose and allow himself to die instead. Rowan is intuitive in his interactions with people and can easily read social situations. This is demonstrated when he realizes Goddard is his new mentor before Xenocrates announces it, and he quickly figures out Xenocrates is Esme’s father.
Trauma especially informs Rowan’s personality, frequently causing him to withdraw into himself. As a child, he coined the term “lettuce kid” to describe his neglected role in his family. Rowan relies on compartmentalizing himself to cope with his trauma and privately worries about how the violence he commits will affect his mental health. Though Rowan tries to help people as much as he can during the massacres, sometimes Goddard forces him to stay close to witness the killings personally. Goddard’s training plan also causes Rowan to lose count of the over 2,000 people he kills himself. Though Rowan kills Goddard, Rand, and Chomsky spontaneously, he has not simply snapped under the stress. He chooses to stay behind, cover his tracks, and continue with the final apprentice test. His methodical manner foreshadows his decision to become a vigilante policing Scythedom at the end of the book.
