Kukka

Kukka is a black-haired human woman who practices witchcraft on the island of Skellig. She numbers among its community of young mages.

Kukka keeps a cooler head than many of her peers. She is the first to rebuke Molda for the hostility that witch shows Guts and his party on their arrival, and she loses patience with Molda's stubbornness over how Elfhelm ought to teach magic. Toward the newcomers themselves she is gentle and welcoming, even though rumor had led the islanders to expect outsiders as coarse as Isidro and Magnifico; she takes to Schierke at once and does not hesitate to check Isidro on his rudeness.

She first appears in shadow beside Theuene and Iony, remarking that no ordinary human could ever breach the barrier that wards the island. When Schierke quiets the scarecrows guarding a magic pumpkin patch, Kukka begins to suspect Iony is right that the stranger wields magic. As Molda escalates, dragging out a taboo wicker man and then attacking once Guts destroys it, Kukka moves in to scold her for such reckless violence and frets that the spreading fire could scorch the whole field beyond any but a guru's power to quell. Once Gedfring douses the flames with rain, she introduces herself and asks the visiting Schierke what she is doing in the company of Isidro and Magnifico.

Hearing that the group crossed the sea to mend Casca's sanity, she reflects that the Flower Storm Monarch might manage it through the Corridor of Dreams, and she praises the party for braving the ocean on nothing but a flicker of hope once the Great Wave of the Astral World had struck. She finds Guts' beherit unsettling and marvels that he has heard of the Falcon of Light who caused that catastrophe. Traveling on to Elfhelm with Danan and Gedfring, she explains the absence of the weight elementals called barytes in the local forests, listens to a drunken Isma spin tales at the welcoming feast, and later attends Gedfring's lessons, startled when Farnese calls up the Four Kings of the World with no magic circle at all.

Kukka takes it upon herself to teach Schierke to ride a broom, and when Isidro torments the witches she rallies them into groups to thrash him. She is among the Skellig mages evacuated as the island is destroyed, appears during the Kushan assault on the Seahorse, and later walks the Kushan capital's streets as Qliphoth rises. Her name, fittingly, is the Finnish word for flower.