"Are you always this weird, Kellen?"... "Always, I promise."
Daughter of the craftswoman Janucha zal Ghassan, she is as brilliant as her mother. A born Gitabrian, she is studying to become... (An architect?)
Cressia and Kellen meet at the Academy where she is a student, and she informs him that she only likes girls. She is somewhat impressed by his (apparently) shameless confidence, while he admired her for her wit and bravery.
The two meet again in Charmcaster, when Kellen comes to Gitabria in search of another student carrying obsidian worms. That student turns out to be Cressia. Mages from Kellen's own tribe are controlling her in order to gain access to her mother's inventions, as Kellen realizes at the great unveiling of the Mechanical Bird.
Kellen is able to rid her of the worms by her eye, but her opinion of him at the end of the book is yet unclear as he was unable to stop her parents's deaths.