Tarisa Mandeil was born Tarsakh (April) 6, 1483 in Khymrych, a small farming village about a hundred leagues southeast of Marsember. The only daughter of the moneylender Erik Mandeil and his wife Vanessa, Tarri is an astonishingly pretty girl, with beautiful golden hair and large green eyes.

(Khymrych is an unusual town; the vast majority of its inhabitants trace their lines back to a single, still-living woman, the undead-hunter Nacheyla duRosten. The Mandeils are not Nacheyla's descendants, but Tarri - having been raised so close to the near-religion of the Blessed Mother and expecting to marry in to the tribe - is still somewhat in awe of her.)

Tarri was a bright, outgoing, and mischievous child, charming her way out of trouble almost as often as she got into it. When Tarri was thirteen, her mother was bitten by a poisonous snake and died before a healer could be summoned to help her. This left Tarri to take care of her father, and she learned earlier than most of her friends how to perform domestic chores such as cooking and sewing.

As she matured into adulthood, her mischievous tendencies gradually changed into flirtatiousness. Between her physical beauty and outgoing charm, she was quite popular with a number of the young men of Khymrych. She walked out for a time with the charming and attractive Tomas Tailor - but soon tired of his disparaging comments about her enjoyment of reading and his demands for physical liberties she was not willing to grant. She dropped Tomas and began walking out with Vallel d'Nache.

About a month before her seventeenth birthday, Tarri and Vallel snuck into his father's barn to fool around. Tarri's plan was to snare Vallel as a husband, but it backfired when Vallel's latent psionic powers suddenly became active, catching their clothes, the barn, and Tarri's hair on fire.

She wasn't physically harmed much by the incident, but the showy nature of the story ensured that everyone in the village knew about her downfall. Where before she had been a pretty, popular girl, Tarri suddenly found herself looked down upon by her peers - especially certain young men, who expected her damaged reputation to lead her naturally into promiscuity. The only thing that might have saved her would have been immediate marriage to Vallel, but he had been sent to the psionics school in Marsember to learn to control his talent - and Tarri was now too frightened of him to marry him in any case.

After a little more than a year of this, Tarri received an offer of employment from Marsember, one which her father eagerly accepted on her behalf. Before she had entirely understood what was happening, she had been carried off to the City of Spices to be a nursemaid for Cwalindia and Jalavier Bluestar.

In Marsember, Tarri became re-acquainted with Vallel, and met his fiancée, Glossaria Anobium. The meeting was an accident, the result of her meeting Vallel's roommate Sanriel Tailorson. Frightened as she was at the meeting, it has turned out for the best, and she now counts Vallel and Glossaria among her dearest friends - along with Sanriel, to whom she became engaged.

In the spring of 1402, she was kidnapped by Tomas, who had been corrupted by the evil artifact of the dead god Bane. She was one of several potential candidates "honored" with the potential of being mother to a reborn Bane. She was rescued by Vallel and his sister Loria (a priestess of Nacheyla).

The event left her scarred in ways that marred her relationship with Sanriel. Regretfully, she returned Sanriel's ring to him and turned to her studies as an apprentice healer. It was in this capacity that she met Orlann Drilgar, the last survivor of an attack on his home village of Bleakhill, in the mountains west of Marsember.