"Is it me, or are you this nervous around all women?"
Katrina is a strong and colorful woman from the town of Sleepy Hollow, and helps breathe life and new ideas into literal minded Ichabod Crane.
She is the daughter of Baltus VanTassel, the richest and most powerful man in Sleepy Hollow. Her family has built themselves up from nothing to a position of great power and wealth.
Katrina's mother died when she was very young. Her mother performed witchcraft, and she was told by her father that that was the cause of her death. Her father remarried not too long after his first wife's death. He married the nurse that was the one who tended to his first during her time of illness.
"To call a person superstitious is to imply they fear magic, but not all magic is black."
Katrina, though her father has warned her about what happened to her mother, performs small amounts of witchcraft. She reads her mother's books late at night and is forced to hide them from others, usually stuffing them beneath the cushions of the sofa.
At one point, she gives Ichabod a book of spells that had been her mother's to protect him. She tells him to always keep it close to his heart.
"You are horribly old-fashioned, aren't you?"
Katrina falls for Ichabod almost instantly, and goes with him in search of the Headless Horseman when no one else would. Ichabod believes that she belongs to Brom VanBrunt, but she confides in him later that no one means as much to her as he does.
When her family's name is threatened by Ichabod, she is forced to chose to defend her father's honor. She tells Ichabod that she no longer can love him, but her actions later on prove that her words were false.
