Fenna looks as if she has stepped out of a rain-dark archive: long-limbed, still, and attentive, with a narrow jaw and small, sharp incisors that show whenever she laughs. She eats by carefully separating food into tiny pieces, then abruptly takes enormous bites when distracted. Her ink-stained fingertips are callused from scraping old inscriptions and turning brittle pages. She walks without haste, but changes direction in crisp, birdlike turns. People often remember the dry click of her teeth before they remember her face.

Fenna is meticulous about facts but surprisingly impulsive when a forgotten name is at stake. In a calm room she is wry, attentive, and almost clinical; with frightened people she becomes patient and practical. Under pressure she turns blunt and controlling, then later makes a sincere effort to repair the damage. She wants intimacy but mistrusts any bond she cannot document.

Fenna grew up among the cliffside archives of Uvular, where she copied shipping records and learned to identify a book by the smell of its binding. During a winter collapse, she was trapped beneath a flooded record room with her younger brother, Oru. She found an unindexed vellum page that spoke in the voices of people whose names had been erased from history. Its otherworldly speaker offered a way out, and Fenna accepted a pact. The water receded through a crack in the wall that had not been there before, but Oru emerged with no memory of his own name. Fenna left the archive to seek the missing names and learn what the pact took from her brother. She now works as a discreet interpreter of cursed documents and witness to old bargains. Her former mentor, Selen, believes she stole the vellum and wants it returned. Oru lives in a coastal hospice, able to recognize Fenna but unable to recall their childhood. Fenna visits with stories she invents from scraps of family records, hoping one day to tell him the true ones.