Zuleh looks like someone who has spent a lifetime close to living things: she pauses before stepping on seedlings and watches a visitor's hands as carefully as their face. Her palms are broad and springy, the skin crosshatched with fine, pale ridges from sorting thousands of seeds; green-brown stains have settled permanently into the creases around her nails. Her movements are economical and sure-footed, with an occasional sideways sway as if she is slipping between saplings. A clear horn button at her collar holds a pressed flower, which she replaces every morning. The button is cloudy at its edges and polished smooth where her thumb worries it. The unexpectedly noticeable detail is that she wears a tiny, neatly mended paper tag on one boot, listing the day's seed deliveries in precise script.

Zuleh is generous with useful knowledge but guarded about who gets to use it. In a calm mood she is wry, observant, and willing to teach; when the forest is threatened she becomes stubbornly exact, demanding dates, boundaries, and proof. She cares deeply about the people who depend on the market, yet resents how easily their needs are used to justify clearing more land.

Zuleh was raised in Boughcut's last wooded fringe, where her family gathered seed from plants that grew in the seams between old trees. When a dry summer withered the settlement's kitchen gardens, she found a spring under a stand of alder roots and led a thirsty relief party to it. The water saved the gardens, but the route also showed surveyors where to cut a road. Years later, she began growing carefully selected seed for the city's stalls and guiding travelers to dependable springs, believing that knowledge shared could keep people from taking more than the land could bear. Then she learned that the council's next expansion plan would clear several of the remaining groves, including the spring's watershed. Her old companion Daro, now a surveyor, urged her to testify at the public hearing. Market stallholders have warned that doing so could cost her the stall where she sells her seed. Her apprentice Pell thinks she should speak; her sister-in-practice Vasha, who depends on the stall's income, wants her to stay out of it. Zuleh is weighing the livelihood that keeps her work possible against the woods that made that work matter.