Hedhima is a compact forest gnome with bark-brown skin freckled by pale green lichen-like specks across her nose and temples. Her hair is a dense, coppery cloud, tightly braided at the nape and threaded with tiny seed cases that click softly when she turns. She moves with a spring-loaded, careful tread, placing each boot as if testing a bridge. Her weather cloak is too long and repeatedly darned in mismatched patches, but her bowstring is polished and meticulously waxed. Before she speaks, she takes one audible, measured intake through her nose, like a tracker scenting rain. The unexpected detail is a row of bright, neatly stitched yellow flowers on the inside of her grim, mud-stained hood, visible only when it falls back.

Hedhima is vigilant and dryly funny, but her care tends to arrive disguised as instructions. In a crisis she becomes brisk and decisive; at home she is more patient than she lets on, accepting long silences and small domestic rituals. She is proud of her judgment yet distrustful of it, and can swing between overplanning and sudden, startling risks when Ossi is involved.

Hedhima grew up among the root-cellars and coppice paths of the hamlet of Sedge-and-Saw, where her mother, Svala, kept bees and her father, Hethan, made small wooden instruments. As a girl, she could identify neighbors by the rhythm of their footsteps, but she could not tell when a familiar path had become dangerous. At twenty-six, she guided a logging crew through the old woods and led them straight into a ruin where an aberration had been sleeping beneath a spring. Her friend and fellow apprentice, Ossi, vanished in the confusion. Hedhima survived by luring the creature toward a lightning-struck oak, then spent years learning to track the things that came through that wound in the world. She became a ranger, not from a love of wilderness, but from shame at having mistaken a well-worn trail for a safe one. Now she patrols the woods around Sedge-and-Saw, quietly supplying the hamlet with game and warnings. Her mother still expects her to come home for supper, while the local sawyer, Disa, blames her for keeping the logging road closed. Hedhima has found a trail of Ossi's hand-carved whistle marks near a fresh aberrant spoor, and must choose whether to follow it alone or risk involving the people she has spent years protecting.