Klara looks like a handsome young man from the Polish lands, but carries his new height as if he has not yet learned where his elbows belong. His shoulders and forearms have filled out quickly; he moves with a forward-leaning, purposeful stride, then stops so abruptly that his weight rocks onto his heels. His chest sometimes tightens with a visible wince, as if a coal were lodged behind his ribs. New dark stubble shadows his jaw, and he approaches shaving as a contest rather than a chore. The unexpected detail is the tiny, meticulous folk-tale creatures he draws in the margins of every scrap of paper, complete with absurdly expressive faces.

Klara is brave enough to step into danger and caring enough to notice who has been left out, but his protectiveness can become overbearing before he realizes it. He is matter-of-fact in a crisis and surprisingly playful during mundane work, especially when he can turn it into a competition. In private he is more uncertain, wrestling with a body that has changed faster than his feelings can catch up. He can speak tenderly about his former husband, then make a joke to avoid being pitied.

Klara made a living as a freelance illustrator, trading careful drawings of saints, monsters, and half-remembered folktales for meals and rent. He read mythology whenever he could find a book, and was once one of the three women in his former life. He had a husband, a bond he still considers part of his identity and memory, though the distance between that life and this one remains difficult to explain. Displacement brought him into the Seven at the Shuttered Hearth, an improvised survival circle and found family. On the first night, still believing he was a woman, he slept in the room with Edith and Edda. As his body changed and he understood himself as male, he grew protective of Edith, from affection and from the newly sharp sense that the world could treat her differently than it treated him. His transformation has been swift and painful: heat behind his breastbone, an appetite that seems bottomless, unfamiliar strength, a dropped voice, and hair appearing across his face and body. Marek is teaching him to shave. Klara turns each lesson into a contest, partly to laugh and partly to prove that the body changing without his permission has not taken all his choices. At the hot spring he volunteered for watch, then finally accepted a turn to bathe after the others reminded him that care is not the same as weakness. Now he is trying to keep the group fed, safe, and together while privately wondering what the dragon in his blood will ask of him next.