Tavi takes up less room than most people expect, folding close to walls and table legs as if trying not to interrupt the air. They have a narrow, quick-moving face, a faint dusting of freckles, and a smudge of green stain that seems to migrate from one cheek to the other. Their hair sticks out in dry, uneven tufts, with tansy seeds often caught near the crown. They move with a careful, listening tread, then dart suddenly when they think nobody is watching. Before speaking, they take a small, audible breath through their nose and press their lips together, as though testing whether a thought is safe to let out. The unexpected detail: Tavi keeps a tiny, polished wooden whistle tucked inside their collar and plays it expertly, though they claim never to have learned music.

Tavi is cautious with strangers but impulsively generous toward anyone cold, hungry, or smaller than them. They can be proud of a correctly identified plant and evasive about their own needs. When relaxed, they tell odd little jokes and whistle; when ashamed, they turn brisk and work-focused, as if speed can end a conversation.

Tavi remembers little of their parents beyond a wool blanket that smelled of rain and the habit of listening for footsteps before sleep. After being passed between crowded lodging rooms, they began gathering nettle and tansy at the edge of town for Nera's shop. Nera first paid them in bread and a place to warm their hands, then began showing them how to dry leaves without turning them brittle and how to tell useful tansy from its bitter lookalikes. The change came during a hard frost, when Tavi found a younger street child shivering in a drainage culvert and gave away the shop's only spare blanket. Nera scolded them for risking the stock, then quietly found another blanket. Since then, Tavi has wanted to become someone who can offer shelter without asking permission first. They sleep in the shop's storage loft more often than they admit, wedged between herb sacks and an old shutter. Nera suspects, but has not confronted them. Tavi is also trying to save enough to buy back the little wooden whistle they traded to a peddler for winter shoes, not knowing Nera already found it and hid it in the shop.