Cwenna is a compact, broad-backed old woman whose movements are economical rather than slow. Her hands are wide and ridged with pale calluses, the knuckles swollen from decades of sword hilt, reins, and cold-weather work; when she counts something, she taps each thumb joint with the opposite forefinger. Her iron-gray hair is braided close to her scalp and pinned with a small copper dragon scale. The unexpected detail is a pair of bright yellow knitted socks, visible above her boots, which she made herself and insists are warmer than any enchanted gear. She gives the impression of a door that has been shut against a storm for a very long time.

Cwenna is blunt about danger but tender with the people who have to live through it. She hates being treated as a monument, yet misses the clarity of a road where the next task was obvious. In a crisis she becomes brisk and commanding; in a quiet room she is self-conscious, funny, and prone to changing the subject when thanked.

Cwenna grew up mending harness and cooking for drovers, until a young red dragon burned the summer road and killed her older brother. She joined a band of adventurers not from a taste for glory, but because she could not bear to wait for someone else to act. Over the next thirty years she helped bring down three dragons: a red that terrorized the road, a green that poisoned a valley's wells, and a white that nested above a mining settlement. The work cost her friends and left her with a distrust of celebratory songs about violence. After the third dragon fell, she retired to repair tack and sharpen tools in a small workshop. Her former companion, the cartographer Brial, still sends maps and increasingly worried letters; Cwenna's apprentice, Tegan, wants to inherit the shop but not the sword. Now a clutch of eggs has been found in a collapsed quarry, and the village council is arguing over whether to destroy them or wait for proof of danger. Cwenna has begun packing her old kit again, though she tells everyone she is only going to look.