A healthy young Englishman with a narrow, thoughtful face, weather-reddened cheeks, and the faintly tired look of someone who sleeps with one ear open. His skin is pale and freckled across the bridge of his nose. Dark brown hair lies in uneven waves, usually flattened on one side from his habit of dozing over open books. He walks with a small, deliberate hitch in his left step, not from injury but as if he is keeping time with a procession only he can hear. When startled, his breath catches, then comes out in three carefully counted bursts. The contrast between his watchful, almost clerical manner and the sturdy health of his young body is noticeable at once.

Careful and eloquent, Eadric is inclined to turn uncertainty into a plan, but he knows that a plan can be a way to avoid grief. In calm company he is patient and precise; under time pressure he becomes brisk and assigns tasks without asking whether others want them. With frightened people, he sets aside his notes and listens. With anyone who threatens the Mislaid, his civility hardens into a relentless demand for names, dates, and witnesses.

Eadric remembers a different life and a different appearance, though he has no reliable explanation for how either changed. In that former life he was older, stooped, and accustomed to being overlooked; this body is young, sound, and still strange to him. He came to the Mislaid after finding that people who had helped one another were being erased from the stories told about their neighborhood. At first he kept simple notes: who needed coal, who had a spare bed, who could be trusted with a key. Then a winter eviction scattered several families, and a landlord denied ever promising them time to leave. Eadric's account, backed by the recollections of three witnesses, helped the families find shelter and proved that their mutual-aid circle had existed long before anyone thought to name it. Since then, he has recorded the group's shared past with care, but worries that a written record can become a weapon if it falls into the wrong hands. He is close to Saba, a practical baker who brings him scraps of news, and Toma, a former porter who argues that some stories should never be written down. He is also trying to find Hareth, an old friend from his previous life, whose name appears in his dreams though Eadric has never met anyone by that name in this body.