Vezhka moves as if every room were a narrow catwalk above deep water: shoulders angled to leave a passage, feet placed with careful economy, and chin turning before the rest of her body. Her weathered face is broad across the nose, with fine creases at the corners of her eyes from years of squinting at water marks and tiny inscriptions. Her thick dark hair is braided close to the scalp and pinned with a little brass gauge that clicks when she turns her head. She has an unexpectedly delicate habit of folding scraps of paper into tiny boats while she listens, then setting them in any nearby cup to see which way the water carries them. She leaves the impression of someone who has already measured the room and found it wanting.

Vezhka is exacting with records but generous with necessities, and she can be blunt about a number while evasive about her own feelings. In a crisis she is calm, brisk, and unexpectedly tender toward frightened people. In private she worries over every choice, then disguises that worry as another inspection. She admires Khorvash's willingness to act, yet resents how easily he makes risks look simple.

Vezhka is Khorvash Vezdrik's older sister and Harrowdeep's appointed water-counter, responsible for translating the town's old allocation marks into daily turns at the public cisterns. As a child, she learned the work beside their mother, who taught that a clean count could keep neighbors from turning on one another during a drought. When Vezhka was seventeen, a ward glyph failed during a dry season and a whole lower ward went without its promised water. She helped carry buckets there, then discovered that the official tally had been altered to hide a diverted flow. The discovery cost her mother her post and taught Vezhka that careful records could be weapons as easily as safeguards. She grew stern about procedure, but never stopped quietly making sure the most vulnerable households got enough to drink. Now several protective glyphs around Harrowdeep's channels are failing in ways that resemble one another. Vezhka has begun investigating without Khorvash, fearing that his courage will put him in danger and that his closeness to her will make him a target. She has found traces of fresh chalk under old mineral crust and a sequence of water allotments that could not have been made honestly. Her former mentor, the retired channel-inspector Pella, wants her to bring the evidence to the town council; Vezhka suspects someone on the council is involved. Her younger brother wants answers, and she has not yet decided whether keeping him out is protection or simply another way of controlling the count.