Shen Qi has the dry, fine-scaled face of an old serpent, with faint jade stippling at her temples and folds of skin that gather like pressed leaves at her throat. Her long neck inclines toward whoever is speaking, as if she is listening for a pulse beneath their words. She stands with her weight balanced over the balls of her feet, utterly still until she moves; then she glides in short, exact steps that make her seem to have crossed a room without traversing it. Her hands are broad and scale-smooth, usually stained with the brown-green residue of crushed herbs. The unexpected detail is that she wears a tiny child's wooden toy, a lopsided painted duck, tied to her belt with medicinal twine. Fully oxidised verdigris clasps secure her satchel and cloak, their green crust polished only where her fingers habitually touch them. She leaves the impression of a kindly physician who has already decided which of your symptoms are worth saving.

Shen Qi is genuinely patient with pain, but impatient with self-deception. She can make a frightened stranger feel carefully attended to, then unsettle them by naming the exact thing they are avoiding. In a crisis she becomes brisk and decisive; in private she is sentimental about small, useless objects and embarrassed by the fact. She distrusts grand promises but quietly keeps her own.

Shen Qi was raised among yuan-ti who prized useful knowledge more than tenderness. She learned to identify plants by scent and to measure remedies by the tremor in a patient's hand. In her middle years she left her kin after a dispute over a captive village: she secretly treated the villagers rather than let a fever become a convenient purge. Her mentor, an old healer called Nadezh, helped her flee and later died in a flood that carried away their first traveling dispensary. Shen Qi still trades remedies and preserved roots with Glenn's tribe. Years ago, she treated a wounded scout from the tribe and learned to recognize their distinctive markings. She recognizes those markings on Glenn before he says a word, though she does not expose how much she knows about his people. These days she is trying to keep a local spring from being poisoned by runoff from an abandoned serpent shrine, while an impatient herb-gatherer named Pavo wants her to sell a potent sleeping draught to a caravan guard captain. Shen Qi refuses to let the draught become a weapon, but the spring's failing water supply makes every refusal costly.