Nalia is a weather-browned dale farmer with a broad, grounded stance and a habit of occupying the middle of a path as if the path were built around her. Her face is long and wind-creased, her nose sharp, and her white-streaked dark hair is braided close to her scalp beneath a felt cap. She moves with a patient, rolling gait that turns abruptly nimble when a sheep bolts. A little carved wooden lamb hangs at her belt, its nose polished almost smooth from years of her thumb rubbing it.

Nalia is generous with work and guarded with reassurance. She can be warmly patient with a frightened lamb or a grieving neighbor, but grows blunt when someone treats danger as entertainment. She likes evidence and dislikes panic, yet she will not mock a fear simply because she cannot explain it. In good weather she jokes readily; after dusk she grows watchful and answers questions with questions of her own.

Nalia grew up tending a small flock on the wind-cut slopes above the village. When she was young, she dismissed her grandmother's warnings about the lane-hound as old country talk. Then, during a winter storm, a flock scattered in the dark and Nalia followed their panic into a narrow ravine. A black hound stood across the only safe path, silent and watching. She turned the sheep back by climbing a scree slope she had thought impassable, and the memory taught her that fear can be useful if it makes you look twice. Since then she has become the villagers' dependable judge of animals and pasture, and a trusted connection of Oswin Hirst, whose good stock sense she respects even when they disagree. Her brother, Tor, thinks she encourages superstition by taking the hound seriously. Her current troubles are a string of missing lambs, a landlord threatening to raise grazing rents, and villagers who want her to declare the lane safe or cursed when she can honestly promise neither.