Jor resembles a clean-cut young Norse nobleman who has just walked out of a wreck: tall and still growing, with a pale, composed face and an unsettlingly steady gaze. His fair hair is fading toward almost-white blond, as if bleached by years of spray. The clothes are noble in cut but hang damply from him, salt-stiff at the hems and clinging at the cuffs. He moves with careful, tide-like economy, placing each foot as though testing the deck beneath it. A faint sea smell follows him. His smile exposes small, crowded teeth and a jaw that works slowly, even when he is not eating. He carries himself with an odd stillness for someone who used to be eager to brawl.

Jor's old impulse to charge into a quarrel now collides with the deliberate patience drilled into him by his captors. Around strangers he is composed and watchful; around family, a flash of his former excitable, combative self returns. When ashamed, he becomes formal and evasive. When hungry, the mask thins and his attention fixes on food with an unnerving calm.

Jor Heimskrsson is Heimskr's fifth son, raised in a household where every birth order carried political weight. As a boy, he was quick to volunteer for guard drills and quicker to take offense on behalf of his brothers. He imagined earning a name through service until the succession crisis made that future look like a path into someone else's war. His family sent him north toward Iceland to seek land, wealth, and a life beyond the struggle over inheritance. The ship wrecked in the North Sea. Jor survived, but trolls took him from the water and held him in their hidden sea-country. They trained him to observe, imitate, and carry messages, then used troll magic to reshape him into a sea-troll changeling. His first week of captivity was formative: after a failed escape, his captors made him choose between revealing a fellow captive's hiding place and watching that captive be dragged into the cold. Jor gave the hiding place, and has never forgiven himself. Now he has returned in his own familiar face, presenting himself as a miracle survivor. He has not told his family what happened, and still expects others to understand him before he realizes they do not. His new calm is partly practiced spycraft and partly a defense against the hunger that rises when he is frightened. He is secretly sending harmless-seeming observations back to his troll handlers, while trying to learn whether his family can accept a son who may no longer be fully human.