Iven looks like a man shaped by long days in wet woods: quiet, spare, and difficult to surprise. His hands draw the eye first. The pads of his fingers are ridged and darkened from bowstring, bark, and resin, while his nails are kept short and stained faintly green from plant dyes. He stands with his weight resting on the balls of his feet, knees loose, as if ready to step around a sound rather than toward it. He walks with an economical, almost sideways glide through brush, but plants his feet firmly on stone. The unexpected detail is that he wears a tiny, carefully folded paper flower pinned inside his collar, replacing it whenever rain ruins it.

Patient with frightened people and impatient with preventable danger, Iven is more tender than his practical manner suggests. He can sit silently with a grieving stranger, yet will interrupt a confident leader who ignores a bad trail. In good spirits he tells small, wry stories about animals; under pressure he becomes blunt and relentlessly focused. He wants company but often arranges his life so nobody has to rely on him.

Iven grew up among the tree-cutters and charcoal burners of Rillford, a settlement named for the timber rafts once sent down its shallow river. His mother, Luta, taught him to read tracks; his father, Borik, taught him to judge a bow's pull by feel. When Iven was young, a hunting party drove a wounded owlbear toward the settlement. It broke through a barricade while Iven was on watch. He froze, then ran for help, and the delay cost his cousin Fenna a leg. Fenna refused to blame him, but Iven never forgave himself. He left home to learn how to keep danger from reaching other people. Years later, he found the same kind of baiting marks on trees near Rillford: someone is deliberately steering monsters toward the old logging roads. He sends supplies to Fenna, now a practical-minded ferrier, and avoids answering her letters about coming home.