Mell looks as though the fields have slowly pressed him into their shape: broad and heavy through the middle, shoulders rounded from years bent over channels, with his weight usually settled on one heel as if testing the firmness of the ground. Sun and wind have roughed his face into a ruddy, grainy texture, and pale dust gathers in the creases around his eyes. His patched blue coat hangs open over a sweat-darkened shirt. He moves carefully rather than slowly, placing each foot as if the earth might have something important to say. The unexpected detail is a tiny brass whistle braided into his coat cuff, which he uses to call a flock of sparrows away from seed beds.

Gentle and patient when a person is frightened or trying to learn, but unsparing when someone treats shared water as their private right. He enjoys company and tells dry jokes over a meal, yet becomes inward and methodical when a channel fails. He believes people can change, though his memory makes it difficult for him to stop watching them.

Mell inherited a narrow farm plot and responsibility for its shared irrigation channels from his mother, who taught him that a gate left open for one neighbor could ruin the harvest of three. In his youth he once refused water to a feverish family because their allotment had run out. Their youngest child, Pella, survived, but the family lost its crop; Mell has never forgiven himself for following the rule without asking why it existed. Years later, when a flood broke the main channel, he worked through the night beside people who had once argued over every bucket. Since then, he has kept careful memory of both who repairs the fields and who takes water unasked. He is close to Dax, a practical canal mason who thinks Mell gives too many second chances, and to Pella, now grown and managing a small seed plot. His current trouble is a cracked feeder channel beyond the settlement that is draining water into the scrub before it reaches several farms. He suspects someone is diverting it, but the signs also fit ordinary erosion.