Elysande stands with the tidy, unassuming posture of someone trained in both ceremony and swordplay. Her hair is a loose, sun-fried plait that looks almost too bright for this world — a rope of pale gold braided with a single silver thread of windwhorled metal that hums faintly when she concentrates. Her clothing is an intentional mismatch: a fitted leather jerkin dyed in the soft blue of the kingdom she helped liberate, beneath a flowing, turban-like scarf in saffron and indigo borrowed from the current land's fashion. She moves with the coiled economy of a soldier but the measured grace of a negotiator; when she laughs it is sudden and a little loud, like a burst of bell tone. Unexpectedly, she wears a child's charm bracelet on her left wrist — a clinking band of mismatched trinkets from home — which makes her seem oddly vulnerable beside the polished sword at her hip.