Ysa Longstep is a lean, long-limbed male tiefling whose grey cloak hangs in weather-stiff folds, patched with squares of darker cloth that never quite match. He carries a longbow taller than he is, its grip polished slick by years of use and its upper limb wrapped in neat, pale thread. His small, swept-back horns are ridged like old wood, and his tail moves with measured, almost silent corrections as he walks. The left pinky is missing; the healed end is usually hidden inside a glove with its little finger sewn shut. He moves as if each step has already been measured for distance and cover. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny, badly made clay bird tucked into his collar, its paint worn away from being handled.

Ysa is disciplined enough to wait through an insult and proud enough to remember it for years. He protects the people under his command because he knows what it means to be expendable, yet he weighs their safety against his own ambition with an unsettling calm. In public he is clipped and difficult to read; with his mother or alone with a broken piece of gear, he becomes unexpectedly patient. When frightened, he gets more practical, not more honest.

Ysa grew up hauling freight along the wind-scoured road between the quarry settlement of Varnsk and the river towns. His mother, Tressa, taught him to judge distance by the sound of a wagon wheel; his father, a hired bowman, taught him that a clean shot could settle an argument before it began. At seventeen, Ysa joined a border company and became its best pathfinder, valued for his patience and disliked for his habit of making every kindness sound like a debt. During a disastrous retreat, his commander ordered him to abandon a trapped supply crew to preserve the officers' escape. Ysa obeyed. The crew's youngest survivor, a child named Pella, later found him and gave him the clay bird she'd made from roadside mud. He keeps it, though he tells no one why. Years afterward, he took command of a band of road wardens and began selling safe passage to the highest bidder. His former commander, now a powerful magistrate, still controls the contracts that keep Ysa's people fed. Pella, grown and working as a courier, has recently started asking questions about the retreat. Ysa wants to keep his lieutenant's command, secure his followers' future, and prevent either relationship from forcing him to choose between loyalty and self-preservation.