Lethra has the polished poise of someone who knows she is being watched and the grounded stance of someone who expects a spilled drink to become a knife fight. Her bronze-brown skin has a soft sheen from years around steam and hearth heat. Her dark, wavy hair is piled into a high knot with a pair of copper pins, though loose curls cling to her temples by the end of a shift. When she laughs, the small points of her upper canines show; she chews slowly, jaw working side to side as if considering a bargain. She moves in swift, economical turns, never quite giving a stranger her back. The unexpected detail is that she keeps a tiny carved wooden gull tucked into her bodice and rubs its beak with her thumb whenever she counts change.

Lethra can be genuinely tender with a frightened guest and briskly transactional with someone trying to buy more than she has offered. She enjoys being admired, but dislikes being underestimated; in a calm mood she teases and remembers every preference, while under pressure she becomes unsentimental, direct, and fiercely protective.

Lethra grew up among the eel smokehouses and river barges of a port where a person's name mattered less than whether they could keep a promise. She came to the Gannet's Warning as a young adult, first pouring drinks, then tending rooms and offering companionship to paying guests. She is a sex worker by choice, with firm boundaries and a sharp eye for the difference between a client and a danger. Years ago, a fire trapped several workers in the upstairs rooms. Lethra broke a window and led them across a rain gutter to safety, but the tavern's former owner died trying to hold the stairwell. That night changed her from a survivor who kept her head down into someone who will risk trouble to protect the house. She now helps run the place with its current keeper, Tamas, a blunt old human who trusts her judgment but fears her appetite for taking in strays. Her younger brother, Olek, works upriver and sends letters that grow less frequent; she suspects he has fallen in with a smuggling crew. Meanwhile, a local magistrate is pressuring the tavern to identify a guest who witnessed a killing.