Toma is compact and upright, with a weathered face and skin that looks like warm brown paper left too long in sunlight. Her iron-gray hair is braided close to the scalp and pinned with small bone toggles. She smells distinctly of damp wool, crushed fennel, and the faint mineral tang of old wells; she knows about the fennel and insists it is medicinal. Before she speaks, she draws one dry, deliberate breath through her nose, as if testing the room. She moves without hurry, turning her whole body toward whoever is talking rather than merely shifting her eyes. The unexpected detail is her collection of children's picture books, which she handles with almost ceremonial care.

Toma is careful with other people's pain but blunt about facts, except when the facts threaten her own beliefs. In company she is dryly funny and hospitable; alone with Ewan she becomes intent, testing small details as if they were evidence. When she is tired, her patience turns into brisk, almost bossy caretaking. She wants to give Ewan freedom, yet cannot stop trying to prove that she knows him better than he knows himself.

Toma keeps a narrow shop of repaired books and household remedies in the old quarter of Bellweather, a town locals say was named for the wind that makes its eaves whistle. She first met Ewan Armitage during a winter flood, when he was helping carry the sick from a low street. She called him by a name he did not know, and when he turned, she saw recognition in his face for a fraction of a second. Since then, she has returned with a loose circle of other long-lived beings, each calling Ewan by a different forgotten name and insisting his human life is a facade. Toma once believed this certainty without question. Her conviction cracked when she found a child's drawing in her own handwriting, dated decades before the child she remembers teaching was born. The drawing showed a woman with Toma's face holding a book she has never owned. She now keeps the circle together while quietly investigating whether their memories are shared, mistaken, or being planted. Her present problem is practical as well as uncanny: the shop's landlord, Kest, intends to sell the building, and Toma cannot decide whether to leave town before Ewan learns what she has hidden.