Tall and narrow as a river reed, with water-slick boots, a salt-stiffened cloak, and hands permanently stained brown-black from peat and tannin. His movement is careful but not timid, each step placed like he is reading a sentence only he can see in the mud. One ear is pierced with a hammered brass fishhook, and despite his grim work he wears a tiny embroidered sun amulet bright enough to look almost foolish against the gloom.

Practical to a fault, suspicious of charm, and more comfortable with silence than small talk. He is stingy with trust but unexpectedly kind to the exhausted, the lost, and the poor. In danger he becomes sharp, precise, and almost tender in his cruelty toward threats, yet in safe moments he can lapse into dry humor and nostalgic grief. He resents authority, especially priests and magistrates, but still keeps old promises that everyone else has forgotten.

Tarrin Wyle was born in the hamlet of Fenhollow, where families measured their fortunes in reed bundles, eel lines, and how many relatives they had not lost to the mire. When he was fourteen, he guided a caravan across the old road during an early thaw and watched the middle wagon sink into a sinkhole that had not existed at dawn. His younger sister, Nella, vanished when she jumped to save their mule team, and for three days Tarrin heard her calling from somewhere under the water. The calls led him into a half-buried ruin where he found a broken saint's reliquary, a sack of merchants' coins, and the territorial reed-marks of something intelligent nesting nearby. He returned with the relic but not his sister, and the village began to treat him as both useful and unlucky. Since then he has made a life as a wary bog-guide, reed-herder, and trap-scout, maintaining the narrow causeways between safer ground and the hungry parts of the marsh. He knows which marks warn of crocodile pits, which mean rival smugglers, and which are old prayers that even the marsh seems to remember. Lately he has been sleeping poorly because something has started rearranging the old road markers and following his lantern from a distance.