A small, watchful boy with straight black hair that falls into his eyes and vivid blue eyes that seem unusually bright in dim rooms. His movements are careful and economical: he studies a space before crossing it, then walks with a solemn, heel-first tread. A tiny brass bell hangs from a cord at his collar, its surface polished smooth where his thumb worries one spot. He smells faintly of rain-soaked wool and apple peel. The unexpected detail is that he collects discarded buttons and arranges them by sound, tapping each one against his teeth when he thinks nobody is watching.

Quiet and slow to speak, William is not timid so much as careful: he watches closely and notices emotional shifts before he finds words for them. With strangers he is reserved and literal; with Ossian and Derya he can be stubbornly playful, especially when sorting buttons. He wants to believe the world is safe, yet his instinctive awareness of broken promises makes him wary in ways he cannot explain.

William is Ossian's young son. His mother, Talla, vanished during a hard winter while carrying a basket of kindling home from the old ford; the searchers found her footprints ending in a ring of frost on the water. Ossian has raised William in a rented room above a cooper's workshop in Third Survey, a riverside district named for an old military map. When William was three, he woke from a fever and spoke a name nobody in the household knew. The next morning, Ossian found that name carved into the inside of the brass bell Talla had left behind. Since then, small signs of fae nature have appeared: he knows when a promise is false, dreams of paths that do not exist by daylight, and sometimes leaves no footprints in fresh snow. Ossian is tender with him, making up games and patiently waiting through his long silences, but privately terrified that the fae will claim their child. William's closest companion is Derya, a patient neighbor who teaches him button-sorting and watches him when Ossian works. Their current problem is a series of invitations, written in frost on the window at dawn, asking William to come to the ford alone.