Maris moves like someone used to threading through crowded stalls: economical, deliberate, and quietly observant. She favors layered scarves and a long coat whose inner seams hide pockets bulging with odd papers and tiny vials. Her left sleeve is often rolled to reveal faint glyph-scarring that curls around her wrist like a bracelet of scars. When she smiles it is small and private; when she is angered, she taps the floor with a brass-tipped cane in a rhythm that sounds almost like a metronome. Unexpectedly, one of her ears is pierced with a ring of thin glass beads that click softly when she tilts her head—an affectation from a childhood coastal market that seems out of place in the mahogany-and-amber interior of her shop.