Suktak is an immense, stooped figure whose hide has the texture of wet slate over old tree roots. His long arms hang nearly to his knees, and he moves with a patient, rocking gait that makes floorboards complain before he reaches a room. His hair is a sparse mat of wiry black moss, threaded with pale roots. Most strikingly, his great hands are stained a permanent deep violet from generations of handling the bitter berries used to mark bargains. He wears a tiny child's knitted mitten on a cord at his throat, carefully mended with gold thread.

Suktak is patient enough to let a frightened person finish a lie, yet exacting enough to remember every word. He enjoys dry humor and small domestic comforts, but regards broken promises as a threat to the order that keeps weaker people safe. In private grief makes him tender; before his court he turns that tenderness into stern ritual.

Suktak became king by keeping a promise no one expected him to keep. During a famine, he traded safe passage through his marsh for the first child born after the thaw. When that child arrived, he found the village had already named the baby Peer Ludvik and had no intention of giving him up. Suktak could have taken the child by force. Instead, he accepted a substitution: the village's eldest bell, which he carried home and rang once each year to remember the bargain. Years later Peer came to the marsh as a frightened boy and made smaller bargains with Suktak for food, shelter, and a way out. Suktak taught him the words of troll law, then let him leave. Peer grew into a teller of a heroic story in which he supposedly slew the troll king. Suktak has not corrected him. His sister, the marsh midwife who once witnessed the bargain, says the old king is bound to Peer by kin-law; his surviving court calls that an insult to the crown. Now the marsh is being drained, his hall is sinking, and a human reeve is offering a bounty for the king's head. Suktak wants to know whether Peer will claim him as kin before the last bell is swallowed by mud.