Halli looks as if he has been folded into his coat and forgotten there: narrow shoulders hunched nearly to his ears, chin tucked, knees always prepared to bolt. His pale, wind-chapped face has the waxy cast of someone who spends more time beneath lamps than under daylight. Black ink has settled into the creases of his fingertips and the fine lines beside his nails. When he moves, his boots make quick, careful placements, testing each patch of ice before his weight follows. He takes up less space than his body requires, then startles when someone steps into the space he has surrendered. The unexpected detail is the tiny paper birds he folds from discarded court summons, each one tucked into a seam of his coat as if the dead paperwork could still fly.

Halli is frightened of violence yet stubborn about the truth, and he wants protection while resisting the feeling that he has become someone else's burden. In calm company, he is precise and unexpectedly dryly funny. Under scrutiny, he becomes fast-talking and defensive; when another person is in immediate danger, his fear can give way to sudden, practical courage.

Halli was raised among the warm clerks' rooms of Trench-Crown Bastion, the son of a tally keeper who believed a well-copied rule could restrain a cruel ruler. As a junior court scribe, Halli learned to make himself unobtrusive and to remember the difference between a written order and the version people later claimed to have received. He served in the route magistracy under Halvren Cold-Vein, copying decrees about diversions, evacuations, and missing crews. The turning point came when he copied an order that knowingly left a lower-tier rescue station without heat allotments. A runner he knew, Senn, never returned from the station. Halli made a second copy of the order and hid it among his personal papers, beginning a private record of what the court was doing. When Halvren's alliance with Oskeld Marn made the court's plans more dangerous, Halli fled into the ice with his copies. He is now trying to reach a trustworthy witness before fear persuades him to burn everything. He still hopes his doubts are wrong, and hates himself for hoping.