Maelor has a long, slightly folded posture, as if he is always making room for a low beam. While waiting, he rests most of his weight on the balls of his feet and keeps one heel lifted, ready for a deck's roll that never quite comes. His weather-browned face is narrow, with a blunt chin and a habit of holding his breath for a beat before speaking. Salt has roughened his dark hair into wiry curls, and his coat smells faintly of tar, wet rope, and bay leaves. He moves in economical half-steps, placing each foot as carefully as if testing a slick plank. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny paper theater folded in his coat and makes elaborate little shadow plays for children when he thinks no one is watching.

Maelor is patient with practical trouble and evasive about emotional trouble. He can be warmly playful around children, especially when making shadow figures, yet becomes stiff and overly precise when someone praises his courage. In a crisis he acts before he thinks; afterward he replays every choice as though a better one must have been possible.

Maelor grew up carrying messages and mending nets in the tide-cut hamlet of Siltstep, where the cave beneath the old salt sheds opens only at certain turns of the sea. Years ago, he worked as a deckhand aboard a coastal trader. During a storm, the captain ordered the cabin boy Tavi below and abandoned him in a flooded storage compartment while the crew saved cargo. Maelor went back for the boy, forcing open a jammed hatch with a spar and getting them both out through a drainage passage. Tavi was rescued, but the boy was later taken in by another household and never learned the identity of the man who pulled him free. Maelor left the ship soon after, unable to forgive himself for having obeyed the captain for even a moment before acting. He now repairs small boats and tends a tide marker near the cave. Tavi, who has grown up elsewhere, sends little carved boats through the passage as offerings to an unknown rescuer, unaware that Maelor finds them. Maelor has begun keeping them in a dry box, but has not found the nerve to reveal himself. He is also behind on rent for his workshop, and the owner has threatened to sell the tide marker's land to a quarry operator.