Jarek is compact and broad, with the dense, forward-balanced build of a man who learned to take a hit without giving ground. His copper-brown skin is weathered at the temples and shiny across the knuckles; pale dust from the fighting pit settles in the creases of his beard. His black hair is clipped short except for a narrow braid behind one ear, threaded with a single brass washer from his first paid bout. His beard is forked into two blunt points and usually smells faintly of clove oil and iron. He walks with a measured heel-to-toe roll, as if every floor might suddenly become a ring. Within a minute, most people notice his unexpected habit of smoothing the rumpled corner of any cloth he passes, even while sizing up a room.

He can be boisterous and teasing when he wants to make nervous people feel included, yet becomes exacting and unsentimental when someone is being exploited. He loves the spectacle of a clean contest but hates the business built around it. In private he is patient with beginners and impatient with himself; when grief catches him off guard, he fusses over small repairs instead of talking.

Jarek grew up hauling stone at a quarry where his mother, Dagna, taught him to judge a block by the sound it made under a hammer. At twenty, a cave-in trapped him with his younger brother for most of a day. Jarek could hear the rescue crew but could not shift the slab, and his brother died before they reached them. He entered the fighting pits soon afterward, first for money and then because the roar of a crowd drowned out the silence he carried home. Years later he became the pit's champion by refusing to finish a beaten opponent when a promoter demanded a killing for the crowd. The promoter, Varko, kept Jarek's winnings and turned the refusal into a public feud. Jarek now trains young fighters in the mornings, secretly sends a portion of his purse to families of injured contestants, and tries to persuade his old rival Toma to leave the pit before its owners force him into a fixed match. His mother still expects him at the quarry's annual remembrance, though he has missed it twice.