Yamyam is a handspan-and-a-half taller than a human's forearm, with the compact, spring-loaded posture of something accustomed to launching from gutters. Her moss-brown skin has a dry, velvet texture, and fine pale speckles run over her shoulders like flour dust. Her wings resemble two overlapping sycamore leaves, translucent at the edges and darkly veined toward the body; they shiver before she moves, like a held breath. She walks with quick, heel-first steps, then goes abruptly still, head tilted as if listening through the soles of her feet. Within a minute of meeting her, most people notice the smell: bitter wormwood, wet soil, and a faint, unmistakable trace of raw meat. Yamyam knows about the herbs. She pretends not to notice the rest. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tiny, meticulously tended rooftop garden of edible flowers for the city's pigeons.

Iktet is practical to the point of seeming callous, yet she is tender with the injured in ways she cannot explain without embarrassment. She jokes when relaxed, but becomes direct and hard to distract when she feels threatened. In company she can be almost companionable; alone with a fresh scent of blood, her attention narrows into a frightening, patient stillness.

Yamyam and her brother Loom grew up among the cramped roof gardens and flood channels of Khuld, where hungry winters made every living thing seem like a resource. Their mother gathered medicinal moss and taught Yamyam to distinguish healing plants from poisonous ones; their father vanished during a food riot, leaving no body and no explanation. The formative change came when Yamyam was still young: trapped in a collapsed cistern during a winter famine, she survived by eating a dying creature that had been brought down there by the flood. The experience did not make her proud, but it severed the boundary she had been taught to trust between hunger and horror. She later apprenticed herself to a human apothecary, learning to treat fever, venom, and infected wounds while hiding what she did to feed herself. Loom knows enough to fear her appetite, but he still shares their rooms and tries to keep her from hunting in the crowded districts. Recently, someone has been leaving fresh animal carcasses on her windowsill, each one neatly opened and marked with the old survey number 17. Yamyam suspects a witness from the cistern years has found her.