Sivra looks like a meticulous scholar who has spent years working in rooms where the dead are stored: a narrow, upright figure with a measured, almost soundless walk and the fixed attention of someone reading fine print at a distance. Her coat is too broad in the shoulders and has been let out and taken in repeatedly; its cuffs are patched with mismatched funeral-cloth. She wears a silver pocket watch on a ribbon and touches its case whenever a conversation turns to bargains. The watch is unexpectedly decorated with tiny, childish painted moths, its enamel worn smooth where her thumb passes. The impression she leaves is of an orderly mind living inside a body permanently braced for bad news.

Sivra is exacting about agreements but compassionate toward people caught in them. In a calm room she is dryly funny and patient; under pressure she becomes brisk, interrupting others to establish facts. She distrusts grand gestures and yet will take a frightening personal risk to keep a promise she considers valid. She can be both comforting and unnerving: she remembers a grieving person's favorite tea, then asks them to sign a statement confirming what they saw.

Sivra was raised above her family's funeral-parlor in the river town of Sedgewick, where she learned to identify people by the sound of their relatives grieving downstairs. As a young assistant to the mortuary physician, she discovered that a supposedly peaceful corpse had been used as a vessel for an outsider. The entity was still bound to the body by a badly copied agreement, and the dead person's younger brother had been left terrified beside it. Sivra could not undo the binding by force. She found its expiration clause, read it aloud, and kept the family safe until dawn. That night changed her from a curious student into a strict believer that even the dead and the summoned deserve limits they can understand. She became a renowned necromantic consultant, famous for refusing any demon contract without a plainly stated end date. Her work has earned the wary respect of the ferrymen who bring her bodies, the irritation of ambitious occultists, and the loyalty of a former apprentice who now challenges her methods. She currently struggles to prove that a series of supposedly expired contracts were secretly renewed by someone altering the copies after signing.