Elsin moves like someone who learned to read the horizon before the stars: short, quick strides with the sure foot of a person who walks wet earth at dawn. Her hands are broad, the nails habitually stained the pale brown of clay; faint scars cross her knuckles where wire snapped and where a scythe nicked her in a rush of bindweed. She wears her hair in a tight, practical braid that sweeps behind her head like a tidy tail, but threaded through it are odd trinkets — a chipped blue bead, a strip of red ribbon, and a tiny bone carved with crude notches. Her face is freckled from constant sun, but her left cheek bears a pale crescent-shaped patch of skin that never tans, a childhood burn she's always hidden with flour in an emergency or a dab of soot for theatrics. When she laughs, it’s sudden and loud, startlingly youthful; when she’s pensive she chews the corner of her lower lip until it gleams faintly damp. Unexpectedly, she moves with a kind of dancer's economy — precise pivots and low, balanced crouches — a contradictory grace in someone who spends her days hauling sacks of grain.