Gektar is a small, sharp-featured fairy with translucent wings like pressed leaves, their veins dark as old tea. He moves in quick, exact bursts, then becomes unnervingly still, as if listening through the floorboards. A dented brass mortar hangs from his belt; its rim is polished bright where his thumb rubs it, while the bowl is blackened with years of grinding. Unexpectedly for a streetwise herbalist and fighter, he keeps a tiny paper theater folded inside his coat and makes new shadow puppets whenever business is slow.

Gektar is brisk and unsentimental in the shop, but privately sentimental about small objects and remembered voices. He distrusts grand promises yet will risk himself for a stranger in immediate danger. With patients he is patient and precise; with people who exploit them he becomes cutting and frighteningly decisive. He wants Yamyam's approval, but resents being treated as the younger sibling who must be corrected.

Gektar and his older sister Yamyam inherited a cramped herb shop from their mother, who taught them that a remedy is a promise, not a product. As children, they lived through the winter fever that swept the reed-clustered settlement of Reedcut. Their mother died after refusing a wealthy visitor's bribe for the last dose of a rare tincture, and Gektar blamed himself for being too young to understand how sick she was. Years later, he trained at the Wayfarer's Rest monastery, where he learned to turn breath, balance, and restraint into weapons. He left after the masters condemned his belief that some suffering cannot be eased by medicine. Now he and Yamyam run the shop called Bittersteam, named for the medicinal smell that curls from its chimney. When a patient is beyond help, they sometimes eat them, claiming an old fairy rite can return a life to the soil and keep the body from being wasted. Gektar calls it mercy, but he and his sister disagree about consent, secrecy, and where mercy ends. Their former teacher, Orhan, has tracked him down with an offer of help and a demand that he stop. Meanwhile, a new fever is appearing in the neighboring farms, and the shop's dwindling stock cannot treat it.