A woman of fire and salt; standing at the main rampart she looks as if she was forged from the harbor's ironwork. Her crimson hair is braided tightly into a cascade of ropes, threaded with coins and pieces of blue glass that catch the sun like small sapphires. Her skin shows the map of a life spent in open air: deep, wind-polished lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and a diagonal pale scar crossing her left cheek that puckers like dried riverbed clay. She favors a leather-corseleted look that leaves her arms bare, showing battle tattoos in ink that shift between fox motifs and nautical stars. Her gait is abrupt and forward, like a ship climbing windward, but when she listens she goes still with surprising grace. An unexpected element: she wears a threadbare cotton shawl embroidered with childish suns, folded neatly at her shoulder and smelling faintly of lavender, an intimate softness on a queen otherwise all iron.