Radu looks like a traveling workshop that learned to walk: broad through the chest, slightly stooped from years under a loaded harness, and always shifting his weight onto his right heel as though testing a floorboard. His skin is sun-browned and dusted with fine brass filings that cling around his cuffs. His black hair is cut close at the sides and tied in a small, stubborn tail; his beard is clipped short except for a narrow braid threaded with a tiny copper washer. He smells distinctly of hot beeswax, iron filings, and the bitter orange peel he uses to mask both. He knows the smell follows him and offers no apology. His most unexpected detail is a tiny, carefully maintained garden of blue thyme growing in a tin tray on top of his traveling chest.

Radu is generous with his labor and guarded with his trust. He jokes easily when bargaining, but becomes exacting and almost severe when someone handles a tool carelessly. In a crisis he is calm to the point of seeming cold; afterward he may fuss over a cracked cup or a torn sleeve because small repairs are easier than grief. He likes people more than he admits, yet keeps his wagon packed as if leaving at dawn.

Radu was raised in a roadside repair yard where his mother, Dema, mended wagons and his father traded medicines, buckles, and rumors. At seventeen, he apprenticed to a celebrated artificer who taught him that a perfect object should outlive its maker. Radu took the lesson too literally and built a self-guiding bridge winch for a flood-prone village. When the mechanism jammed during a storm, the bridge failed and his younger brother, Tavi, was swept away. Radu survived, but the villagers blamed his invention and he left before grief turned into a trial. Years later, he learned that Tavi had survived and now works as a ferryman under another name, refusing contact. Radu travels with Nib, a practical machine built from the bridge winch's salvaged gears. He sells repairs, charms, and carefully tested magic while searching for Tavi and trying to prove that useful craft need not become a monument to its maker. His current trouble is a string of counterfeit healing charms bearing his maker's mark, which has drawn the attention of a local magistrate and frightened customers away.