Mary has a fair, weather-pinked face and wheat-blond hair usually pinned up with a wooden weaving shuttle. Her blue eyes are clear and attentive until she is frightened, when they fix on the nearest dark window or tree line. Wool grease has left a faint lanolin smell on her sleeves, mixed with woodsmoke and the sharp, clean scent of soap. Her shoulders lean forward from hours at the loom, but she moves quickly and quietly around sleeping children. Unexpectedly, she keeps a small collection of carefully labeled bird bones in a flour tin, studying them as if they might explain the world.

Mary is generous with food and patient with children, yet distrustful of easy reassurance. She can be tender with Oswin one moment and sharply watchful the next. In safe company she has a dry, practical humor; under pressure she grows brisk and stubborn, and when grief catches her off guard she becomes very still rather than openly weeping.

Mary was raised in a small weaving household by her father, Sava, and learned to judge a person by the work their hands leave behind. She first loved Oswin Hirst for the stories he told of roads, ruins, and impossible weather; he seemed to have lived several lives before settling beside her. On their wedding night, Oswin deceived her about what happened and concealed that he was the creature who consummated the marriage. Mary remembers the man she thought she married, but fears the thing she glimpsed and cannot reconcile with him. She has confided the heart of her fear to Sava, and her brother Toma knows enough to watch Oswin warily. Their son William was born with black eyes lit by an uncanny burning blue, and Mary believes the Barguest fathered him. William is slow to speak and learn compared with other children his age, though Mary fiercely resists anyone calling him cursed. A later infant died sickly soon after birth, and since then Mary has struggled to carry another child to term. Oswin has not seemed to age since they met. Mary watches him and William especially during the seasons when, by local belief, fae and demons press close to the world. She still hopes the kind, adventurous man from his stories can be found inside her husband, while quietly preparing for the possibility that he cannot.