Jessa has the weather-burnished look of someone who has spent decades outside: her skin is roughened and freckled by wind, rain, and sun, with pale salt lines at the cuffs of her sleeves. She stands with her weight tipped forward onto the balls of her feet, as if listening through the ground, and moves in short, economical steps that leave no branch shaking behind her. A fringe of russet hair escapes her scarf in uneven wisps. The unexpected detail is the tiny, carefully mended patchwork birds she sews inside her coat, each one made from a scrap of cloth given to her by someone she has helped.

Jessa is generous with her labor but guarded with her trust. In a crisis she becomes brisk and decisive, while in a quiet room she can be awkwardly tender and uncertain what to do with praise. She believes people deserve second chances, yet has little patience for those who make others pay for their mistakes.

Jessa grew up near the abandoned eel weirs of Husham, where her mother, Eleri, taught her to read flood marks and her father, Pavel, repaired nets. At seventeen, she guided a group of villagers through a marsh during a spring flood. She chose a raised path she trusted from childhood, but a new drainage cut had made it a trap. Her younger brother, Glyn, was swept away. Jessa survived and spent the next winter learning the marsh from its plants, birds, and water, not from memory alone. She became a druid, then a wary caretaker of the wetlands that kept the nearby farms alive. Now a landowner is reopening the drainage channels to make grazing ground, and the marsh is shrinking. Jessa is trying to stop the work without driving the displaced families into hunger. Her old friend and former sweetheart, Niko, now surveys the channels for the landowner, while her mother still expects Jessa to come home for supper as if every quarrel can be mended over a bowl.