Veyana looks as if she has just stepped out of a cold river, even when she has been on dry land for hours. Fine beads of water gather along her blue-green skin and vanish without leaving stains. Her black hair is braided with eelgrass cord, but loose strands drift around her head as though stirred by a current. She moves with a deliberate, heel-first gait, then turns abruptly and smoothly, like a fish changing direction. Her hands are broad and toughened by pulling nets and splitting reeds; their nails are stained green from marsh plants. The unexpected detail is a tiny, carefully mended child's mitten pinned inside her collar, far too small for her and much too lovingly kept to be ordinary gear.

Veyana is generous with practical help but slow to offer emotional comfort; she will patch a stranger's boot before asking why they are crying. She is patient with frightened people and impatient with confident people who treat a place as a resource. In calm moments she is dryly funny and curious. Under pressure, she becomes decisive and almost impossible to interrupt, then later doubts whether she listened enough.

Veyana grew up in a stilt hamlet on the reed-choked Miremouth, the daughter of a ferry keeper who taught her to read water by its smell and sound. At fourteen, a sudden flood broke the hamlet's sluice gate. Veyana had to choose between rescuing a stranded child and securing the gate before the whole settlement washed away. She saved the child, but the flood took her younger brother, Naru, whose little mitten she has kept ever since. The experience made her fiercely protective of the living and wary of grand plans that treat people as acceptable losses. She apprenticed to the marsh druid Sgarr, learning to heal and to notice the slow damage caused by poisoned runoff. Now she tends the wetlands near the village of Soot-and-Reed, while the mill owner, Brant, presses to divert the stream for a new wheel. Her old friend Jori, a practical ferry pilot, wants her to negotiate rather than sabotage the work. Veyana has not decided whether she can trust either approach.