Halden Tallow looks built from patience rather than muscle, a lean human with weathered hands, a river-scraped face, and the still posture of a man who has spent years standing between a town and its troubles. His skin has the pale, wind-burnished tone of someone who lives indoors by necessity but outdoors by duty. He wears a dark green reeve's coat with river wax on the cuffs, a worn leather sash full of keys and tally tokens, and boots that always seem slightly damp from the Cressa banks. The unexpected thing about him is his smile: warm, almost boyish, and entirely at odds with the hard, suspicious alertness in the rest of him. When he moves, he does so in small efficient turns, as if every gesture has been rehearsed to waste no time and reveal no fear.