Talasra moves like someone who has spent most of her life balancing on roots and tightropes: a steady, economical gait that never wastes motion. Her face is weathered but not rugged — stamped with a map of fine lines and a deep, crescented scar across the left cheek that she sometimes covers with a streak of bright indigo paint when she wants to look theatrical. Her fingers are callused and ink-stained from ledger entries as often as from bowstrings. She keeps a coil of braided leather rope wound across one hip like a belt and a dozen tiny brass hooks threaded on a cord around her neck, each etched with a different trade-mark. Unexpectedly for a forest-born trader, she favors a waistcoat of city-tailored cut beneath a battered cloak — a deliberate contradiction meant to put both woodfolk and cityfolk at ease.