Milly Fairchild is a striking young woman with the polished composure of nobility and the frayed energy of someone who has spent too many nights bargaining with impossible things. Her long braided golden hair is bound with black velvet cords threaded through with tiny brass coins, and the braid itself is never still, swaying as if tugged by an unseen tide. Her pale skin is dusted with freckles across her nose and cheekbones, though one of those freckles is actually a faint, star-shaped scar that glitters like mica when the light hits it. Her brown eyes are warm at first glance, then unsettling on closer inspection, because the pupils occasionally narrow into slitted rings when she is angry or frightened. She is slender and tall for her age, moving with the careful grace of someone raised to be observed, yet she habitually stands with one shoulder slightly hunched as if bracing against a blow only she can feel. She wears immaculate tailored dark silk layered beneath a practical merchant's coat lined in coin-colored stitching, and the contradiction of such expensive clothes with the leather fingerless gloves, ink stains, and soot-smudged sleeves makes her look like a noblewoman who keeps one foot in a counting house and the other in a grave.