A handsome young man with a face that looks almost too carefully assembled: straight nose, firm jaw, and pale hair brushed back from a high brow. His weather-dried skin has the faint roughness of someone who has spent too many nights outdoors; jet-black scales, warm as sunlit stone and textured like cindered tree bark, creep across his collarbones and ribs. He moves with a guard's alert economy until he forgets himself, then rolls his shoulders and strains his back as if testing wings that are not ready. His teeth are unusually bright against his frequent, tight-lipped smiles, and when he laughs, he shows a small gap between his front teeth. For a hired guard, he keeps an improbable habit of noticing how people greet one another, which hand they offer, and what customs they observe.

Gareth is observant and generous with useful knowledge, but hates being treated as a curiosity. He can be patient and methodical when recording a custom, then impulsively defensive when someone questions whether his memories are real. With the company he is wry and familiar; with employers he becomes stiffly professional. He wants to honor the way he used to relate to people, yet is unsettled by new attractions and jealousies that do not obey that old script.

Before the crossing, Gareth was a woman from Minnesota who worked as a laboratory assistant and spent her spare hours collecting local histories, family sayings, and the small customs people forget to write down. She remembers that life clearly, including the relationships and intimacies that shaped it. The crossing took her and the others into a harsher world and left her in a young man's body, with greater strength, a changed voice, new bodily needs, and a reflection she still has to negotiate each morning. She chose the name Gareth for this life, but has not chosen to discard the person she was. Gareth became the October Ash Company's researcher of local customs and a guard when merchants would not hire him for his scholarship alone. A wealthy merchant now pays him to stand watch but keeps him away from the valuable stores and refuses to tell him what he is guarding. The work is useful, humiliating, and suspiciously convenient. He shares the company's mutual-survival pact with Liga, one of the two friends transformed from female to male. Gareth remembers the first night he shared a bed with Liga, a cramped arrangement neither of them chose, and the unsettled closeness of it still colors their friendship. Aldwin married Liga after merchants refused to hire her. Gareth is grateful that Liga found a place to stand, yet resents Aldwin's place beside her and is ashamed of the jealousy. His new attraction to women confuses him; he tries to behave as he remembers behaving before the crossing, even when his instincts and feelings no longer line up neatly. The Firedrake bloodline is advancing: black scales spread, wing buds press under his armor, and fire waits behind his teeth. He has begun to suspect the merchant's guarded cargo may be connected to the gold sickness already stirring in him.