Sava is matchstick-thin, with shoulders habitually tucked as if she is making room for someone else at the bar. Her smooth ivory skin catches the green glow of her cocktails, and round spectacles magnify her dark hazel eyes into an unnervingly attentive stare. A near-black braid reaches her waist, bound with a narrow ribbon that she reties whenever a conversation turns uncomfortable. She moves with quick, measured precision: a glass never clinks when she sets it down, and she can pour while watching three separate corners of the room. Her restrained smile looks both welcoming and as though she has already noticed the lie.

Sava is gracious enough to make a stranger feel welcome, yet observant enough to make a practiced liar feel examined. In a busy room she is brisk, amusing, and unflappable; alone with someone frightened, her courtly polish falls away and she becomes startlingly direct. She dislikes being treated as fragile, but quietly takes on burdens that are not hers.

Sava was raised in a once-prosperous human family whose townhouse stood above the old canal. Her father taught her the formal courtesies of court; her mother taught her to listen for what people avoided saying. When Sava was seventeen, a fire destroyed the family archive and left her father ruined by debts he had concealed from his children. At the height of the crisis, she persuaded a magistrate to delay eviction by hosting a private supper and exposing the official's own fraud. That success taught her that a well-timed question could be more useful than a title, and she left home rather than become a marriageable solution to the family's finances. She now runs the back bar at the Gulls and Grates, a cramped speakeasy whose name survived from a long-closed fish market and ironmonger's shop. Its owner, Hala, trusts her with the keys but resents how often Sava lets desperate customers pay in promises. Sava still sends money to her younger brother, Oren, who is studying accountancy and believes she is employed in a respectable hotel. Her current problem is a string of missing patrons: each vanished after ordering the same luminous green drink, though Sava insists the recipe is harmless.