Miela is a young human woman with a broad, capable face, a slightly crooked smile, and the compact strength of someone accustomed to carrying water, firewood, and sleeping children. She stands with most of her weight on the balls of her feet, as if a sudden emergency might begin at any moment. Her hands are unusually steady, even when the rest of her body trembles. She watches doorways, staircases, and the hands of strangers before she looks at their faces. Her belly is visibly pregnant, but she moves with surprising quietness and speed. The unexpected contradiction is that her manner is soft and almost maternal while her gaze can become as cold and appraising as a butcher judging a knife.

Miela is tender with the sick, suspicious with the healthy, and unexpectedly severe with anyone who treats poverty as a moral failure. She can give a stranger her last clean blanket, yet become possessive and evasive when anyone asks about her family. In public she is composed, wry, and efficient. Around children she becomes playful and almost silly. When alone, she rehearses difficult conversations aloud and then avoids having them. She longs for an honest life but keeps choosing secrecy whenever honesty threatens the child.

Miela was born in the riverside hamlet of Vaskela, the second daughter of a washerwoman and a ferryman. Her grandmother taught her herbs, childbirth, and the old prayers used to ease fever. At sixteen, Miela helped deliver a nobleman's child during a winter flood, and the household rewarded her with a place in the city temple as an assistant healer. She learned divine magic there, not through ambition, but because she could not accept that a prayer should fail simply because the person praying was poor. During a harvest festival, she spent one night with Orest Valdren, the youngest son of a powerful noble family. Neither expected tenderness or consequence. Months later, she discovered she was pregnant. Orest has since been sent abroad under the pretense of military service, while his family quietly searches for the woman who may threaten their succession plans. Miela returned to Vaskela and now runs a small infirmary in an abandoned tollhouse. Her formative experience came when a plague swept through the village and she had to choose which patients received the last doses of medicine. She saved three children and lost her own mother. Since then, Miela has become compassionate without being trusting, and merciful without believing mercy is always kind. Her current problems include dwindling supplies, pressure from the noble household, frightened villagers who suspect her pregnancy is politically dangerous, and recurring dreams in which the unborn child speaks in Orest's voice.