Bromm moves like a work-hardened anvil given purpose: deliberate, solid, and oddly graceful when he handles animals. He is broad-shouldered with knotted forearms and hands that smell faintly of leather and horse sweat. His beard is kept plaited into three thick ropes bound with battered brass rings—each ring stamped with the sigils of mounts he once broke or saved. His skin is creased with sun lines and a thin white scar runs from his left temple to the corner of his eye where a hoof once glanced him. He wears a short, heavily patched leather riding coat over chain mail: practical, patched, and still oiled. Unexpectedly, tucked under his belt alongside a tinker’s roll is a tiny glass vial of sea water that he turns obsessively between his fingers when thinking—a remnant of the day he left the coast long ago. When he walks among horses he softens, speaking in murmurs; among townsfolk he adopts the blunt cadence of a foreman.