Mikael Vale cuts an immediate, uncanny figure, with ink-stained fingers that never seem entirely clean and a scholar's posture ruined by years spent hunched over cramped desks and storm-battered caravans. His face is narrow and pale, with a sharp nose, a mouth that looks permanently poised between a dry joke and a weary confession, and one eyebrow that rises slightly higher than the other as though it is always reading ahead. He moves with a soft, deliberate glide, yet every so often he jerks as if listening to a sentence only he can hear. The strangest thing about him is his cloak: an elegant charcoal garment lined in cheerful saffron silk, as if he dressed for a funeral and a festival on the same morning. When his magic stirs, the edges of his sleeves shed tiny flecks of luminous script that vanish before they hit the ground.