Dorran has the compact, forward-leaning posture of someone who has spent decades bracing against a wagon's jolts. His broad palms are ridged with rope-calluses, the nails permanently darkened by grease and axle dust; he rubs the side of his thumb against his forefinger when deciding whether to trust someone. His hair lies in a coarse, ash-brown cap, usually flattened by a battered wool hat, and his close-trimmed beard catches bits of chaff. He walks with a rolling heel-to-toe gait, as if feeling for ruts through the ground. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny wooden whistle tucked behind one ear and uses it to coax birds from the wagon yard, a tender habit at odds with his grim occupation.

Dorran is cautious enough to seem cold and compassionate enough to risk his livelihood for strangers. With officials he is clipped, exact, and difficult to pin down; with prisoners he becomes attentive without becoming familiar. On a quiet road he can be unexpectedly funny, but fear makes him procedural and silence makes him look guiltier than he is.

Dorran learned roads before he learned letters, riding beside his mother on a prison wagon that carried debtors between market towns. When a winter bridge gave way beneath the convoy, he heard the prisoners calling from the half-submerged wagon while guards argued over whose duty it was to cut the harness. He freed them with a broken trace-knife and watched one of them, an old cooper named Iivana, go back into the water to pull a guard to safety. That night changed his idea of who deserved saving. Years later, he took the driver's post himself, believing that a man at the reins could make small mercies possible. His current route carries prisoners whose work earned them casks of cider as payment. He arranged for those casks to be diverted to hungry families in the hamlet of Sootfall, then falsified the wagon's timing so the prisoners would not be blamed. He remains in contact with Iivana, now a cooper with a bad knee, and with Sootfall's watchful midwife, Seija, who coordinates the quiet distribution. His immediate problem is that a quartermaster has noticed mismatched axle marks and is asking why the wagon arrived lighter than its manifest claims.