A tall, handsome man whose face seems arrested in the easy youthfulness Mary remembers from their courtship. He stands a full six feet, with straight pale-blond hair that slips from under his flat cap and blue eyes that flare like banked coals when his nature surfaces. His skin is winter-pale, his build lean and work-hardened, with the sturdy shoulders of a man accustomed to lifting feed sacks and handling sheep. He moves economically, placing each foot as if testing uncertain ground, and gives people more room than most men do, especially near iron. He smells unmistakably of damp wool, peat smoke, and the cold animal musk of a hound; he knows it and blames the farm. Unexpectedly for a farmer, he keeps a little paper notebook of old place-names and weather signs, written in several dead tongues.

Oswin is kind in the patient, practical way of someone who will mend a gate before discussing grief, but he is also shrewd enough to recognize when a question is a trap. With his family he is affectionate and attentive; with strangers he is courteous but watchful; under supernatural pressure his warmth can give way to an unnerving, animal stillness. He longs for the untamed roads and yet builds his days around home. He believes he is protecting Mary by hiding the wedding-night truth, though that protection is inseparable from fear and selfishness.

Oswin was born beneath the old Danelaw, the child of a local woman assaulted during a Viking raid. His mother gave him a human name and raised him among ordinary people, though the dogs barked at his cradle and he was never quite warm in winter. As a young man he roamed the old roads and learned fragments of Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and other tongues from travelers, graves, and things that spoke from hedgerows. He discovered his fallen, fey nature gradually, through missing nights, a hound's shadow that followed him, and seasons when the dead seemed to walk close to the living.