Maelin Veyr looks like an elderly woman who has been folded and unfolded many times, all fine bones, deliberate movements, and astonishingly steady hands. Her skin is bronze-brown and deeply lined, with wrinkles that gather around her mouth like parentheses whenever she is withholding an opinion. Her hair hangs in long silver ropes, usually tucked beneath a flour-stained scarf, and the ends are faintly singed no matter how carefully she trims them. She walks with a polished black cane, yet moves with the quiet speed of someone accustomed to crossing a dark kitchen without waking a sleeping child. Her most unsettling feature is her shadow, which sometimes resembles Maelin as a much younger woman. She leaves behind the impression of a warm hearth, old paper, and the uncomfortable certainty that she has already noticed every lie in the room.