Janko is tall and slightly stooped, with long, jointed fingers that move delicately among young shoots but curl into blunt hooks when he is worried. His uneven mustache looks as if he trimmed one side with a pruning knife and forgot the other. He smells plainly of damp loam, crushed leaves, and the sharp green scent of sap, and makes no effort to hide it. His coat is patched at both elbows with mismatched cloth, but a small brass watering nozzle at his collar is polished every morning. He walks with a careful, heel-first tread, testing the ground before trusting it. People remember him as someone who seems to be listening to the trees even while answering them.

Janko wants to be generous and patient, but takes every failure of the grove as a personal accusation. In a calm season he is wry and attentive, happy to teach a stranger how to prune a branch. Under pressure he becomes stubbornly practical, cutting off debate to make a decision; once the danger passes, he is often ashamed of how little he listened. He is tender toward children and seedlings, yet distrustful of anyone who treats either as incapable of choosing for themselves.

Janko was born in Veyra's Ladder, a settlement built along steep terraces where fruit trees cling to the hillside. His mother taught him to graft branches; his father taught him to brace a trunk before a storm rather than mourn it afterward. At seventeen, during the harvest remembered as the Long Frost, he tried to save an old pear grove by burning its roots for warmth. The trees survived, but the smoke ruined the valley's stores and several families went hungry. A patient neighbor, Eirwen, showed him how to ask for help before making a desperate choice. Janko has tended the groves ever since, and ties a red thread around his wrist for every harvest he survives. He has not explained why the threads are counted as harvests rather than years. He is close to his former mentor, Eirwen, and to her grandson, Tovin, a curious child who keeps sneaking into the forbidden lower orchard. A new problem shadows his work: one row of trees is fruiting in midwinter, and their black-seeded apples seem to draw small animals into a sleep from which they wake confused and hungry.