Ásmund moves like someone who has spent his life reading grain and ring in trees: deliberate, patient, and heavy where it must be. He is weather-creased rather than weather-beaten; the skin of his face is mapped in thin, pale lines where frost and bark have cut him. His hands are broad and callused, with a faint silver scar that snakes along the inside of his left palm—a place he touches when thinking. He keeps his beard clipped short but unruly at the chin, often flecked with sawdust. He favors a patched oilskin and a thick wool vest, but when he walks he carries himself with the odd grace of a man who has learned to balance on rolling logs and narrow ridges: a steady, almost musical footfall. Contradiction: under that heavy, workworn exterior he wears a single, clean linen shirt folded neatly in his pack—kept for funerals, court days, and a woman named Maela.