Lady Wes Snowsden has a bear's brow and broad, blunt nose plainly showing through her shifter features. Shaggy white hair, coarse as carded wool, escapes its pins around a face creased by wind and long concentration. Her jaw is broad, and when she laughs her square, slightly yellowed teeth show in an unexpectedly frank grin. She moves with a heavy, measured sway, placing each foot as if testing lake ice. Her presence is at once formidable and oddly homey, like a snowbound house with its door already open.

She is tender toward frightened people but unsentimental about bad plans. She delights in clever design and practical jokes, yet becomes rigid when someone treats the land as decoration. At ease, she tells long, rambling stories; under pressure, she reduces every choice to its cost and consequence. She wants company, but dislikes being fussed over.

Lady Wes Snowsden was once a celebrated maker of winter gardens, living sculptures grown from trained willow, lichen, ice, and hardy alpine flowers. Her creations were commissioned for public feasts and funerals alike. In middle age she designed a living snow maze for the Frostwake court; during a sudden thaw, its hidden channels flooded a workers' quarter. Wes saved several children but could not reach her apprentice, Talla, who drowned beneath the collapsed icework. She abandoned grand commissions and spent years learning how to read snowpack, river ice, and the moods of the land. Her work now serves villages: windbreaks, root cellars, living bridges, and shelters that can endure blizzards. She still accepts one or two public commissions each year, partly to keep her craft alive and partly because she cannot bear to let beauty become only a reminder of failure. Her former patron, Lord Kett, wants her to build a ceremonial winter garden over a newly discovered spring. Her niece, Brinka, urges her to refuse; the spring feeds several hamlets downstream. Wes is secretly helping Brinka document the water flow while pretending to negotiate with the lord.