Vadeya has a cute, finely boned face and a focused expression that makes her seem older until she smiles. Her short dark curls spring loose around her temples. She moves carefully through brush, placing her feet as if each step were a decision. Her perfectly straight ebon staff is polished except for a thumb-worn oval near its grip, and the carved druidic marks seem almost black against the dark wood. Despite her country work, she leaves the impression of someone dressed for a formal portrait who has simply walked into the wilderness.

Vadeya is controlled and observant in public, but privately impatient with the slow machinery of noble custom. She can be tender with the sick and mercilessly practical about their care. She wants to believe courtesy can change people, yet bristles when it is used to conceal harm. In a crisis, she acts first and frets over the consequences later; when safe, she can spend hours second-guessing herself.

Vadeya was born into a minor human noble house whose land is more marsh-edge orchard than grand estate. Her mother taught her the household accounts; an elderly tenant herb-wife, Seshai, taught her which roots eased fever and which were poisonous. At sixteen, a late frost ruined the family orchards. Vadeya watched her father refuse to open the granaries to neighboring tenants until rents were paid. She secretly carried food and remedies to the sick, and the experience changed her idea of what a title was for. Now she manages a neglected medicinal garden on the family border, trying to keep its remedies available to common folk while her family presses her to restore profitable crops. Seshai is still her closest teacher, though they disagree over whether Vadeya's quiet acts of defiance help anyone for long. Her younger brother, Othesh, sends courteous letters from the family house and asks her to come home, never mentioning their father's debts.