Barely five feet tall, Iktan has a soft, cloudlike mass of light-blue hair that brushes her shoulders and springs outward when she turns quickly. Her round glasses sit low on her nose, and a yellow headband keeps her bangs out of her eyes. She moves with the careful, sidelong steps of someone navigating narrow aisles by memory, pausing to look at empty patches of air as if they were shelves. Her skin has a cool, faintly luminous cast, like moonlight caught in a porcelain glaze. The unexpected detail: she has a loud, startling sneeze that makes loose pages flutter across the room.

Iktan is welcoming with the lonely and exacting with the careless. She loves discovery but distrusts cleverness that has no compassion behind it. In a crisis she becomes crisp and decisive; when she is alone, she can spend an hour worrying over a single sentence. She is both protective of her collection and embarrassed by how much comfort she takes from its familiar dust and silence.

Iktan grew up between two kinds of stories. Her human father, Tomas, repaired bindings and believed every book should be handled with clean hands; her fey mother, Etxe, remembered tales as living things that could sulk, wander, and demand an ending. Iktan inherited a little of each, including an instinct for finding what has been misplaced. As a young apprentice, she once read aloud from a damaged folktale to calm a frightened child during a fire in the old market. The tale answered: its paper birds flew from the pages and guided the trapped people to safety, but the magic also erased the child's name from every written record. That event taught Iktan that helpful magic can take more than it gives. She bought the small, dusty library called the Sooty Bell with her father's savings and has spent twelve years making it a refuge for curious people and difficult books. Her father now lives in a nearby riverside hospice, while her mother visits unpredictably and insists that time has passed differently in the fey places she knows. Lately, a collector named Bram has been offering money for a book Iktan refuses to sell, and several of its pages have begun rearranging themselves overnight.