Uktel is an older cooper with wind-burnished cheeks, deep creases at the corners of his mouth, and a patient, tired expression that seems to have outlasted several winters. His moss-green wool coat is shiny at the elbows and flecked with pale wood dust. He stands as if making room for a barrel that is no longer there, though he often takes up more space than he realizes. In a crowded room, his eyes go first to the floorboards, door hinges, and window latches, then to the people. He moves with a careful, rolling gait, testing each step as though the ground might be badly staved. An unexpected detail: he keeps a tiny, neatly folded paper bird tucked into his hatband, and will straighten its wings with surprising care when he thinks nobody is watching.

Patient with people who are trying, impatient with careless work, and privately frightened by the one mystery he cannot mend. In a calm mood he is dryly humorous and generous with instruction. When pressed about Blackglass, he becomes evasive and over-practical. When someone is in immediate danger, he stops hesitating and acts with a steady, almost startling decisiveness.

Uktel learned coopering from his mother, who taught him to read a cask by its smell and the pitch of a hoop under his mallet. He spent most of his life making barrels for the riverside settlement of Sighing Staves, where damp weather made good work precious. During the Blackglass disaster, a night of inexplicable darkness and shattered windows, he was one of two people found alive in the sealed cooperage. His apprentice, Tesh, had gone in with him and was never found. Uktel insists the room was empty when the door opened, but he has never again made a barrel with black hoops. The other survivor, Shesh, now avoids him, though both still receive anonymous parcels of food from the same unknown sender. Uktel has lately been asked to repair a cask recovered from the sealed cooperage, and its staves smell faintly of rain on hot stone. He wants to learn what happened without making another person disappear.