Cevra is a small, spring-loaded child with sun-browned skin, dusty knees, and a smudge of chalk that seems to migrate from her palm to her cheek. Her faded tunic hangs past her hips, its sleeves rolled unevenly; the hem is patched with fabric from a flour sack. She moves on the balls of her feet, always leaning toward the next interesting thing, and leaves the impression of a sparrow that has just discovered a loose gate. A detail people do not expect from a village child who spends her days outdoors: she keeps a tiny, carefully folded paper map tucked inside her tunic, marked with the names of every well and spring she has found.

Cevra is openly delighted by new things but guarded about her own worries. She laughs easily with children and animals, then becomes startlingly serious when someone is thirsty or excluded. Around stern adults she performs cheerfulness to keep them from asking what she has found; when she feels safe, her curiosity becomes patient and methodical.

Cevra grew up in a two-room cottage with her mother, Dali, who mends nets and sacks, and her grandfather, Gela, who once kept the village well. When Cevra was six, the old spring ran dry after a season of hard rains washed silt into its channel. During the search for water, she found a narrow seep beneath a collapsed millrace, following beetle tracks and damp stones where the adults had seen only mud. The discovery helped the village through a difficult week and changed how people treated her: some began asking for her sharp eyes, while others decided she was too bold to be safe. Now the millrace is being cleared, but a wealthy landholder's agent has started claiming the spring lies on private ground. Cevra has been secretly mapping the streams and overhearing arguments, hoping to prove the water belongs to everyone. She is close to her mother, adores her grandfather, and is trying to make peace with Toma, a cautious playmate who thinks her exploring will get them both in trouble.