Garen is a wiry young man with river-silt brown skin and close-cropped black curls that spring up in damp weather. His face is narrow and alert, with a broad, expressive mouth and eyes the dull green-brown of water under cloud. He moves with a sideways, measured hitch from years of balancing loads on slick planks, placing each foot as though testing a submerged step. A reed whistle hangs at his throat, and he checks its knot with his thumb whenever a conversation turns personal. He leaves the impression of someone listening for a change in the water, even indoors. Unexpectedly for a flood porter, he is an enthusiastic amateur maker of tiny, intricate paper birds, which he folds from scraps of wrapping and leaves in unexpected places.

Garen is quick to laugh at practical mishaps but stiffens when anyone treats him as fragile. He is generous with strangers who are in immediate danger, yet evasive with people offering lasting care. In a crowd he is alert and brisk; in a quiet room he becomes thoughtful and almost playful, folding paper while he listens. He can be stubbornly brave in a crisis and deeply avoidant once the crisis is over.

Garen grew up with his older brother Tovaren in a low riverside quarter where flood marks were treated like a second calendar. He was quick with ropes and quicker to volunteer for errands, partly because he hated being thought of as the younger one who needed watching. During the evacuation, a sluice gate jammed while families crowded onto the raised causeway. Garen doubled back to guide a pair of children through a drainage arch as the river surged into the streets. The evacuation crew saw him swept behind a collapsing market awning and marked him lost. He survived by clinging to a ferry chain and was carried downstream, waking days later in a reed-cutters' shelter with fever and no memory of the route home. His first clear memory was of Tovaren calling his name across the water, a sound he could not answer. He now works hauling nets and salvage at Siltwake, a riverside landing known for the sour smell of its drained marsh. He sends anonymous folded birds upriver with small clues about where he has been, but has not yet dared to write his name. He is trying to learn whether Tovaren still searches, while a local salvage boss presses him to help recover goods from the ruined quarter before the next flood buries them.