Romana's straight white hair is cut blunt at the jaw and tucked behind both ears, though loose strands keep slipping forward when she bends over a text. Her dark green eyes hold a steady, measuring focus. She stands with her weight slightly forward, as if braced for a horse to shift beneath her, and her thumb repeatedly checks the lower edge of her breastplate without her seeming to notice. Her armor is scuffed at the knees and polished where rain runs off the shoulders. An unexpected softness in her role: she carries a tiny folded paper bird tucked behind the breastplate's gold emblem, and handles it with care whenever she thinks she is alone.

Romana is exacting about evidence but impatient with ceremony that wastes a frightened person's time. She can be stern and strangely protective in the same breath. In private, she is gentler with animals and children than her formal manner suggests; when tired, she becomes stubbornly literal and has trouble recognizing humor.

Romana was raised in a river ward where people of several peoples shared one crowded market and argued over whose law applied at the ferry. She entered the Divine Collegium believing that clear rules could prevent the strong from preying on the weak. Cormac Faoláin, master inquisitor of the Collegium in Newces, taught her the Church's reading of the First Breath and the Gathering Flame: Breath as Mercy, Flame as Law, both aspects of Cambridgere. He also taught her to distinguish a faithful explanation from a convenient one. Her defining trial came during a grain seizure in the town of Hushwater, named for the millwheel that stopped after a flood. Romana's superior ordered her to treat a disputed village boundary as settled law and arrest families who resisted. She found proof that the Church's own surveyors had moved the marker to protect a wealthy estate. Romana delayed the arrests, brought the evidence to Cormac, and watched him risk his position to force a public hearing. The experience did not make her distrust law; it made her distrust law that cannot bear witnesses. Now she serves as a traveling holy inquisitor, examining disputes over doctrine, civic duty, and the Church's reach. Her white warhorse, Waegda, was assigned to her after a difficult winter patrol and has become her closest companion. She exchanges terse letters with Cormac and has an uneasy working relationship with Tavi Kett, a local clerk who keeps finding irregularities in Church records. Her current problem is a case involving an alleged heretical gathering whose members appear to be protecting refugees from an unlawful eviction. The evidence points in two directions, and someone is burning the documents before she can inspect them.