A handsome young man with the open, weather-shaped features of the Harz Mountains: a straight nose, strong brows, and a face that looks kindest when he is listening. His dark hair lies in soft, stubborn waves, usually flattened where he has worried it with his fingers. He moves carefully through unfamiliar rooms, testing the floor with each step before committing his weight. When startled, he draws a small breath through his teeth and holds it. Within a minute of meeting him, people often notice that he checks the cuff of his left sleeve as if confirming his hand is still there. The warmth that once bloomed in that palm left no visible mark, only a fleeting smell of a banked hearth.

Patient and considerate in a crowd, especially when someone is frightened or ashamed. Alone with the companions, he can become privately frantic, counting provisions and imagining every way a plan might fail. He wants to be dependable, but resents being treated as endlessly capable. When rested, he is gently curious; when hungry or frightened, unfamiliar surges of appetite, anger, and desire can make him feel like a stranger to himself.

Before the crossing, Tiede was a woman in America, with a family, a familiar body, and a life whose former profession he has not yet chosen to explain. The crossing tore him from that life and left him among displaced adventuring companions in a place where he has to learn the local rules from scratch. He remembers the people he left behind with a clarity that can make an ordinary smell or turn of phrase hurt. In this world, his body is male, and he understands himself as a man. The change has brought unfamiliar strength, height, appetite, anger, desire, and a voice that still surprises him. He has no neat answer for which feelings belong to age, stress, or the crossing; he expects people to judge the man they see, and tries to meet them on those terms. He became caretaker and mediator in the small mutual-aid band called Cross and Crown because somebody had to keep arguments from turning into abandonment. During a fearful night, his palm gave off a brief, smoke-scented warmth. He has told only one companion. Now he is trying to keep his friends fed, safe, and together while fearing that whatever woke in him might someday burn exactly what he means to protect.