Lzhev looks like a tall, wind-worn scholar who has spent decades arriving at places just after the weather turned. He occupies more room than his lean frame should: shoulders angled outward, elbows loosely extended, as if he expects an invisible map to be spread around him. When waiting, he plants his weight on the balls of his feet and rocks almost imperceptibly toward whichever exit is farthest away. His skin is creased like folded parchment, and his long white hair has a coarse, rain-frizzed texture, usually caught in the clasp of his travel hood. He moves in abrupt, efficient starts, then pauses with his head cocked as though listening for a thought still catching up. The unexpected detail: he carries a tiny wooden toy boat and absentmindedly sails it across tabletops, even in tense negotiations.

Lzhev is patient with confusion but impatient with cruelty. He can be warm and funny over a meal, then abruptly clinical when he notices a magical danger. He dislikes being treated as a legend, yet cannot resist explaining an elegant solution. Around frightened people, he makes himself reassuringly ordinary; around officials, he becomes unnervingly direct.

Lzhev Kurov was once the celebrated cartographer of the royal observatory at Serev, where he charted ley lines and taught apprentices to distinguish a genuine omen from a coincidence dressed for court. During the winter of the Glass Comet, he and his closest colleague, gentle-voiced Oshun, discovered that a supposedly harmless navigation ritual was pulling a distant town a few inches out of the world each year. The court ordered them to keep quiet until the next succession. Lzhev broke the ritual publicly, saving the town but tearing open a temporary passage through which his spellbook vanished. He has wandered ever since, following the book's erratic wake and trying to repair the little fractures it left behind. Oshun stayed at court to protect the surviving apprentices; their friendship has become a strained correspondence of unsent letters and intercepted warnings. Lzhev now lives from observatory lofts, roadside shrines, and borrowed attic rooms. His current problem is that the spellbook has begun returning pages in the handwriting of someone who has not been born yet.