Fenn Bors has the broad, unmistakably half-orc frame of a dockworker, but moves with a strange economy: each step lands on the outer edge of his foot, as if he is testing a floor for hollowness. He keeps his coarse hair clipped close and his beard shaved in a neat, narrow stripe down the chin, grooming himself with the same care he gives a weapon. His skin is dark olive with a pebbled texture across the shoulders, and pale flecks of old flour dust cling stubbornly in the creases of his knuckles. His lower tusks are blunt and uneven. People first notice that he never quite faces a person squarely; he stands at an angle, shoulders loose, one heel lifted, poised to move without seeming ready to fight. Unexpectedly, he carries a tiny wooden bird in his pocket and turns it over whenever he has to wait.

Fenn is patient with frightened people and impatient with anyone who uses rules to excuse cruelty. He can be warm and funny while repairing a tool, yet stiff and formal when someone praises him. In a crisis he becomes focused and economical, but in private he can fret over tiny decisions until they feel as heavy as a floodgate.

Fenn grew up hauling sacks at a riverside mill where his mother, Szelka, worked the night shift and his father was a passing caravan guard who never returned. At seventeen, a flood broke the millrace gates. Fenn tried to force a jammed sluice alone, and the rushing water swept away two children sheltering below. He survived by clinging to a beam until dawn. A wandering monk named Kurov found him afterward, sitting in the mud and counting the mill's broken boards. Kurov taught him that stillness was not the same as helplessness, and that strength without attention could become another kind of flood. Fenn trained at the Half-Step House, a small riverside school whose students learned to fight on slick planks and crowded ferries. He left after its abbot, Jorren, ordered the school to shelter a group of debt collectors who had threatened Szelka. Fenn refused, and the school split over the decision. Now he works as a ferry guard and neighborhood mediator, sending money to his mother and trying to keep the mill district from being swallowed by a proposed canal expansion. He still visits Jorren, though neither has apologized.