Robyn “Dame” Gold is a sun-browned human woman with honey-blonde hair bleached nearly white at the ends by salt, glare, and years beneath hard skies. She ties it in a loose sailor's knot, though wind worries strands across her face. Her light olive skin is freckled over the nose and cheeks, marked by rope burns around both wrists and a pale scar through her left eyebrow. She moves with a rolling economy, knees loose and weight always prepared for a deck that lurches underfoot. Her smile is warm, theatrical, and almost disarming. Before violence, she becomes perfectly still, so still that the creak of leather and the tick of cooling metal seem loud around her. Her broad, callused hands smell of powder, tar, and clove oil, yet she uses them with astonishing delicacy when mending a gull's wing or tying a child's boot.