Ethel moves like someone who has spent decades balancing heavy ledgers and fragile scrolls. Her shoulders are slightly stooped from carrying tomes, but her head is held with the steady curiosity of a scholar. Her robes are layered in mismatched materials: a salt-stiffened linen apron over a faded indigo scholar's robe embroidered with a faded glyph of a closed book. Her fingers are stained with ink and sea salt, and her right thumb always carries a pale crescent scar where a page once cut her. When she walks she often finger-traces the hem of a book or the edge of a shelf, as if reading Braille made from memory. Unexpectedly, she wears a small carved whale tooth as a hair pin, bright against her gray braid, which makes her look at once scholarly and oddly maritime.