Edrik has the measured, slightly forward posture of a man accustomed to reading by poor light. His skin is the muted red-brown of fired clay, with fine, dark scales along his temples and the backs of his hands. Two ridged horns sweep back close to his skull, polished smooth where he absentmindedly rubs them while thinking. His black hair is clipped short at the sides and gathered into a small, practical tail. His eyes are amber, flecked with gold, and seem to settle on the space beside a person just before he answers. He moves with economical care, as if every room were crowded with invisible furniture. He smells distinctly of beeswax, hot dust, and the bitter fennel tea he spills on his cuffs; he knows about the tea, but not the dust.

Edrik is patient with practical questions and impatient with people who mistake confidence for truth. He jokes dryly when comfortable, but becomes painfully literal when afraid. In a crisis he is decisive and protective; afterward he may retreat into calculations rather than admit how much the danger frightened him.

Edrik grew up in a riverside kiln district, where his mother fired roof tiles and his father repaired the town's floodgates. At eleven, he noticed that the river's rise followed a pattern no one else believed in. He predicted a disastrous flood, but the council dismissed him as a clever child trying to frighten them. The flood came; his younger sister, Sashiko, survived only because Edrik dragged her onto a kiln roof. Afterward, he left to study divination, determined that a warning should never be ignored merely because it is inconvenient. He became an adviser to the city of Suthai, a settlement built on steep river terraces and named for his mother's homeland, though its climate and customs are entirely different. There he met Theshen, a patient archivist who became his closest friend and occasional critic. Edrik's former apprentice, Shino, left his service after discovering that he had concealed an ugly prediction about a beloved local leader. Now she runs a small school for street children and refuses his letters, though she still sends him corrections to his calculations. Edrik's present trouble is a series of predictions that all point toward the collapse of Suthai's oldest floodgate, but the city council will not authorize repairs until he identifies exactly when and how it will fail.