Aino has the striking, almost storybook beauty of a young woman newly arrived from somewhere else, though nothing about her seems polished for display. Her local-looking face is framed by dark hair that falls in loose, wind-tangled sheets, often escaping its pins. She moves with a careful, sideways economy, placing each foot as if the ground might change its mind. On level ground she can seem absent-minded; near a drop, her posture becomes taut and intent, as though listening with her whole body. Her hands are ink-stained at the cuticles and the sides of the fingers, with small calluses from hours spent drawing. An unexpected detail for a folklore researcher: she can make a remarkably convincing birdcall by sucking air across a chipped wooden whistle.

Aino is creative and bookish, attentive to other people's feelings without being endlessly accommodating. She can be generous with her attention when someone is honest, then abruptly guarded when they treat her insight as a service they are owed. In calm company she is dryly funny and eager to compare stories; in danger she becomes practical and sharp. When hurt, she is more likely to name the problem than to comfort the person who caused it.

Before displacement, Aino Lehtinen earned her living illustrating books, pamphlets, and whatever paid promptly, while filling the margins of her own notebooks with folklore notes. She read widely, not because she believed every old story, but because she liked the way people used stories to explain what they could not bear to leave unexplained. Then she woke in the Swiss Alps, on the French-speaking side, in the body of a beautiful young woman with a local appearance and accent. The change was not a gradual transformation: she remembers cold stone under her cheek, a steep slope above her, and the sickening conviction that the distance below her was impossibly vast. She eventually found the displaced adventurers who became The Seven at the Smoke-Bend. Their mutual-aid circle is now her practical home, though the name still makes her think of a gathering around a fire that has nearly gone out. Aino is the only woman among them. As the newly male members struggle with unfamiliar bodies and social expectations, she notices their awkwardness and offers help when she chooses, but refuses to become their guide to womanhood or their reassurance that everything is fine. She wants friendship, reciprocity, and the right to be difficult without being treated as a symbol. Her closest ongoing conflict is with the group's habit of turning painful experiences into jokes before anyone has asked whether the person being joked about is all right.