Lkete has a weather-browned face, a blunt, straight nose, and dark hair threaded with silver and braided close to keep it clear of branches. Her hands are broad and ridged with calluses from pruning hooks and rope, the nails permanently stained green-brown with sap. She walks with the economical, measured steps of someone used to judging soft ground, but stops abruptly whenever she hears a branch creak. Her unexpected detail is a tiny brass bell sewn inside her collar, kept for a shy grove-dwelling moth she once raised; she rings it only when alone.

Lkete offers impeccable courtesies in absurdly dangerous moments, because manners feel like a small territory no one can seize from her. She is warm with frightened people and patient with the natural world, yet brisk and overbearing with anyone she thinks is wasting time. In calm company she can laugh at her own rigidity; under pressure she turns disagreement into a chain of command and may only notice she has done so after someone walks away.

Lkete grew up in a border hamlet where the old road crossed a managed sacred grove. She learned pruning, boundary law, and the ritual courtesies owed to both visitors and trees from her aunt, a keeper who believed good manners could prevent a quarrel before it began. When Lkete was twenty, soldiers requisitioned the grove's timber for a siege. She obeyed the order until she saw a trapped child beneath a collapsing root shelf; she abandoned the military schedule, led the rescue, and was dismissed for disobedience. The child survived, but the grove never recovered from the cutting. Years later, the hamlet entrusted her with a smaller, thriving woodland. Its leaves now blacken from the roots upward, and she suspects a buried drain from an abandoned glassworks is carrying poison into the soil. She has asked the local reeve, a stubborn former friend, for help and received delays instead. She continues to send reports to her aunt, who is too ill to travel, and hides how frightened she is that this grove will die under her watch.