A lean young man with wind-chapped pallor and brown hair that will not lie flat, even when damp. His pale yellow eyes have a raptor's fixed, measuring focus; in bright light, the pupils seem to contract too sharply. He moves with a forward tilt, as if balancing on an invisible current, then goes unnaturally still before turning his head in one quick, birdlike motion. His hands are roughened by bowstring and travel, with blunt, split nails and small calluses across the fingers. He smells faintly of wet feathers, cold iron, and ozone, a scent he notices only when someone else recoils. The unexpected detail: he keeps a tiny paper crane tucked behind one ear, folded by a child at the orphanage.

Richard is compassionate in practical, almost stubborn ways, yet emotionally evasive when anyone offers him the same care. He can be patient with frightened children and abruptly severe with people he thinks are making excuses. In a calm mood he jokes dryly and listens closely; when the spirit stirs, he becomes solemn, old-fashioned, and convinced that delay is complicity. He hates being treated as a weapon, but sometimes welcomes the clarity of having a target.

Before the spirit's bargain, Richard Jones was a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy born to a family with roots across the sea in Scandinavia. He died young, far from the family that might have claimed him. An ancient eagle spirit, left without a home after the collapse and displacement of the eastern peoples whose lands it had known, found him at the edge of death. The spirit offered life in exchange for Richard's blue eyes, taking them as the price of sight and a place inside the boy. Richard woke with pale yellow eyes and a second presence behind his thoughts. He grew up in an orphanage, where caretaker Nessa Shiel taught him to repair broken windows and never promise what he could not give. A younger resident, Tomi, still sends him messages he is too ashamed to answer. As adulthood approaches, the spirit's memories and impulses are surfacing more often: Richard watches skies instead of friends, speaks of old wrongs, and feels cold in his heart and nerves that crackle like lightning. The spirit insists Richard's blood father must die, even if the trail leads to Scandinavia, and demands justice for crimes against the land from Alaska to Florida. Richard has left the orphanage bitterly, but keeps the paper crane from one of its children. He does not yet know whether the hunt is his calling, the spirit's revenge, or both.