Lärka

• Build & height: 1.62 m, slight and narrow, light on her feet. She weighs so little the deck barely notices her, and she notices everything the deck does.
• Face: pale, calm, "almost kind, like a nurse's" (ch. 40). Eyes that never seem to focus on anything near (ch. 39). By Saga IV: ringed with exhaustion from holding the Bastion's wounded quiet through a siege.
• Hair: short and white, cropped close, ruffled by the wind on the Current; it never makes a sound when it moves (her panels have no rustle-lines).
• Eyes: pale grey, unfocused at rest; wide when afraid (ch. 41, 44, 53) and wet when she first hears her own heart.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a grey wool shift · a grey Bastion tunic, then (ch. 53) the same tunic ragged from the islands · a plain belt with a sheath for the stiletto · barefoot, always (she feels through her feet). In Saga IV, Bastion grey again, with sleeves pushed up and a basin of water on her hip.
• Signature item: a finger to her lips. And one hand pressed over her own ear while the other is raised (ch. 53): she is learning to bear sound.
• Movement: she feels what's in front of her: through the deck, the air, the tremble of boots. She sidesteps blades and bullets without looking, an inch at a time, and walks off ships onto the starlight of the Current as if it were a road.
• Voice: almost none. Her words are rare and each one costs her (ch. 199). Her balloons are small, cracked, in the faintest lettering in the series; one word each, sometimes with a stammer. In the Hush, no balloons at all: mouths move, lips are drawn, nothing is printed.
• Variant looks: Hunter (ch. 39–44: calm, unhurried, a pale hand reaching for a chest "the way you'd reach to switch off a light"). Hearing (ch. 44: both hands over her ears, crying, terrified of her own heart). Ragged and returned (ch. 53). The Bastion's nurse (ch. 200–208: finger to lips, basin and cloths, carrying a boy of fourteen, then carrying Aldhrun's axe).

Lärka raises her hand, and in front of her the world goes silent. No sound, and no heartbeat that can be heard.

• A cone. The silence comes out of her chest and points forward (ch. 41, 44, 53). "She can only face one way."
• No sound: the crew shout and nothing comes out; they can't coordinate (Drekk swings at her and hits Rougeina, ch. 39). Trollmage switches to writing in glowing letters in the air.
• No heartbeat: the golden pulse line along Kompis's panel goes flat. Without Mingus's heard heartbeat, Subtick dies (ch. 38–44). That is what she was built for.
• What still works: the Swap ("this silence takes heartbeats, not places") and MACRO (written, not spoken).
• Her touch: a palm laid flat on a chest slows that heart ba… dum… ba……… dum…… (Kompis, ch. 40); two fingers into a collarbone drops a fighter to one knee (Rougeina, ch. 40).
• Her sense: inside her silence she feels what's coming (sidesteps Rougeina, Drekk, and a rifle-bullet by an inch), "what's in front. Not what's exact." (Trollmage, ch. 44)
• It blinds whatever hunts by sound: Mörda's Nightmares hunt racing hearts, and in her Hush they are blind and don't get up (ch. 53); Igel, who hunts by pulse, is blind in it; Tihi's giggle can't reach anyone through it.
• It can be lent: she lent it to Kali, and nothing went dark. A thing lent is shared, not taken (ch. 53).
• What it can't do: reach behind her (outside the cone); guard its own tip, where the silence leaves her body, too close to feel around; stop a gun-soul that moves by itself (Ivar, ch. 41); stop Mingus standing in front of his person (she has to step around him, ch. 40, 42). Mingus's beat can be muffled to others, but never stopped.

• Tempo: 45.
• Home tempo: inside her own silence, where nothing can be heard coming but her.
• Heartbeat technique: THE LISTENING HAND. Palm flat on a chest, inside one beat, she can turn that heart either way: quiet it toward stopping (ch. 40), or hold a failing heart in place so it doesn't slip (Kompis in Sömnen: "Someone was listening to my heart. Holding it in place.", ch. 56). It is the same touch in two directions; for her first life she only knew one. No one else holds a heartbeat with a hand.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): every heart she holds quiet is a heart she must listen to, and she has only been able to hear since ch. 44. Her ceiling is how many hearts she can hear at once. A gatehouse of eleven cots is within it (ch. 206); a battlefield is not. Past it the silence turns inward: her own heart, the loudest thing she knows, goes quiet first. Short of that, every spoken word costs her (ch. 199) and every burn leaves her shaking, hands over her ears.

She lived inside her own silence from birth. Her power muffled the whole world around her, so she never heard a sound, not even her own heartbeat. When the Sightline cracked the Hush she heard it for the first time: "Loud, terrible and alive in her ears", and she ran. Since then the world is too loud for her (she flinches at wind and bells), and every word she speaks costs her: "She says about one word a year." (Kompis, ch. 199) Her whole vocabulary on the page: loud · slower · thank you · not… crew · help · Aldhrun.

• The tip of the cone. Smurjan's third eye found "a single crimson point at the very tip of the cone, where the silence comes out of her", and his first Sightline walked straight to it (ch. 44).
• Behind her. Drekk worked out it was a cone and came from directly behind with the flat of his axe ("BEHIND YOU, WITCH!", ch. 41).
• Writing. Trollmage talks in glowing letters ("HER HUSH ENDS WHERE SHE CAN'T FEEL. FIND THE EDGE.").
• Love that moves by itself: Ivar's ghost swinging the rifle into her blade ("NOT. THIS. BOY."); Mingus standing between her and Kompis.
• How she was beaten (ch. 44): the Sightline cracked the Hush, sound came back to the Marka, and she heard her own heart. Vigolas: "Let her go." / "She almost killed him." / "She's never heard anything. Let her go hear something." She ran across the Current.

• A thin, pale stiletto, the blade that shattered Ivar (ch. 41).
• Basin, water and cloths (Saga IV): she cleans Aldhrun's scars after every blow to his wall.
• Aldhrun's axe, which she carried behind his shield up the Bastion stair (ch. 208).
• No companions on the page but the Bastion's wounded.

• Wants: at first, nothing; she did her work like a nurse and had "no idea what it is she's quieting." After ch. 44: to keep hearts going, Kompis's first, because he told her what hers was.
• Fears: loudness; and, once she knows what a stopping heart sounds like, that ("…S-slower.").
• Contradictions: built to silence one heart, she becomes the one who holds it; the quietest woman in the world chooses the one word help.
• Humour: something "almost like a smile"; a small silent wave from a wall.
• Habits: finger to her lips; counts under her breath without sound (Nine. Ten. Eleven.); puts her ear to chests.
• Alone: walks on the starlight between drifting islands, practising words with her lips before she lets them out.

• Kompis: the man she was built to kill. "That's your heart. That's what it sounds like. That's what you were switching off." She kept his heart going in Sömnen, and spent her one word in years on him: "…help."
• Kali: lent her silence; the first person who ever lent Kali anything ("Nobody has ever lent me anything!").
• Smurjan: the Sightline that cracked her Hush, and gave her the sound of her own heart.
• Vigolas: let her go, twice; the second time he called after her: "Not yet!"
• Drekk: the axe from behind.
• Ivar: she broke him. He came home reforged (Saga III).
• Aldhrun: her Architect. She cleaned his scars, held his wounded, and at dawn, as he died on his feet, said his name. "…There. That's… one."
• Vider: a fellow in the Silence.

• "…l… loud." (ch. 44)
• "…S-slower." (ch. 53)
• "…Thank… you." (ch. 56)
• "…Not… crew." (ch. 56)
• "…help." (ch. 199)
• "…Aldhrun." (ch. 206)