Nässla

• Build & height: 1.78 m, lean and wiry, all tendon. She stands with her arms held slightly out from her sides so they don't brush anything, herself included.
• Face: sharp and wild, with high cheekbones and a narrow, amused mouth. Red welts across her cheeks and forehead, from her own hair.
• Hair: a nettle thicket: tall, serrated nettle stems growing from her scalp to her shoulders, swaying. In summer it flowers in tiny green tassels.
• Eyes: pale green. When her sting is burning in someone, a red ring shows round each iris.
• Skin & burl-mark: green-black, covered head to toe in fine stinging hairs that catch the light like frost. Red welts on everything she has touched, including herself. No sin (Scarwood). Her burl is a nettle-knot at the base of her throat that glows nettle-green when someone near her lies.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a sleeveless shift woven from her own nettle fibre, scratchy and greenish-grey · a belt of braided stems · bare hands, always. She has never worn gloves and never will · bare feet.
• Signature item: her bare hands, palms up, offered. Nobody takes them.
• Movement: loose and feral. She moves through a crowd without touching anyone, ducking and twisting.
• Voice: dry and amused. She asks every question twice; the second time, it burns. Her balloons have bristly outlines, tiny hairs all along the edge.
• Variant looks: Stinging (a red welt blooming on the target, a red ring in her eyes). The Field (knee-deep in nettles under Astralis's crimson starfield, two vast mirrors on either horizon). Mirror-Walk (a gap in a mirror where her reflection should be).

Anyone Nässla stings cannot lie for as long as the sting burns. Each lie they try burns hotter and pushes a nettle out through their skin.

• Duration: about an hour, longer if they scratch.
• Tracking: her nettles grow wherever a promise was ever broken. She can track every broken promise in the universe by following her own weeds.
• Mirror-Walk: she cannot pretend to be anything she isn't, so mirrors don't reflect her. She can walk between mirrors without being caught by them, so reflection-powers (Echo's, Katriel's octagon) can't touch her.
• The Field rule (home field): nobody can lie while her sting burns in the Nettle Field.
• What it can't do: make anyone speak (silence is not a lie), or catch a true believer: a lie the speaker believes is not a lie.

• Tempo: 40 base, plus one for every lie spoken within her reach.
• Home tempo: the Nettle Field, or any court, council or throne room. "Liars are fast food."
• Heartbeat technique: THE STING-COUNT. Every lie spoken near her adds a heartbeat to her own, counted, so in a room full of liars she becomes the fastest thing alive. No one else is fuelled by other people's lies.
• Burn cost: every full burn flares her own welts. She stings herself, every time, to the bone.

She cannot touch anything without hurting it. She has never been held, and she has never held anyone. Her own sting is always on her, so she can't lie either, not even a kind lie, not even to herself.

• Silence. Someone who simply doesn't speak can't lie: Vider, Lärka.
• True believers. Katriel believes every assignment she made was just; Redactor believes his dream. Their lies don't burn.
• Fire burns nettles, and her.
• Armour. Sentinel white-plate and thick gloves keep her sting out. She has to find skin.
• Pride and Envy themselves: the two sins sealed in Astralis's great Mirrors, raw forces with faces: Pride a silver figure that wants everything in its place, Envy a rose figure that becomes whatever it sees. They have pushed at the glass for a thousand years, and her field is what lies between them.

• Her hands and the Nettle-Lash.
• The Nettle Field: knee-deep nettles under the crimson starfield of Astralis, between the two great sealing Mirrors that face each other across the plain.
• The black panthers of Astralis: her allies from a distance. They won't come near her. Rougeina's panther is the first who does.

Truth as a weapon. She opens by touching whoever is lying most, then asks twice. In a fight she is fast in courts and slow on battlefields: she whips, ducks, stings, and gets out. Team combos: Nässla + Rougeina: the sting that opens Envy I (below). Nässla + Orka: the two truth-tellers. Orka binds, Nässla stings, and no lie gets through either. Nässla + Kompis: he reads threads, she reads lies, and between them no traitor survives a dinner.

• Wants: to be held, once, without anyone flinching.
• Fears: touching someone she loves and watching them pull away.
• Contradiction: a creature made of truth who sometimes longs to hear one kind lie.
• Humour: dry and needling. "Lovely speech. Your neck says otherwise."
• Habits: rubs her own welts; follows broken promises out of curiosity, like gossip.
• Alone: lies in her field on her back, looking up at the crimson stars, arms out, touching nothing.

• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus puts his head under her hand. It stings him, a little, and he doesn't pull away. "The dog's got nothing to hide. It barely burns." She sits down in the field and cries.
• Vigolas: under her sting she asks what he wants. "Everything." It doesn't burn. She laughs for the first time in the book.
• Trollmage: lies constantly, as jokes. He's covered in nettles inside an hour, and it's the funniest thing in Saga III.
• Smurjan: Kali lies about everything and gets stung ferociously; Bakasura never lies ("…Hungry.").
• Orka: her closest friend in the series: two women who can't lie. They can't hold hands, so they sit back to back.
• Katriel: the boss of her debut arc, a true believer whose lies don't burn.

• "Say it again. Slower. Let's see if it burns."
• "Lovely speech. Your neck says otherwise."
• "What do you want? …What do you want?"
• "The dog's got nothing to hide. It barely burns."
• "Don't. I'll hurt you. …Oh. You don't care. Oh."