Räva

• Build & height: 1.72 m, lean, all angles, loose-jointed and quick. She lounges against walls as if she owns them, and is gone before you look twice.
• Hair: red, worn loose and wild, a shade more orange than Rougeina's crimson.
• Eyes: laughing amber. In any borrowed face, her amber eyes stay behind it: the tell Smurjan's third eye catches (ch. 59).
• Skin & sin-mark: freckled and sun-browned. Envy, rose, becoming what you see. Rose script along the white tip of her tail, and a faint rose line at the hairline of any borrowed face: a tell for readers who look closely.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a loose linen shirt, sleeves rolled · a patched waistcoat with thirty pockets (most of them full of other people's things) · rust-red trousers with a slit for the tail · soft, silent boots · a belt with two thin blades: cheap copies, never mirror-steel.
• Signature item: a real, living, bushy fox tail, red with a white tip. It gives her away when she's happy.
• Movement: a thief's: dirty, fun, improvised. She kicks crates, flicks fish, uses pratfalls as feints.
• Voice: quick and mocking, with "darling" everywhere. In a borrowed face she uses the owner's voice exactly, and her balloons take on the owner's lettering. Her own balloons have a small fox-ear notch at the top.
• Variant looks: Wearing (someone else's face perfectly, with amber eyes behind it and a fox tail behind them). Flicker (three faces in three panels, mid-fight, laughing in three voices, ch. 59). Faceless (Saga IV, Arc 5: every borrowed face flying off her at once like leaves in a gale).

Make someone laugh, and she can wear their face, their voice and their rank plate, perfectly, for as long as she likes.

• The owner is left smooth-faced, a blank, until she gives it back (ch. 57).
• She keeps every face she has ever borrowed, the dead's too (ch. 59). Marka laughed at her joke in a Gate City tavern nine years ago: "Laughed till she cried. Best face I own."
• The plate comes with it. The Scalelist believes the face: she can walk into an Order hall as an officer.
• The Rävgrytet rule (home field): the paths rearrange whenever anyone laughs. At the centre, where nobody laughs, is her den, its walls hung with thousands of faces like masks.
• What it can't do: take a face without a laugh; take ∞−1's plate without being burned (ch. 63: "OW! What is this?!"); fool Mingus, who knows her by smell in any face.

• Tempo: 260 (her own).
• Home tempo: Rävgrytet, where every laugh is a door.
• Heartbeat technique: THE LAUGH-CATCH. Inside the one heartbeat of a laugh (the breath going out), she takes the face. No one else's power is triggered by someone else's joy.
• Burn cost: every face she wears at full burn costs her a little more of herself: a memory of her own childhood, gone. She is running out of her own past.

She has worn so many faces that she has forgotten her own. If anyone ever shows her her real face, she loses every face she has ever borrowed, all at once. And she's a thief who keeps the faces of the dead, so she has to carry what they looked like when they laughed.

• No laugh, no face. The grim, the deaf to jokes and the grieving are safe from her.
• The Hounds: a pack of Trisdel trackers who have hunted her for a century, led by the old, unpowered Hound-Master Brannvik. They smell fox-scent under a face (ch. 57). They target the Kits, because "the fox always comes back for her kits" (ch. 61).
• Smurjan's third eye sees amber eyes behind any face (ch. 59). Kompis's Lust-sight sees that a borrowed face has no threads of its own (ch. 59).
• ∞−1 burns her.
• Nässla: a liar by trade, under a sting that won't let her lie.
• Echo's mirror: the only mirror that shows the truth.

• Two thin blades, cheap copies, "not mirror-steel" (ch. 57).
• The waistcoat of thirty pockets.
• The den: the silent heart of the maze, walls hung with every face she has ever borrowed (ch. 63).
• The Kits: orphan thieves in fox-fur hats with pinned-on tails, whom she has taught to steal. The smallest, Ekorre, fights Hounds with a ladle (ch. 61) and throws rotten fruit with deadly accuracy (ch. 57).

A thief, not an assassin. Dirty, fast and funny. She opens with the Joke, takes the face of whoever laughs, and fights as them, against people who can't bring themselves to hit that face. She finishes by running, into a maze that rearranges behind her laugh. Combos (when she's on the crew's side): Räva + Trollmage: the comedy rivalry (two jokers, one lazy and one restless). His worst joke on purpose makes everyone laugh and rearranges the maze (ch. 62). Räva + Rougeina: the faces of two women who look too much alike .

• Wants: to stop running, and to stop being afraid of mirrors.
• Fears: her own face.
• Contradiction: the most dangerous liar in the Current goes back into a burning den for her kids (ch. 64), and gives a face back because someone covered her children.
• Humour: constant, merciless, self-mocking. "Ooh. Scary."
• Habits: studies stolen faces in puddles; hums; keeps the Kits fed before herself.
• Alone: sits in the silent centre of her den among a thousand faces, and can't remember which one she was.

• Rougeina: stole her face with her first-ever open laugh (ch. 57), then gave it back: "You covered my kids." (ch. 64). Her niece, and neither of them knows until Saga IV.
• Drekk: the cruellest trick in the saga. She sat at the crew's fire wearing Marka's face, and he laughed for the first time since the jaws, and lost his own. "…Sorry, sailor." (ch. 59) She keeps it until Saga IV, Arc 5. He steers by feel in a mask of the Kettle's bell-rope.
• Marka: her best face.
• Trollmage: comedy rival, and a MACRO : SNEEZE = 12 (ch. 59) she has never forgiven.
• Vigolas: she took his face; the ∞−1 burned her; she dropped it fast (ch. 63).
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus bit the seat of her trousers and hung on (ch. 59). He's the one being she can't fool, because he knows her by smell in any face.
• Smurjan: "It isn't her. Her eyes are amber." (ch. 59)
• Levla: she has robbed him three times.
• Isa: laughter breaks Isa's hold. They are natural enemies, and secretly delighted with each other.
• Brannvik: a hundred years of hunting her.

• "Laugh. Go on, laugh. I'll give your face back… eventually."
• "Oh. This one fits too well." (ch. 57)
• "Not so easy to hit the people you love, is it?!" (ch. 59)
• "…Sorry, sailor." (ch. 59)
• "You covered my kids." (ch. 64)