Ferra
Who she is
A picker on the hand-cut reserve rows of Veylan Steps, in Maudry’s crew, and Ansel’s closest friend.
The Opening
The crews chose her as the pickers’ witness for the Opening of the twenty-one-year vintage. She will lay the cutting from Auvren on the cask before the seal is broken, and she has been rehearsing the witness words (“I bear the labor of the year”). She is nervous about it, and more so when she learns she must also receive the cutting from the keeper, which has words of its own.
Appearance
Small and quick, a head shorter than Ansel, with a mass of dark curls tied back in a scrap of twine that is losing the fight. Freckled nose and forearms from a harvest under Vya and Veo; fingers stained purple to the second knuckle. Carries a hooked picking knife and a satchel.
Personality
- Practical, quick-tongued and fiercely caring. She feeds Ansel her own lunch (“It was my lunch. Now it’s your breakfast.”) and calls him hopeless.
- Keeps a running count of how many times he’s been late, and doesn’t accept his excuses about the lift.
- Knows about the reaching, the only one besides Dareth who does, and never lectures him about it.
- Embarrasses easily (goes red to the ears at Maudry’s “Your Witnessship”).
People in her life
- Ansel: her best friend.
- Maudry: her crew boss.
- Dareth: Ansel’s master, who trusts her with him.
- Ruthe: the keeper at Auvren Groves.
As the story unfolds
These details come from the story itself. Choose the last chapter you’ve read, and only what has been revealed up to that point will appear.
Receiving the cutting
At Auvren, every word she practiced drains away when Ruthe offers the cutting. She answers “The hands that bore the year,” stumbles on “A new… year,” and corrects herself to “season.”
A later
When Ansel says he “saw” the Quickener, Ferra looks at him the way she does when deciding whether to believe him, and keeps her conclusion to herself. That evening she reminds him he still owes her a “later.” He promises: “Tomorrow. After.”
Her first word
At the seal, nothing comes out. Then: “I bear the labor of the year.”
I just do
Of the man at the trestle: “He didn’t come for the wine.” Asked how she knows: “I just do.”
Her door
She walks home rather than take the lift, with her arm through Ansel’s. At her door she straightens his collar, and she leaves him holding her lamp.
He said you sent him
A man got her door open by using Ansel’s name. “Couldn’t hear anything in him. Kept asking when you’d come.” He lies dying in her doorway, and her picker’s knife is red to the handle.
Late
Carried through the dark: “Told him you’d be late.”