Bram

Bram was raised in the same litter as Ysra, in the same rooms, on the same stone. He was taken the way she was and put through the rite the way she was, but younger, and where she has nothing to remember he has less than nothing: not a face, not a word, not a shape of a room. He has never found this sad. You cannot grieve a thing you were never given, and the people who have him now have never once let him go hungry.

In the field he is the ground she works above. She takes the roofline and the rafters and the dark; he stays down in the lit part of the room where anything looking for her will find him first. He is proud of this arrangement in a way he would not be able to explain, and he has never asked whether it is fair, because it has never occurred to him that it might be a question.

He is younger than he acts. He over gives, and it comes out as taking the worse watch, doing the extra thing, standing a half step nearer than the job requires. His loyalty to the pack is total and completely uncomplicated, and it is the flattest, warmest thing in The Undercity: a person who has decided who his people are and has never spent one evening reconsidering it.

Alone, he looks tired, and briefly like what he is, which is a young man doing a great deal of work to be enough.