Justine Blanche

Justine Blanche is thirty-four years old. She has sharp features, gray-green eyes, and dark brown hair pinned into a tight bun with loose strands escaping. An ink stain perpetually darkens her left cheekbone, and a distinct mole marks her eyelid. She wears a battered, indigo woolen pea coat over a man's linen shirt with ink-smudged cuffs.

Once, Justine took depth soundings for the Royal Hydrographic Board in Vernon. The work was honest, meticulous, and strict. Then her superiors sold her surveys to merchants who passed the charts around, and Justine reasoned sensibly: if others were lining their pockets with her labor, buyers ought to pay for beautiful fiction underpinned by an immaculate grid of coordinates.

Now she drifts through the waterfront taverns of Saint-Clair, Marlot, and Tarven. She buys up decrepit pilot books from elderly navigators, trades tobacco for fishermen's tall tales, and draws nonexistent atolls brimming with rich veins of ore. Half her clients dream of gold; the other half pay to send fools far out to sea. She never steals: a filched purse can be recovered, but you can't dredge up an imaginary reef from the seabed.

In conversation, Justine remains unflappable and dryly witty. Her thoughts race ahead of her tongue, occasionally ending a sentence on an unexpected word. She appreciates thick coffee, brass dividers, and plain speech without posturing. She cannot stand it when parchment is creased across a drafting. She is fascinating to haggle with, debating Mercator projections and leaving you guessing where honest surveying ends and artful deception begins.