Niva

A young woman of a good house in Holmford, a few years older than Bren — of a quiet beauty, her neck held a touch too straight, like someone who learned to stand that way because they were told to. Warm on the outside, she wears her courtesy like a shield, and beneath it she carries her own unspoken weight: her mother is bargaining her off to the well-to-do Werchockis, a quieter mirror of what befell Maris. Once she tells Bren outright that she'd like, just once in her life, to choose something for herself.

Bren has quietly loved her for a long time, but she lives in a different world than a smith's apprentice and, in practice, doesn't see him "that way." The feeling stays unreturned and unspoken — the Maris affair brushes them against each other for a moment, but nothing comes of it and Niva goes back to her world.