Tena

Tena is a widowed gardener from Kilksey Lake who joins Wistover's founding household. Her knowledge of food and decorative gardens makes her the estate's head gardener, while her protective supervision gives Millie a workable place as the manor's Garden Witch.

Biography

Establishing the manor gardens

With her children grown and scattered, Tena is seeking work when she guides Dominic Wavemates's party through the crowded labour market. Her qualifications in both food and decorative gardening earn her a place in the new household. At the neglected manor she immediately assesses the overgrown garden, goats, fencing, crop rotation, and irrigation, insisting on a protective wall before lower-priority work. She becomes head gardener rather than merely hired labour because the household repeatedly defers agricultural decisions to her, giving Wistover a practical cultivation plan as the estate and surrounding farms are rebuilt. (Chapters 217–230 and 243–248)

Tena's responsibility grows when Dominic brings her Millie, a talented Garden Witch recovering from a head injury. Understanding the risk of overwork, Tena places her under close supervision and begins with controlled weeding in gardens divided for continuous fresh vegetables. The partnership combines ordinary horticultural planning with Millie's accelerated magic and protects a vulnerable worker while improving the manor's food supply. By her latest appearance, Tena is also one of the few people expected to remain engaged in detailed farmland planning with Wistover's Barons. (Chapters 234–235, 294, and 297)

Appearance and personality

Tena is a large woman with thick arms; the corpus gives no further stable physical description. She is motherly, socially confident, and protective, especially toward the younger household women and Millie. Her humour is warm, but her garden priorities are firm and grounded in practical risks such as unreliable rain. (Chapters 219, 230, 235, and 248)

Magic, skills, and craft

The corpus does not establish personal magic for Tena. She is skilled in food and decorative gardening, garden layout, staged harvesting, crop rotation, irrigation assessment, livestock-adjacent estate work, and supervising magical cultivation. She can design work that uses Millie's selective weeding safely, but the plant magic belongs to Millie; Tena contributes the horticultural plan and limits that keep it sustainable. (Chapters 218, 223–235, and 243–248)

Relationships

• Millie: Tena becomes Millie's supervisor and protector, giving the Garden Witch structured work while guarding against overexertion after her injury. (Chapters 234–235 and 294)
• Dominic Wavemates: Dominic hires Tena, trusts her agricultural judgment, and builds walls and other facilities around the priorities she identifies. (Chapters 217–230 and 248)
• Beth: Beth and Tena travel as senior household staff and help organize the newly hired workers during Wistover's hurried founding. (Chapter 219)

Items

• Garden walls, tools, and irrigation works: Tena directs the use or construction of ordinary estate infrastructure rather than possessing a named magical item. (Chapters 223–230 and 248)