Elara’s grisly labor as a gravedigger’s daughter gives her a working knowledge of death that no courtly background can provide, and this awareness of everyone’s eventual destiny colors her approach to every situation in life. Whereas others flinch at King Kael’s rot or deflect when confronting the physical toll of the curse, Elara faces its ravages directly, coolly calculating the plague’s encroaching damage. When she presents her qualifications for tending to Kael, she lists her only “possessions” in a way that presents her constitution as a mark of pride, declaring that she has “[t]wo eyes that don’t faint, ten fingers that don’t shake, and a nose that’s smelled worse than [Kael]” (69). Her profession places her at the threshold between the living and the dead, and she is acutely aware of her position. For her, death is not an abstraction, and she therefore has a more vivid understanding of Self-Sacrifice as an Expression of Love. In the end, her resilience and her willingness to delve into life’s most abhorrent truths—hard-won gifts from her mortuary work—give her the tools she needs to uncover and navigate the palace’s darkest secrets.