Nina

Nina is a fair-haired young woman with blue eyes, her looks thinned and worn by the sickness that plagues her. She lives on the outskirts of Albion among the other women who work under Luca, and her wasting condition leaves her convinced she has little time ahead of her.

Timid and inclined toward self-preservation, Nina means well but is too frightened to stand up for anyone when doing so might invite punishment. She snaps at times at both Luca and Casca, only to dissolve into tears and apologies moments later. Though she admires Luca, she also comes to resent her, reading the older woman's generosity as a claim to being better than everyone else, and she fails to grasp why Luca shares their earnings, missing that it buys the whole group goodwill and safety.

Her outlook is darkened above all by a chronic infection, one known to Luca and to Joachim, which she fears will rob her of her mind should it reach her brain. Persistent bleeding and discharge suggest a disease passed through her work, and Luca secures her a medicine received as a doctor's payment. Dreading an early death, Nina makes most of her choices for whatever relief they offer in the moment. Crucially, her cowardice is never framed as villainy; she loathes herself for her selfishness and regrets the times she throws others into danger to spare herself. At the arc's end she recognizes she had misjudged Luca, yet decides to part from her all the same, believing she will never grow steady unless she learns to stand without leaning on her, and she turns instead to Joachim, trusting that two flawed and gentle souls might hold each other up.

Nina numbers among Luca's group of women working outside Albion, and she becomes entangled with the pagan cult of the Great Goat. Her fear repeatedly places her in peril: she is dragged into the torture chambers of the Holy See for interrogation, coughs up blood as her illness worsens, and is nearly lost during the chaos that engulfs the Tower of Conviction, at one point seeming to plunge from its heights. Reunited afterward with Luca, she clings to her and pleads not to be abandoned again, and she shelters with the others as the Kushan army sweeps through. Her long ordeal finally eases when she is brought back together with Joachim, and she resolves to leave prostitution behind to seek a new life at his side.