House Telemanus's aged Yellow physician and botanist, a lonely, grief-touched old man who befriends Lyria and grows deadly flowers.
Dr. Liago is the ancient Yellow physician of House Telemanus, caring for fox and human alike, and the one soul on the Luna estate who treats Lyria as a person rather than an object of pity. Baffled by what has driven Sophocles bird-mad, he sets Lyria to collecting scat samples while he tinkers in his greenhouse, teaching her the chemistry of life—skatole, carbon, the stuff of every living thing. A Martian himself, ten years on the moon and homesick, he dotes on her bluntness and on the old Pink servant Bethalia, sending her flowers of his own design.
His pride and joy is the Nyxacallis, the 'Night Lily'—a slender violet-budded flower, thirteen years in the perfecting, that arcs like a cat into a gentle hand but erupts poisonous spines and cellular death upon anything that strikes it too fast. Named for a woman he once loved and lost, the deadly flower and the pain he carries plainly in his eyes are what make Lyria fond of the old bat.
A very old Yellow of perhaps seventy, wrinkled deeper than aged knuckles, all crags and fissures with patches of scraggly facial hair and great white plumes cresting his long-jawed head; nimble hands, a magnifying ocular strapped over one eye, in patched overalls.
The Telemanus house physician and botanist; a lonely, deadly-fingered gardener and Lyria's unlikely friend and confidant.