The door was ajar when the half-orc found her room at the Broken Dagger. This was not her home. It had not been for some months, though her meager stipend from the Inquisitory had allowed her to keep it.
There was a wooden bed with a hemp frame to hold its lumpy, hay-stuffed mattress. Beside it stood a hastily-constructed table whereupon a single candle, like a fiery sentinel, was perched on a clay plate. The girl sat on a storage-chest at the end of the bed, a thing of weather-beaten pine and tarnished iron corners. Her head was cocked awkwardly to the side when he entered, the cup of her left ear crushed against her shoulder. Her right hand covered the other ear. She stared across the room at a dark, unrealized point--
When he entered, Gloria Wynsee looked at Murrukh.
Then, her attention fell to the gleaming gash that smiled at her from the meat of his broad forearm.
Minutes later, the one-armed girl had distributed her tools across the bedding: a spool of uncolored thread, a series of shining needles that gleamed in the faint, orange light; a ceramic basin of boiled water procured from the kitchen, a tangle of warmed rags and cheesecloth. She motioned for him to sit on the chest. After some acrobatics of her remaining fingers and teeth, a knotted length of string dangled from a needle's eye. She scorched the steel tip over the dancing candleflame until the sliver of metal was smoking and black. Her eyes were swollen, bulging; her nose, raw at its corners, was wet with snot.
"It did this to you?" she asked him. "It cut you?"