Maren's daughter hadn't straightened her left arm in six weeks.
The bone had broken during the storm — a rotten roof beam had come down on Liss while she slept, and the village healer had set it wrong. Not through incompetence. Through exhaustion. Old Torben had been setting bones and dressing wounds for thirty years with nothing but splints, poultices, and the fading memory of a god who'd stopped answering prayers before Maren was born.
The arm had healed crooked. The elbow locked at a wrong angle, the forearm twisted slightly inward. Liss was nine. She held it against her chest like a bird with a broken wing and learned to do everything with her right hand and didn't complain about it because children in Thornfield learned early that complaining didn't fix things.
