Anymore, she could come and go as a ghost.
After almost three years in Myrken Wood, Gloria Wynsee had taken her place amid its filthy regulars and downtrodden citizens, chiseling out a niche despite the muddy hue of her skin and the broken glass of an accent that still lingered from her life overseas. That had been her old life, her past life, a place of sand and blood where she'd grown into a fat little girl with a head full of nothing. Very quickly, Myrken had managed to peel back the Jerno and inject her with fancies, with ideas of her own, with the capacity for good decisions and bad ones.
And here, standing in the smoky upper hallway of the Broken Dagger with a tin cup of tea held in her fist, she wondered if this was another one of the latter.
The room across from her belonged to Ailova; the brigand, however, wasn't its only occupant.
"Phor," Gloria whispered, leaning forward to press her cheek against the wooden slats. Her rumpled bonnet crushed against the wood. With an eye angled to see through the slits between the boards, the girl wondered whether or not she could catch a glimpse of the world within: perhaps a sliver of the bed or a shadow of movement, maybe the glimpse of a secret to feed an insatiable surge of curiosity. Looking into the rooms of others was a portal to another life, another existence, something different.
"Open up," she encouraged, skirts rustling as she lifted a knee to knock it against the doorframe. "I brought tea. It's Gloria. I brought you some tea."