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Reaching behind the bar, much to the waitress's disgruntlement who was working back there, Svana fished around until she found a clean towel. Soaking a corner in the remains of her drink, she used it to clean blood off her hands, one finger at a time. The other woman there brought up her question before she could ask it. The child seemed terribly gullible.

"So a perfectly good stranger who tries to kill you tells you you're entire life is a lie? And you believed him? Why does his word hold more merit than the people you actually trust who don't mistakenly try to gut you?"

Trivial as they may be, focusing on the girl's problems helped her shy temporarily away from her own. She continued scrubbing blood off herself, wincing when she found an oozing cut on the back of her wrist, stinging as her whiskey soaked cloth scraped over it. Biting off a hiss, she inspected the gash as she cleaned it more thoroughly. She was in no mood to let another one turn toxic and nearly kill her again.

Gratefully, Sherith accepted the napkin, nodding her head to express thanks. "I'm not sure," she says. "I don't even know where I am now. How can I plan ahead if I don't even know that much?"

Turning her eyes on the elven woman, she shrugs her shoulders. "I don't know what to add to what I already told Claudette," she says, gesturing to the woman since the elf hadn't been here when she had been introduced. "Everything he said made sense. He didn't say things about my family directly, but the things he described fit them too well."

Pressing her lips together, she added, "I was never allowed to leave the grounds before, and everything I read and learned came from them. It wasn't too hard for them to hide things from me. When something is the only thing you know, you don't know to question it."

Suddenly feeling the weight of her situation, she props an arm on the table and rests her cheek in her hand.

Svana snorted and rolled her eyes again. "Burn it all, you aren't the brightest bug in the bog, are you?" The girl was a lost cause. No sense of loyalty and no skepticism. She'd probably be dead on her own in a week. If she trusted every stranger who "made sense" she could probably talk the kid right into a set of shackles and convince her it was for her own good. All it had to be was a good enough story for her not to bother questioning.

The other woman took an interest in her wounds, bringing her back to her own issues. She frowned, wiping off her neck with the rag. "Successful flanking tactics, a well trained army and a better trained army, a fool's plan, and a lot of motivated dwarves defending their territory," she grumbled.

It didn't matter who had won. Svana felt the losses tear apart her soul.

She lifted her fingers to her stitched cheek, but let them drop again. It would get infected if she bothered it.

Claudette held back a laugh at the elf's comment about Sherith. She was completely right though. The girl was easily manipulated into believing a total stranger. While she did feel sorry for the girl, there wasn't much she could do if the girl was absolutely convinced the man was right. But, she figured she could at least keep the girl from getting into any more trouble.

She nodded at the elf's words. Some battles were too harsh to give detail to, and Claudette decided to leave it at that. The smell of alcohol was getting to her anyway, since that was what she really wanted more than the coffee she had drank earlier.

Sherith still seemed pretty confident the man was right about what he had told her, so she let it go.

"If you're sure that he's right about them," Claudette said, her voice drifting off. She really didn't know what to say to that, but maybe some alcohol might give her mouth some guidance.

She rose from her seat and approached the counter once again.

"Rum, please," she said.

Claudette waited at the counter while the employee prepared her drink after she paid with a few wooden coins. She was mostly staring at Sherith and the elf. Was it really okay to leave them alone?

Sherith seemed unlikely to be the one to start trouble. Getting into trouble, however, was an entirely different story. Though this place doesn't seem to be inherently dangerous, one never knows what might come through the doors next. After all, Sherith's reaction to Svana was hardly...polite. Then again, the girl was quite overwrought. Slowly she rubbed her forehead and her eyelids started drooping. Whether or not the man was correct, the situation was obviously quite an ordeal to her. Now she's feeling the effects of that distress, and she folds both her arms on the table and rests her head between them.

((OOC: I'm going to lie down RL so feel free to pose around me.))

Svana watched out of the corner of her eye as the woman sharpened an interesting looking weapon. The craftmenship was unfamiliar, hard to pin. Since a human wielded it, it made sense they had probably designed it, but given how displaced she was from their cultures, there was no way of telling.

"You wouldn't know it," she replied vaguely, taking another long swallow of her drink. "It was forgotten by your people a long time ago."

In some ways that was better, especially now she was deliberately breaking the treaties.

"I've never seen that sort of weapon. How do you use it?"

More specifically, she wanted to know the best way to defend against it if she ever came across it.

The young woman's shriek drew Veiris's attention towards the bar and the bloody spattered figure. His eyebrows creased as he took in the other's appearance- pointed ears, black lines tracing her skin. He thought she may be one of the Feineil, but he'd never seen one like her.

He kept silent as she started talking with Claudette and Sherith. He paid little attention to Sherith's story. Her tragedy wasn't really his concern, and he'd established she wasn't any threat or really any interest to him. The blood covered, possible Feineil, had stolen his focus.

He couldn't hide how he stared at her, his eyes tracing the lines that marred her skin. He noticed they looked like the color came from under the skin, but that didn't make sense. He tried to read them, the way he easily "read" his own tattoos and those he'd seen on every other Shifter. But they didn't look like his tattoos. They were sharp lines, not twisted knotwork.

He pulled himself out of his own thoughts when Claudette pulled her blade. He pushed away from the table, and the blade, on instinct and muttered a nearly silent "s**t" under his breath. It was aimed more at himself for not paying attention than for the woman pulling the blade. It took him a moment to realize she was just sharpening it, and not intending to actually use it.