Morna has a broad, weather-ready face and the compact, weighty build of someone who has hauled casks for decades. Her skin is ruddy from stove heat and winter drafts; pale floury streaks often cling to the fine creases beside her nose. Her dark-brown hair is braided into a thick rope and tucked under a kerchief, though loose curls escape at her temples. She moves with a measured, heel-first tread, as if testing every floorboard for honesty. Within a minute, people notice that her eyes travel to hands, doorways, and empty chairs before they ever settle on a face. When rattled, she takes a breath through her nose that catches halfway, then lets it out in a dry, rasping huff.

Morna is brisk with strangers but quietly generous once she has decided they are not a danger. She likes order because it keeps people safe, yet she will break any rule that seems more interested in authority than in lives. In a busy room she is dryly funny and quick to mediate; alone after closing she becomes restless, revisiting old decisions as if they were chores left unfinished.

Morna learned to keep a room fed and calm from her mother, who ran a roadside cookshop where soldiers, salt haulers, and fugitives all paid the same price for stew. As a young woman she served for several years in a town militia, where she became more useful at holding a narrow gate than chasing anyone through it. During a flood, she disobeyed an officer's order to abandon a locked storehouse and went back for the trapped workers. She saved three people, including her future partner in the tavern, but the delay cost the militia a defensible crossing. Morna left service with no taste for distant commanders or grand speeches. She bought Die Salzwaage with help from her old comrade Szelka, and turned it into a place where travelers can eat without answering questions they do not owe. Szelka now handles the kitchen and suspects Morna is hiding something. Morna's brother Thurn, a ferryman upriver, wants her to sell the tavern and move somewhere safer. Meanwhile, a local reeve keeps demanding that she identify a regular who once sheltered a wanted courier.