In Circle of Hands, prior to rolling dice a character decides how aggressive or defensive she wishes to be; this is called the "commitment" in the rules, and generally works by taking twice your Quickness, and allocating those points between Attack and Defense.
Here's the question: the text seems a little unclear about whether that's a character's full, healthy Quickness, or the character's current, "I just took a hell of a lot of damage" Quickness.
For the full healthy Quickness point of view: the example of combat on pages 99 and 100 of the text has Krimhilde down to Quickness 1 (or Quickness 3 under one alternate scenario), but then has 12 points to commit to full attack.
For the current, I'm-badly-injured Quickness, see the sample character sheet.
Note that if you're not wearing armor, and take a pretty serious hit, that's going to deplete your Quickness pretty quickly, making it almost impossible to defend yourself, which creates a death spiral. I can see this as part of the "harshness" of the setting, especially since if your Quickness gets clobbered you won't be able to make a Q v 12 roll to escape. But it also seems like if a lone Circle Knight gets jumped without armor, and the other side has advantage, that's pretty much all she wrote.
Ooops just read page 99 again and realized my mistake: Krimhilde is in fact fully armored and thus her Quickness is unimparied. So maybe it really is current Quickness all along.
Current Quickness. Yeah, if you're damaged down to Quickness 2, you have 2/0, 1/1, or 0/2, good luck.
You about gave me a heart attack with that text reference.