I didn’t like it. Everything I had in the world was in those panniers, including my journal and what money I had. A sneaking part of me resolved that at my earliest opportunity, I’d make certain it was still there. She was meeting my eyes in a very direct way. I took a breath. She’d meant well and she was honest about it. Traveling can make a person suspicious. “It took me aback, yes.”

“It was something I was willing to do for you.” From the emphasis she put on the words, she made it clear that there were other things she’d be unwilling to do for me. “My mother was a good seamstress and she taught me well. She sewed for some of the best families in Old Thares. She knew how to make clothing fit a…portly man. And I learned it at her knee. I can make your garments more comfortable on you. So you can chop wood without straining the seams.”

Why was it so hard to say, “Thank you. I’d welcome that”? I suppose it was because I wished she could see me as something other than a fat stranger who wanted to lie with her. I had to admit that in many ways, it was a fair appraisal of me. It wasn’t that I was infatuated with her or wished her to like me. She was pretty enough, in a weary way, and she was a woman, and the first woman other than my sister I’d spent any appreciable time with in weeks. That was all, I told myself. It was simple proximity and honest lust. A man didn’t have to be ashamed of that, as long as he didn’t force himself on a woman. It was just the way a man was made.

That evening was both more comfortable and less easy. The food was more substantial, and once again we had tea to finish with, even if there was no sugar. But she had told me her story the night before, and I had no wish to tell her mine, so talk was scarce. Firelight was the only light in the room. We sought our beds early. I lay on the floor, rolled in my blanket. I tried not to think of her, soft and warm and only a few steps away. For all my harsh training to be a soldier, I thought to myself, this family lived in harder circumstances than anything I’d ever experienced. There were no evening pastimes for the children, no storybooks or music, no toys save what they had invented for themselves. Amzil had little education; I doubted she could read. Whatever culture she had absorbed growing up in the grand city of Old Thares would be denied to her children, growing up in poverty in this wilderness. It was grim to speculate on their future, not just during the harshness of the coming winter but for all the years after that.

I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shut down my thoughts. She’d as much as admitted that she’d whored for passing travelers last winter to get food for herself and the children. With such an example before them, what would Kara and little Dia expect of life? What sort of a man would Sem grow to be, watching his mother sell herself to support him? It was tawdry and disgusting. Yet when she looked at her children, her gaze was familiar, for it was the same way my mother had always looked at us. In the last year, I’d had my eyes opened to my mother’s place in our world, and had come to realize that in many ways she had sacrificed her own interests to ours. The seeds of thought that Epiny had sown in my mind were growing in uncomfortable ways. My mother had always been my mother and my father’s wife. I don’t think I’d ever stopped to wonder who else she might have wanted to be, outside of those roles. Now I’d glimpsed, several times, how she had had to bow her head to my father’s decisions for her children, and witnessed more clearly how she had battled him for a say in our lives. She’d never expected to be a nobleman’s wife; she’d been married off to the soldier son of a good family, with no higher expectation than that he would advance in his career as an officer. When she’d left her father’s house, she would have believed that eventually, when my father retired from the military, she would return to Old Thares, to live at the Burvelle mansion there, to visit her childhood friends, to go to the theater and enjoy the cultural and social events of her home city. Instead, my father’s elevated status had meant that she lived far from the capital city and that her social friendships were limited to women similarly uplifted. She had traveled to visit her family in the city perhaps once every five years, and only after we children had become mostly self-sufficient. Until then, she had not left us for a single day. Was that what it meant to be a mother?

I shifted uncomfortably on the packed earth floor. The cold from it seeped up through my blankets and made me ache. I tried to fall asleep, but my eyes kept opening, to stare around the dismal little room. I didn’t want to think about my mother and how life had trapped her in a similar way to how life had trapped Amzil. That led to wondering how deep of a trap I had fallen into myself. Here I lay, the son of a nobleman, a soldier son destined to be an officer, and I’d begged shelter and food from an ignorant seamstress, the widow of a thief. And I’d been grateful for what I’d received.