“What kind of traps?”

“I dug holes for them to fall into. I caught a couple of babies like that in the spring. But the others soon learned to go around them.”

My amused smile offended her. I quickly wiped it from my face. She knows nothing of rabbits, or of hunting, I thought to myself. Her skills from her life in the city were useless here. That wasn’t her fault, and I shouldn’t look down on her for trying. At the same time, I could not help feeling a bit superior. “We’ll make the snare lines very fine, so they’re almost invisible. And I’ll show you how to know where the rabbit will lift its head as it comes down the trail and out of the brush. That’s the best place to hang a snare, to make sure you get a quick, clean kill.”

“The young ones I caught were alive. I wanted to try to cage them and breed them, like people do pigeons and doves in the city. But…” She glanced at the children. “Sometimes meat today is more important than saving for a tomorrow.”

I found myself nodding. She was right. With the right kind of trap, live rabbits would provide her with a ready source of meat. “I might be able to come up with a pit trap that would work, then,” I offered.

“We’ll set some of both,” she decided firmly.

I was feeling rather satisfied with myself as I followed her and the children into the little house. The rabbit was simmering with onion and potato in a pot near the edge of the fire. The aroma of the cooking meat assaulted my senses. I almost lost myself in it. Then I saw my panniers open on the floor. All my possessions were stacked around them. I could not keep the chill from my voice as I asked her, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

She met my gaze, and her cheeks went a bit pink. But she did not look guilty. Instead, her chin came up. “Yes. Your washing and mending. That seemed a fair trade to me for the work you’ve done with the wood and the hunting. And when I found you had salt in there, I took some for cooking the meat. As you were going to be eating it alongside us, I thought nothing of it. Do you find fault with it?”

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.

Clove had had a couple of days’ rest and some grazing. The days were getting cold and the nights even colder. It was stupid to linger here. The sooner I reached my journey’s end at Gettys, the sooner I would know what awaited me there. There was a danger to waiting too long. If the commander there didn’t accept me for enlistment, I’d probably have to winter there, and then ride out in spring to try my luck at other citadels and forts. There was no guarantee that any regiment would have me. My thoughts spiraled into darker speculation. If no regiment would have me, what then? What if I had to face being a soldier son who could not be a soldier, a noble’s son who had been disowned? A brother who had not kept his word to send for his sister? A fat man who begged shelter and food of strangers? A man who looked at a woman with interest, only to have her turn away in disgust?