It wasn’t just that I feared she would send me away from the fireside. I truly wanted to hear the rest of her tale. I steeled myself to the loss and then said, “I’ve a tiny bit of sugar left in my panniers. Shall we have one last cup of sweet tea to end the night?”

“Sugar!” the elder girl said in wonder. The other two children looked puzzled. Thus I bought myself a longer stay by the fire. Amzil pulled her chair closer to the hearth and told out her sad tale: the long miserable journey east, camping each night by the road, the callousness of the guards who forced them on each day, the primitive conditions in the camps. I’d seen the shackled lines of prisoners moved past our home in Widevale. Summer after summer, the coffles of convict workers and their military guards had passed my home. I’d always suspected it was a miserable journey, but Amzil’s tale of hardship made it real. As she spoke, her elder daughter’s face grew grave, obviously reliving those memories with her mother.

“We traveled to the end of the road. There was just a work camp here, with other men working off their crimes. There was no town with little houses and gardens for us! Just canvas stretched over boards and rough huts and dirt and work. Tents to sleep in, ditches to piss in, and the river for hauling water. Some new life! But they told us we were ‘home’ now, that it was up to us to make it into a town. They gave each household some canvas and some basic food and tools, and my husband and I put up what shelter we could. And the next morning, they put the men to work on the King’s Road, and left the families to cope as best we could.”

By day, the men left their families to go to work on the road. By night, they returned, too tired to do anything more than sleep. “Or curse,” Amzil said wearily. “My husband often cursed the liars who’d brought us here.

Toward the end, Rig cursed me, too, for believing their lies and wanting to come. It was all my fault, he said. He said that even with one hand, he could have provided better for us in Old Thares.