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?