Nast paid me my bond, but I told him I had reasons to winter over. Instead of taking ship, I placed the money with the Tavernkeep. Him I trusted more than any bank, and I needed to stay awhile. Whoever my child was to be, her story would begin here in the shadow of my father’s ox.
I vowed her first memory would not be, like mine, the celebration of a death. The silk the Dancing Mistress had worn into battle covered me quite nicely, and had nearly the right number of bells upon it. I did not know where she had gotten it, or why. There had been a sufficiency of sendings and divine manifestations that night for me to believe almost anything.
In the days since, I’d sewn a new bell at each dawn. The ancients here did not bury their dead in the sky as we had at home, but they were high in the hills, which seemed much the same to me. I patted my belly and the child hidden within as I rode into the day, the sum of my years singing a quiet song of death and life upon my shoulders.
My grandmother would have been proud of me.
I knew Endurance was.