Well, she would no longer be at their beck and call. She was free of their scorn and distaste for being a burden on their backs. As one of the teenagers had later said when she’d returned to offer her services, “That girl is nothing but a beggar that everyone has to take care of.”
That had stung. Wiping the tears away, so no one saw, she’d retreated from such contempt and wept on Frey’s shoulder.
When she was young, the towns people used to pass her around. She’d spent six months at twenty different households. She knew she’d been an inconvenience for many of her early years. A baby can’t help being orphaned. But by the time she was four or five years old, she’d done her best to be helpful. She’d never caused anyone trouble, never been one to break things, or to fight with their own children.
But at ten years old, when she was about to be sloughed off onto a mean-spirited grouch of an old woman, she’d fled. Finding a shack, out in the badlands, one decrepit with termites and old wood, she’d taken up residence.
At first, she’d been afraid to sleep inside the rickety shack, but as she grew older, she replaced bad wood with good and offered her labors at the mercantile house in exchange for nails and the rent of a few tools. Such a trade would never occur, of course, at the house of someone who had fostered her. For them, she did chores without recompense, attempting to repay them for their generosity, such as it was.