Vena has worked her way down to just a raw turnip. She realizes now she shouldn't have taken a raw turnip, it wasn't on one of the trays of easily grabbable things. They're edible raw but not good, she thinks, rolling the root between her hands, and also that's a big sign that she's never really hungry anymore.

"I've just been here and at the soldiers' camps." She doesn't think of them as belonging to a particular lord who commands the soldiers. It was never relevant to her. "There's the men who fight and get all the best food, and the women who do all the cooking and cleaning and forning to keep them happy. And the kids underfoot, until something happens or their parents leave and take them. It was better when my ma was alive. She always shared and wouldn't let her men touch me. After that I had some aunties but, it wasn't the same."

Vena shrugs. She is not going to get into it all. Almost no one in the Sisterhood had had a happy life before coming here, or they wouldn't agree to live somewhere like this; all the stories have bad things in them, so hers doesn't stand out. She's not Lashan, with that burning awareness that the world should be better and that sense of betrayal that it's not. Frankly, it seems exhausting. "Do mercenaries do it different?"