[i]Some things do always chase you,[/i] she thought to herself as she rode, her fingers blindly reaching for her flask, which she did not raise to her lips thought that was an effort. He was watching and she didn’t want to be unprofessional and that was the only thing keeping her from drinking. Too many things chased her, her time in that charnel pit, the loss of her mentor and friend, her failure to save him, her failure at dying. Needlework was the least of it. She needed to keep it light, it had been light and her own gloom threatened to pull her down and sipping at the flask was only a stopgap method to keep her from bleeding internally again. 

She put her hand back on Honey’s reins with great effort and nodded in affirmation to his question, buying herself a chance to collect herself. 

“Yes.” She managed with only a little tightness to her voice. “So much more than that. Which was something young Kat hadn’t a clue about. I’d thought it was all hacking and slashing. That’s all they cover in the tales you see. They don’t mention getting lost, or finding food and shelter, or dealing with the ever-present mud or foot rot or a host of other unpleasant things.”

She snorted and risked dropping the reins to pull back her sleeve a little. She held it up to him revealing the very end of a very ragged, badly mended scar of some age. 

“This was when I realized that needlework had value. My first skirmish, my first wound and my mentor made me stitch myself up. It was a right mess. I blubbered through the whole thing and he was heartless or so I thought. But I made it through and I leaned a few things, the value of stitching and the realization that I could survive such an ordeal.”

Then he got her roaring drunk and let her live through the hangover the next day for similar reasons. She smiled, Big Jim had been a big proponent of getting the suffering out of the way up front in an effort to toughen her up. So many lessons wherein she learned the hard way so she’d only have to learn once. The only pain he’d spared her was that of becoming a woman, he’d left that subject well alone, almost frantically alone. So when the time came she’d bungled that all on her own. She remembered the idiot’s face but not his name, she remembered little but the fact that it had been an embarrassing disaster she’d somehow lived through. 

She shook her head at her own thoughts, rueful but the darkness had retreated in the wake her musings. 

“So besides your first trip to Avantshire have you traveled much? Were you born here?” she asked, waving vaguely back towards the city they could no longer see.