Wandering through the Myrkentown bazaar, in all its filthy splendor, gave her comfort.
Sleet chewed at her cheeks, the shards whipping through the air like invisible insects. Bootheels and hooves had carved paths and pockmarks in the black, squelching mud between stalls where bearded men sold pinches of spice and round-faced women flapped cheap wares at passers-by. The crowd was a throbbing, pulsing mess of humanity: plumes of warm, stinking breath hovered as a fog; girls and boys chased one another amid a forest of skirts and trouser-legs; consumers and salesmen bandied, coin changed hands, and people trudged senselessly throughout the square, trying to adopt a look of purpose.
Gloria Wynsee did the same. With the blunted limb of her left arm tucked protectively against her breast, she nudged through the masses, her patchwork skirts clenched in her remaining hand. An earthen shawl and a white bonnet hid her face from view. Sometimes her hand lowered to find the swell of her belly, but the palm fell upon air alone; large, she was, in bone and body, fat by some standards, stocky by kinder ones -- but there was a breadth to her abdomen she missed. The kicking, the nudging from within, the tiny little life...
A turn of her head. Did Edmund follow? Would he?
At a stall where a bounty of threadspools stood like an army of color and order on an uneven table, her thick fingers ventured to lift a bobbin of yellow string so she might examine it--
"Do you embroider," said the red-cheeked woman behind the display.
"Doesn't every woman," Gloria said.
"Perhaps," grinned the sales-woman, her smile as simple as her frock. "But you're not even a woman yet."