"Mom?"

"Yes, it's me." She looks around the room. "Why is Valèria here?"

He looks down, a little guiltily. "We got married."

"While I was gone?"

She doesn't know if she's angry with him or angry with the wizards or both. Probably both. He could have told her, at least.

"The baby's due in six months."

She had really thought she raised him with more sense than that. At least it's not as bad as what they do in the cities. 

She's still pretty angry.

She tells the rest of the village what the Sower said, about how the biggest thing they needed was a new priest, how they should try praying on it and seeing if Erastil chooses one of them.

He doesn't.

When Valèria goes into labor, Taís stays up all night with her. It ought to have been Valèria's own mother here, but she was killed by a brown-thing from the woods years ago. When Valèria starts bleeding out, Taís runs for the old teacher's house. 

He laughs. "Ten gold. Devil's blood doesn't come easy, you know." 

"Five." She can afford ten, with the stipend, but she can't afford to be stupid.

"Deal." Idiot peasant.

Valèria lives, and so does her little girl. Taís holds Valèria's hand and looks into Valèria's eyes and tells her to bring her up to be less stupid than she was.

Years pass. They've got money to spare from the stipend, enough to keep their own family fed and clothed and help out their neighbors when they need it and stay safe even if disaster strikes. It's tempting to spend it on luxuries, to spend it making their lives a little easier, but the priest said she's working uphill, and she doesn't know how far she has to climb. 

Taís does her best to raise her children right, and Ot alongside them. She prays for Silvestre, and for Dolça and Ezequies and Zèfir, and for Valèria's first son, when he dies of plague a few years later. She helps her daughters find husbands who'll only hit them if they have good reasons to, and tells them when they're being too soft on their children, and makes sure her grandchildren are brought up knowing which gods they need to pray to. She hears one of them mock Erastil one day, when he thinks she can't hear, and she makes absolutely sure to show him why that was a mistake.

Her village catches one of the boys from the next village over trying to rustle cattle. None of them really trust the new judges. None of them have actually met the new judges, but everyone knows they're foreign, and none of them know if they'll just side with the people from the towns. It's been years, by now, but Taís thinks back to what the paladin said at the convention. It's alright to kill him, she thinks, but they're not supposed to torture him. No one can agree what that actually means. As best she can remember they're allowed to hang him, only there's not really a good place to do it from, and they're allowed to whip him. They end up lashing him to death.

A wandering priestess settles in their village for a time. She's chosen by Desna, she says, and she'll probably only be here a little while. It's only Carles and Ot who are still children, but she makes them start praying to Desna too, just in case. The priestess leaves a few months later, and the whole village feels the loss of the healing and clean water. Taís tries asking Erastil again if he'd be willing to pick her. It doesn't work. She can't say whether it's because she's not a good enough fit or because she's still working uphill. She doesn't dare asking Pharasma.

Dària gives birth to twins, in a bad year. There's hardly ever bad years anymore, but something must have kept the priest who blesses the fields, and this year is a bad one. Taís's children are all grown now, and so is Ot. They take in one of Dària's older children and pray that it'll be enough that Dària can feed the twins. The twins catch a winter fever anyway, and one of them makes it and one of them doesn't.

Taís dies a year after her first great-grandchild is born, still not sure whether she's made up for Silvestre.