Ester is thoroughly sick of everything by the time the convention ends, except for coffee, which remains the saving grace of Westcrown such that she has six cups a day.  She is sick of people.  She is sick of both people in general and also many subtypes of people, like nobles, and soldiers, and foreigners, and city people, and anyone from specifically the Heartlands, and Abadarans, and slips, pickpockets, and people who came back from specifically Heaven.  She is also sick of rain, of cobblestones, of coinage, of churchbells, of murals, of voting, of smells, of pamphlets and newspapers and books, of carriages that go too fast through the street, and of urban clothing fashions.  She wants to go back to her cottage and deliver another couple hundred babies and get ancient and die in peace.

So when she's free to go, that's what she does.

She starts getting the most hideous headaches once she's set out.  On her first day on the road, she sleeps right through Pharasma giving her a tap on the brain, once, and wakes up at nearly noon, head pounding, and a Cure doesn't help a bit, and drinking six cups of water helps but only barely.  She thinks she might be dying, and she asks the Lady of Graves to not take so long about it if the time has come.  She has never wanted anything in her life as badly as she wants a coffee.

She did not bring any coffee with her and wouldn't know how to brew it if she had.

She flags down a merchant caravan and asks for a ride in their cart and she'll make water and do channels as they go, which she really should have done to begin with apart from how she's sick of people.  In the cart she can sleep and have a dreadful headache and snap at everyone and still get where she's going, at least halfway, and by the time they need to go in different directions the headaches have ebbed a little and the cravings for marvelous wonderful delicious coffee are less terribly sharp.

She walks the rest of the way, finally getting her break from people.  She doesn't want to see anyone for her first week back in her cottage; she's got to straighten it up and inventory all her food stores to see that nothing's gotten into them; and she needs to gather more firewood and chop it up because she was away all summer long; and she needs to lie in bed till the sun's been up for hours, only some of the time managing to wake up long enough to get her spells replaced, waiting for the dreadful power of coffee to leave her.

But the babies don't really care what Ester needs, now, do they.  While she was gone the Oller girl managed to get herself dead of infection trying to squeeze out her first baby, which Ester missed along with a smattering of others, and nobody's telling what happened to the baby, and Ester's neighbors being champion not-tellers is what's kept her chugging along to her present advanced age as a secret cleric but that's just damned irresponsible, isn't it, and she has to tromp through the hills looking for disturbed earth or spooky hollows and sing all the prayers she learned from the foreigners in Westcrown about soothing the baby ghost and she has to do that whether she's got a headache or not.  Damn fools.  And there's the innkeeper's baby to deliver, and the third Matamala girl with the secret dumpling recipe she will not share for love or money has twins, and there's an Erastilian in one of the villages she covers now and you'd think he'd be able to throw some healing at his wife and it wouldn't be that hard for anybody as channels positive to get the lady out on the other side intact, but then she's got a breech baby, so it's, oh, Ester, Ester save us, Shepherd Ester please oh please, so up Ester gets and out she tromps.

She needs some kind of apprentice.  She's getting too old for this and sooner or later she'll get where she's going.  She starts paying attention to which of the women she's attending seem particularly lucid about the whole business and haven't got too much else going on.  After a few months with her eyes peeled she's found a good one - the pox-scarred Verdaguer lass, anyone's guess who's getting her pregnant but they've done it four times now, and you do need the experience from both ends to be good at midwifing however you come by that experience.  Ingrid Verdaguer has been stashing herself and the brats with her remarkably indulgent widowed mother, who can watch them when Ester shanghais Ingrid along on every midiwifery housecall and narrate over the grunts and groans what she's doing, what she's watching for, why it's important.  Ingrid is nonplussed to be inducted as a lay priestess of Pharasma but it's not worse than what she was doing before, and it'll pay more, too.  She makes herself a holy symbol and takes up prayers as Ester teaches them to her.

The coffee-craving headaches are long gone and Ester is slowing down enough that she needs a donkey to get around.  She pays a lad to build her a little barn for the donkey and she buys it hay because there's no pasture to be had out in the woods.  She makes Ingrid bring her regular hay deliveries, as the entire point of the donkey is for Ester to have to shuffle her old bones around less.  She names her donkey Nightjar, as that's the Lady's sacred bird, and they don't live around here, so her donkey can be the only Nightjar around.

Ingrid gets her pat on the head from the Creator after she's been apprenticing for about three years and has on four occasions gone to a birth when Ester was too ill and on eight occasions taken over on a long one when Ester needed sleep.  People start going to her first, when they live closer to her village than to the (slowly thinning, gradually shrinking) patch of woods where Ester makes her home.  But Ester's still the first port of call for anyone on the far side, and she can still saddle up Nightjar and get where she's going for a good few years.

Eventually Ester goes to sleep, and she doesn't wake up again.

Or, she does, but not in her bed at home.

She gets where she's going.