Belethys

An elderly townswoman who lost her son to the barrow and her husband to the silver road, and now waits with a patience that has become something else.

Belethys has outlived two eras of grief and arrived somewhere beyond both. She feeds the gate guards in winter, argues with Veller about proper procedure, and lights a candle at the Temple each week for a son whose name the Asheni refuse to return to her. Every seventh evening she hauls her mending basket to Ahnassi's hearth and holds a mending-bee — torn shirts, split boot leather, a cracked strap, whatever the town's been putting off — and half of Valenfeld drifts in over the course of the night whether they have mending or not, because sitting near Belethys with a needle in your hand is the closest most of them get to being fussed over by a mother. She never asks who came for the company and who came for the stitches, and she never runs out of thread.