Seaside Moors People ought to stick together, that's the way to make a crowd.

in the days before marie had arrived to fetch her, erzulie had witnessed her first birth. a cramped brothel, gents turned away for the evening as a young whore gasped and grit and brought into the world a pair of perfect babes. she had been so young, still a maid with only wide terrified eyes for the scene.
after that, the exhausted girl had disappeared for some days with her brood only to return without them. she refused to say how she was unmade in motherhood; she took up her mantle with the rest of them and returned to her tasks without another word for the cherubic twins. and her eyes had remained empty all the months that followed, perhaps years, though erzulie would never know it. marie came for her then, a flouncing, glittered woman with a retinue and an eye for beauty. she had picked the sea-rose out of that squalid place. but the eyes of that broken would-be courtesan had always haunted erzulie, and she looked for it now in raleska.
she feared she saw it in the movement of the girl's mouth, the way she turned to the others, in the roundness of her throat and the way she had suddenly reappeared to the moors, a new mother without a mother's joy.
the others went unaddressed for now; she searched the countenance of the returned girl, probing worriedly before she collected herself and stooped to glance at the little ones their daughter had brought home. "i thank you," she murmured to the young woman she assumed was a healer, turning a more level look upon the older of the medics. "t'ank you for helping dem back to rusalka."