Discworld - The Price of Living
She’d stayed up all night, and spent most of it praying, sitting at her kitchen table with her hands tightly clasped, murmuring words to any god who might still be listening. The fighting had all been a ways from Cockbill Street, but you couldn’t miss the rumors about what had happened in the Dolly Sisters, and now she was hearin’ something about watch houses under attack, and then there was that one on Treacle Mine Road, and that one’s got a barricade, and hey, isn’t that the one your Sam’s at?
And so she prayed harder, and when she heard the door open and saw the boy standing there, pale, and bedraggled, and mudstained, and wearing an expression so full of sorrow and shock it nearly broke her heart then and there, she immediately swept her son up in her arms. “Sam. Oh gods I was worried. Are you all right? Are you hurt? What happened?”
But the sixteen-year-old was only cold and still. “Nothin’ Mum. They all died. The one they wanted won, and then they came and killed them anyway.” And he brushed past his mother, his mother who had spent the last day and night wondering if she’d ever see her only son alive again, went to the bedroom, and closed the door resolutely behind him.
She sank down at the kitchen table and sat silent and still, waiting for the sound of crying she knew would come.
But she sat there all day, and into the evening, and it never did. And that was when she truly began to worry.