He Lost His Wife in the Spring — An Orc Widow Walked Up the Road in the Autumn

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Edric Stowe had buried his wife Marissa on a clear cold morning in the second week of the lean spring of his 59th year in the small graveyard at the edge of the village of Aspen Run in a plot they had bought together 19 years before when their daughter Kell had been a small girl and Marissa had insisted in her quiet practical way that the two plots be bought at the same time because she had wanted to know in some small careful way. She had never fully explained to him that the place she was going to be put when the time came was a place he would also be put when his time came and that the two of them would not be in two different small clearings in two different small valleys.

[00:00:56]He had not understood at the time the size of what she had been asking for. He had understood on the cold spring morning he had laid her in the plot she had bought herself 19 years before that her insisting had been in the slow careful arithmetic of a long marriage.

[00:01:15]The most generous thing she had ever done for him. because the knowing of where he was going to be put when the time came had become over those 19 years a thing he had not had to think about.

[00:01:30]And the not having to think about it had been the kind of small careful gift a long married person sometimes gives another long married person without knowing they are giving it. because the gift is the kind that only becomes a gift on a morning the giver is no longer present to see it. He had been 59 that spring. He had been a small farmer at the edge of Aspen Run for 31 of those years on a small 40 acre holding two miles east of the village on the wagon road to the upper country with a low one room weathered timber cabin and a small stone barn and a kitchen garden and four old apple trees at the south side of the cabin and 12 sheep and one slow patient brown and white milk cow named named Brighty and a small flock of red brown laying hens and a small dry stone wall along the south fence line that Edric had built with his own hands across the second and third summers of his marriage to Marissa. He had walked back from the graveyard the morning of the burial in the cold, pale spring sun, alone.

[00:02:51]The small, careful walk of a man whose body had been doing for 41 years. The small, careful walk of going home to the same other person at the end of every day.

[00:03:05]He had reached the cabin. He had opened the front door. He had stood at the door for a long count with the cold spring air at his back and had looked into the small kitchen at the worn pine kitchen table and the iron cooking stove and the small dry sink and the two wooden chairs on either side of the table. and he had understood in the slow, careful way he had understood most things across his 59 years that he had not in fact walked back to the cabin. He had walked back to a building that had been a cabin for 41 years and would now be something else.

[00:03:49]And the something else did not have a name yet. and the not having a name yet was, he understood, the actual condition of being a widowerower, and not the part with the burial.

[00:04:04]He had sat in the kitchen chair beside the iron stove all of that day. He had not lit the stove. He had not eaten. He had not done the evening milking of Brighty, who had walked up to the gate of the small barn at the usual hour, and had stood there for a long count, and had then, when Edric had not come, walked back to her place beside the barn, and had loaded once, and had laid down. And Edric had heard her low through the open back window and had understood that he had failed Brighty for the first time in nine years, and that the failing had been the kind of failing he had not yet learned how to carry. He had gotten up at full dark and had walked out to the barn and had milked her slowly by the light of a small brass oil lantern with his eyes closed for most of the work because his hands did not need to see. And Brighty had stood patient through the milking and had not loaded again. And Edric had thought, kneeling on the small wooden milking stool in the dark barn with his cheek pressed against Bry's warm flank, that the cow had been the first creature on the property, who had known what to do at the end of the day, and that he was going to have to learn from her.

[00:05:29]Their daughter, Kell, had stayed three weeks. She had come up from the small market town of Brunale, three valleys south, the day before her mother had died, having ridden hard for two days on a borrowed mayor to make it in time.

[00:05:46][snorts] And she had been with her mother at the kitchen table at the end, and had held Mara's hand for the last hour, and had been the one to close her eyes. and she had stayed with her father for the three weeks after the burial and had cooked his small meals and had done the small careful work of clearing through Marissa's clothes that Marissa had asked her on the last evening to do because Marissa had said in her quiet practical voice that the going through of a person's clothes was not the kind of thing a man should be made to do for his wife, and that Kel would know which of the things to keep for herself, and which of the things to give to the women of the village, who would be glad of them, and which of the things to fold carefully in the small wooden chest at the foot of the bed. And Kel had done all of those things in the three weeks after the burial. She had also in the third week sat with her father at the kitchen table on a cold spring evening with two cups of weak tea between them.

[00:06:58]And she had said in the careful quiet voice of a daughter who had been thinking about how to say a thing for the whole of the three weeks, "Father, I would like you to come down to Brunsdale and live with us." And Edric Stowe had thought about it carefully and had said in his own quiet voice, "Kale, I would like to come down to Brunsdale and live with you for the rest of my life, and I will not. Because if I come down to Brunale now, I will be a man who has been moved by his daughter from the place he has been living for 41 years.

[00:07:40]And the moving will be a kindness. And the moving will also be a small, careful ending of a piece of me that is not yet ready to end. Kell, give me a year. Let me see whether the cabin and the small farm are going to be a thing I can keep or a thing I cannot keep. At the end of the year, I will come to Brunale if I cannot keep it, or I will stay here if I can.

[00:08:09]I have spent the past three weeks watching you do for me what your mother used to do for me. And I have understood in those three weeks that you have your own family and your own husband and your own two children. And the doing for me is a thing you can carry for three weeks, but not for the rest of my life without becoming a smaller person than you should be. and I will not let that happen to my daughter for the sake of my own loneliness.

[00:08:42]Kel had been quiet for a long count. She had said in her quiet voice back, "Father, you are the most patient, stubborn man I have ever known." He had said, "I am your mother's husband. I learned it from her."

[00:09:00]Kell had laughed for the first time in three weeks. She had said, "All right, father. One year.

[00:09:08]I will come up the road every fortnight on the post rider's wagon to bring you a piece of bread and to sit at the kitchen table with you for an hour." They had drunk the tea. She had gone back to Brunale on the Post Rider's wagon the next morning.

[00:09:27]He had stood at the cabin door and had watched the wagon go up the road in the cold spring sun.

[00:09:34]and his daughter had turned in the seat and had lifted her hand once to him. And he had lifted his hand once in return.

[00:09:44]And the bend in the road by the dry pines had taken the wagon, and Edric Stowe had walked back into his cabin for the first time as the only person who lived in it. The lean spring had passed.

[00:09:58]The early summer had come.

[00:10:01]He had done the work. He had done the work the way Brighty had done the work.

[00:10:07]Slowly, patiently, knowing what to do at the end of each day, because his hands knew, and not pressing himself to feel anything in particular about the doing.

[00:10:20]Because the feeling was not he was beginning to understand the kind of thing a person could press into the doing. The feeling was a thing that came when it came and that left when it left.

[00:10:34]And that was not on a schedule the doing could keep. He milked Brighty twice a day. He fed the hens. He moved the sheep from the upper pasture to the lower pasture and back again across the early summer. He turned the kitchen garden and planted what Marissa had been going to plant in the spring she had not made it to.

[00:10:58]He fixed the small worn lashing on the handle of the kindling axe. He tightened the third stone in the small dry stone wall along the south fence line where the frost had pushed it slightly out of true. He did each small careful thing the way Marica had taught him to do each small careful thing across 41 years of marriage. And he understood by the second month of the doing that the small careful things he had thought he had been doing alone for 41 years had in fact been done with her. In the small careful sense that the doing of them had been a thing the two of them had been doing in two different parts of the property at the same time. and that the togetherness had been the part of the doing that had made the doing the thing it had been. And that the doing now was the same physical motion of the same hands, on the same tools, in the same places, at the same hours, of the same days. But that it was, in the small, careful sense, a different doing, and that the different doing was the actual shape of being a widowerower, and not the kitchen chair, and not the empty bed, and not the cold stove in the morning. The midsummer had come. The late summer had come. The early autumn had come. Edric Stowe had managed. He had not done well, but he had managed.

[00:12:34]He had eaten the small meals he had taught himself to make in the second month of his widowhood, which were the four or five small meals Marissa had taught him to make in the first months of their marriage, and which he had not made for himself for 41 years, because she had made them for him after that.

[00:12:55]and he had eaten them slowly at the kitchen table in his usual chair. And he had not sat in her chair, and he had not moved her chair to the wall. And he had simply left her chair, where it had been across from his chair across the kitchen table for 41 years. and the chair had stayed there, and he had been able to eat his small meals at his end of the table without the chair on her side, becoming a thing that was always weeping at him. Because the chair was not weeping, the chair was just a chair. And the chair, not weeping, had been one of the small, careful arrangements he had been making with the cabin across the summer. The orc widow had come up the wagon road on a clear, cool morning in the second week of the early autumn of his 59th year.

[00:13:54]He had been at the south fence line tightening another stone that the late summer rains had pushed out of true and he had heard the small soft sound of a single pair of leather boots coming up the packed dirt of the wagon road and he had looked up over the stone he was setting and he had seen walking slowly up the road from the south a single adult female orc figure. She was perhaps 45 years old, slim of build and tall with bright vivid green skin, the color of new leaves on a summer apple tree, and long dark hair worn loose to her shoulders and falling unbound in the way the hair of a woman who has stopped pinning it up sometimes falls. and a faded green tribal tattoo in a delicate angular pattern of small linked spirals running along her left cheekbone and large prominent pointed elflike ears and small subtle lower tusks and dark eyes that were tired in a way Edric understood without having to think about it because he had been seeing the same kind of tired in the small mirror above the dry sink in his own kitchen every morning for the past six months. She was wearing a long-sleeved ankle length dark slate gray wool dress with a worn dark leather belt at the waist, woolen leggings underneath, worn brown leather boots on her green feet, a knitted dark forest green wool shawl pulled across her shoulders against the cool morning, fully clothed, she carried in her right green hand a long carved wooden walking stick, and on her back a small worn canvas. pack with leather straps. And on the upper strap of the pack, visible to him from the fence line as she walked, was tied with a small leather thong, a piece of carved wood shaped like a small smooth oval, polished by long handling, the size of a hand's palm, and Edric Stowe, who had been 41 years a man, and had watched Marissa across the kitchen table at every supper of those years, and knew the small, careful things a woman wore on her person and the small careful reasons she wore them knew without having to be told that the small oval of polished carved wood tied to the upper strap of the pack was a widow's mourning token of her people.

[00:16:37]She walked past the foot of the path that led up to his gate. She did not slow. She did not look up at him. She had the small, careful walk of a woman who had been walking a long road for a long count of days, and had stopped expecting any of the gates along the road to open for her.

[00:16:59]Edric Stowe stood up from the stone he had been setting. He laid the small iron mallet on the wall. He walked the 11 paces from the south fence line to the gate at the foot of the path. He stood at the gate. He waited for her to reach the foot of the path. He said in his quiet voice, in the public language, "Good morning." The orc widow stopped.

[00:17:26]She turned her face slowly toward him.

[00:17:29]She looked at him for a long count without speaking. She said in a low, careful voice in the public language, "Good morning." He had not in the moment he had walked to the gate planned what he was going to say next. And he understood now, standing at the gate with a stranger orc widow on the road in front of him, that he had walked to the gate, not because he had been planning to say anything in particular, but because he had recognized the small carved oval of polished wood on her pack, and had not been able to keep working on the stone after he had seen it. he said in his quiet voice. "May I ask you, are you walking somewhere in particular today?" The Orc widow thought about it for account. She said, "My sister's holding is 4 days further up the road in the upper country at the foot of the second pass. I am walking there." He said, "You have been walking for some days." She said, "1."

[00:18:39]He said, "Will you come up to my cabin and sit for an hour? I have a stove that is lit and a kettle that is on and a small piece of bread and some dried apple and some weak black tea."

[00:18:53]I will not press you. I have no other reason to ask except that you have been walking 11 days, and there is no other house on this road for the next nine miles, and the next 4 hours of your walking will not be made easier by the not stopping." The orc widow looked at him for a very long count. she said in her low, careful voice.

[00:19:20]What is the small oval of wood on the back of your right hand? Edric Stowe lifted his right hand and looked at the back of it, and he understood that he had not, in his 31 years of working the small dry stone wall, gotten a single scar that looked like a small oval of wood, and that the orc widow had not been asking him about a literal mark, and that she had been asking him about the small ring of pale skin on the third finger of his right hand, where a wedding band had been worn for 41 years and removed three weeks before because the band had begun to feel heavy. In a way, it had not felt heavy across the first 40 years and three months. He said in his quiet voice, "My wife," he said, "I buried her in the lean spring." He said, "Six months ago this week." The orc widow looked at him. She said, "Yes." She said, "I would be glad of an hour at your kitchen table, mister." She paused for the small, careful pause of a woman who had been raised in the small, careful courtesies of her clan and would not use a stranger's first name without the proper introduction.

[00:20:42]Your name? He said, "Eddric Stowe."

[00:20:47]She said, "My name is Yora of the Hollow Stand clan." He said, "Please come up." They had walked up the path to the cabin together slowly.

[00:20:59]She had laid her walking stick by the front door. She had not removed the small canvas pack from her back. She had stood in the small kitchen for a count.

[00:21:10]While Edric had set the kettle back on the stove to bring it to the boil, and had laid out two chipped gray tin cups, and the small piece of dark bread on a tin plate, and the small dish of dried apple, and had pulled the second wooden chair out from the table for her, the chair that had been Marissa's chair on the far side of the table across from his own. The orc widow had looked at the chair. she had said in her low, careful voice. Mr. Stowe, "Whose chair is this?"

[00:21:45]He had thought about it for a count. He had said in his quiet voice, "It was my wife's chair. It has been my wife's chair for 41 years." The orc widow had said, "Would you rather I sit at the small wooden stool by the dry sink?" He had thought about that for a longer count. He had said, "No.

[00:22:08]I would rather you sit in the chair. He had said in his quiet voice, "The chair has been a chair for the past six months. It has stopped being only my wife's chair. It is now a chair on the side of the kitchen table where another person sits. It would be a help to me if a person sat in it. I think it would be a help to the chair, too." The orc widow had looked at him for a count. She had said in her low, careful voice, "All right."

[00:22:43]She had sat down. She had taken the canvas pack off her back slowly and had laid it on the floor beside her chair, the small carved oval of polished wood tied to the upper strap still visible.

[00:22:57]She had not removed the dark forest green wool shawl from her shoulders. He had poured the tea. They had sat at the kitchen table on the cool autumn morning with two chipped gray tin cups of weak black tea between them and the small piece of dark bread and the small dish of dried apple. And Edric Stowe had not asked her any question because he had understood in the small careful walk from the gate to the cabin that the orc widow had been a person who had been asked too many questions across the 11 days of walking and would prefer on this morning to be at a kitchen table where a person did not ask her any. Yora of the Hollow Stand clan had drunk the tea slowly. She had eaten a small piece of the bread. She had not touched the dried apple. She had sat in Marissa's chair for the length of perhaps 15 minutes without speaking. And Edric had sat in his own chair across from her, and the silence had not been an awkward silence, and had not been a heavy silence, and had not been any other kind of silence Edric Stowe had imagined he would be sitting in with a stranger orc widow in his own kitchen. It had been the silence of two people who had buried someone and were sitting at the same kitchen table for an hour. After the 15 minutes she had said in her low careful voice, "My husband Turvec of the Hollow Stand clan died in the early spring of this year of an old heart that had quietly stopped at the workbench he had been turning wood at for 31 years." He had said in his quiet voice, "I'm sorry." She had said, "My wife." and she had paused at the small careful pause of having begun a sentence in the small careful way she had begun the previous one and having had to adjust the wording. Your wife, Mister Stow, what did she die of? He had said of a slow fever that had taken her across the last six months of the previous winter. She had said, "Was it a hard thing to watch?" He had said yes.

[00:25:23]She had said with my turvvic it was very quick. He had said that is a different kind of hard. She had said yes. He had said in his quiet voice, "Yora of the Hollow Stand clan, you do not have to tell me anything more than you wish to.

[00:25:41]I have not asked." She had said in her low, careful voice back, "Mr. Stow. I have not told another person about my turv in 7 months because I have been on the road for 11 days and before the road I was in my own kitchen with my own cold stove and there was no one to tell. I am glad to be told to. He had nodded. They had talked for the next two hours. They had talked first about Turvec and about Marissa in the slow careful way. Two widows who have been alone for many months talk about the dead. Not the dramatic things, but the small, careful things that the dead person had been doing in the kitchen on a Tuesday morning in the year before the death.

[00:26:31]the small careful order in which they had liked the kindling laid in the stove.

[00:26:38]The small careful word they had used for the cat or the dog or the chicken or the cow.

[00:26:46]They had talked about TurveC's workbench and the small careful chisels that were now sitting in the small careful row on the back wall of the workbench in the holding two valleys south where Yora had been living alone for seven months.

[00:27:03]They had talked about the small dry stone wall on the south fence line that Edric had built in the second and third summers of his marriage and that Marissa had brought him a cup of cool water from the well every afternoon of those two summers without being asked. They had talked about Bridey the milk cow who had walked up to the barn gate the evening of the burial and had stood there waiting to be milked at the usual hour.

[00:27:31]Yora had said, "The cow knew." Edric had said, "The cow knew." After the two hours had stood up, she had said in her low, careful voice, "Mr. Stowe, I have four more days to walk to my sister's holding." He had said, "Yora, my daughter Kell comes up the road every other Wednesday on the post riders wagon. The road my daughter takes from Brunsdale to Aspen Run, runs past your holding two valleys south. I do not know whether you live alone or whether you live with people in your holding. and I do not know whether you will be staying with your sister long, but I would like to give you my daughter's address in Brunale in the day she comes up the road. And if you are ever traveling that road and would like to send a small note to her about an hour at a kitchen table, she will carry it up to me on the wagon. She had thought about it. she had said in her low, careful voice, "I would like that, Mr. Stowe."

[00:28:41]He had written down the address on a small folded square of paper. He had handed it to her. She had laid one green hand briefly on his weathered tanned forearm in the careful small gesture of acknowledgement her clan used. She had said, "Thank you for the hour at your kitchen table."

[00:29:04]He had said, "You are welcome."

[00:29:06]She had picked up her pack and her walking stick and had walked back down the path to the road, and Edric Stowe had stood at the gate, and had watched her walk up the road in the cool autumn sun until she was a single small green and gray figure at the bend by the dry pines. and at the bend she had not looked back and the dry pines had taken her.

[00:29:32]He had gone back to the south fence line and had finished setting the stone. He had milked Brighty. He had eaten his small dinner. He had sat at the kitchen table in his usual chair. And Maurica's chair had been on the other side of the table where it had been for 41 years.

[00:29:50]And the chair had been a chair. And the chair had been a chair on the side of the table where another person sat sometimes now. And the not being only Marissa's chair had been a small, careful gift the orc widow had given him by sitting in it for two hours on a cool autumn morning, and he had not known that he had been waiting six months for the gift, and the not knowing had been replaced that evening with a small, careful knowing.

[00:30:25]The first letter from Yora had come up the wagon road on the post rider's wagon four weeks later. It had been written in clean, careful handwriting on a single sheet of pale cream colored paper, and it had said in three short paragraphs that Yora had reached her sister's holding at the foot of the second pass eight days after she had left Edric's gate. that her sister had not been well and had asked Yora to stay with her through the deep winter, and that Yora had agreed to do so, and that she had been thinking across the eight days of walking and the first weeks at her sisters about the small, careful kitchen table at Edri Stow's cabin, where two widows had sat for two hours, and that she had not known until she had thought about it that the two hours had been the first time in seven months she had felt like a person and not like a wound, and that she would like, if Edric Stowe was willing, to write to him through the deep winter from her sister's holding via Kell's wagon, and that she would be glad to receive his letters in return. Edric Stowe had read the letter at the kitchen table that evening. He had folded it carefully and laid it on the worn pine of the kitchen table at his elbow. He had sat for a long count. He had said aloud in the small private voice he had begun to use in the cabin alone in the past six months. Well, he had then taken out his small writing desk and a clean sheet of paper and the small bottle of ink he had not used in many months.

[00:32:15]and he had written the first letter of what would become across the next 11 years of his life the small careful correspondence between his cabin two miles east of Aspen Run and the holdings of the Hollowostand clan two valleys south and then at the foot of the second pass and then back at the original holding. He had told Yora in his clean, careful handwriting that the two hours had been the first time in six months he had eaten his small meal at the kitchen table with the chair on the other side of the table being a chair on the side of the table where a person sat instead of a chair that had been Maurice's, and that he had not understood how heavy the chair had been until it had stopped being heavy for 2 hours and that he had been thinking since she had walked back up the road that the chair was going to stay unheavy now even on the days no person was sitting in it because the chair had remembered how to be a chair and that the remembering had been her doing. He had said, "Yora, I would be glad to write to you through the deep winter and the early spring and the late spring and the easier seasons and to receive your letters in return.

[00:33:46]And I will not press you for any larger thing than the letters.

[00:33:51]Because the letters are their own thing, and the two hours at the kitchen table were their own thing, and the two things together are already more than I had been expecting to find on a road I had been walking alone since the spring. He had folded the letter and had sealed it, and had addressed it to Yora of the Hollowand Clan in care of her sister's holding at the foot of the second pass.

[00:34:18]and he had given it to his daughter Kell on the following Wednesday when she had come up the road on the post riders wagon and Kel had carried it back down the road to Brunsdale and had given it to the trading postke keeper at Brunale who had sent it up the upper road to the Hollowand clan and Yora had received it 11 days later and the small careful correspondence had begun. They had written for the 11 years. Yora had come back through Edric's road on her way home from her sisters at the end of that first deep winter, and she had stopped at his gate, and she had sat in Maurice's chair for the length of an afternoon, and Edric had served her tea in a small piece of dark bread and dried apple, and a piece of soft cheese he had bought from the village dairyman for the occasion. She had come back again the following autumn on her way to her sisters and she had sat in the chair again. She had come back again the following spring. The visits had become across the second year a thing the two of them had begun to plan in their letters. By the third year, Yora had begun to come up the road twice a year and stay two days each time, sleeping in the back room of the cabin that had been Kel's room as a girl. By the fifth year, Edric had begun to walk down to the hollow stand, holding two valleys south once a year in the easier season, taking the post riders wagon to Brunsdale and walking the rest to spend a week with Yora and her sister and her sister's grown children.

[00:36:09]By the seventh year, Kell had taken to calling Yora in her letters the small, careful name of the York widow of the southern valleys, and Yora had taken to signing her letters with a small, careful, drawn line under her name in the way her clan used. They had never married. They had not been the kind of people who would have. The first marriage of each had been the marriage, and the second arrangement had been the small, careful arrangement of two people who had been widowed, and who had found each other on a road and at a kitchen table, and in a small, careful correspondence. And the small, careful arrangement had been its own thing, and had not needed any other word for it.

[00:36:58]Edric had died in his 70th year. in his bed in the small cabin two miles east of Aspen Run of an old heart that had quietly stopped at the end of a long autumn evening.

[00:37:12]Kel had been there. The post rider had carried the news down the wagon road, and the trading postkeeper at Brunale had carried it up the upper road, and Yora had received the letter at her holding in the early winter, and had walked the eight days down to Aspen Run in the deep snow with her walking stick and her small canvas pack and the small oval of polished carved morningwood, still tied to the upper strap of the pack. and she had reached the cabin on the morning of the third week after Edric's burial. Kell had let her in. The two of them had walked together to the small graveyard at the edge of Aspen Run, and Yora had stood at the foot of Edric's grave beside Kell, and she had not said anything for a long count. And then she had laid one green hand briefly on Kel's forearm in the same careful small gesture her clan used. And Kel had laid her own hand briefly on Yora's green hand. And the two of them had stood at the graveside for a long time.

[00:38:22]Yora had stayed three days at the cabin.

[00:38:26]She had sat in Marissa's chair on the second evening with a cup of weak black tea between her hands at the kitchen table.

[00:38:34]And Kel had sat in Edric's chair across from her, and the chair on each side of the table had been a chair, and the chairs had not been weeping at either of them, because the chairs had been the chairs of two people who had been not alone in their last years, and the not alone had stayed, even when the people who had been not alone were no longer at the chairs themselves.

[00:39:02]Yora had walked back up the road on the morning of the fourth day. She had stopped at the gate. She had turned to Kell on the porch and had said in her low, careful voice, "Kel, he had been my hour at the kitchen table. He had been my 11 years of letters. He had been my small, careful arrangement after Turvik, and I had been his after Marissa.

[00:39:29]and you and your children had been part of the arrangement and you will keep being part of it because the arrangement does not end when one of the two of us walks back up the road for the last time. He kept the letters. They are in the small wooden chest at the foot of his bed. The chest is yours. The letters of him are mine at the holding and they are my eldest nieces after I am gone because I have told her about your father and she will know what they are.

[00:40:06]The arrangement keeps. That is what I came to tell you.

[00:40:11]Kel had not been able to speak for account. She had nodded. Yora had walked up the road. She had not looked back.

[00:40:19]The dry pines at the bend had taken her, and Kel had stood at the gate for a long time, and she had gone inside, and she had opened the small wooden chest at the foot of her father's bed, and she had read the letters, and she had read them every winter of the rest of her life.

[00:40:41]He had buried his wife in the spring. An orc widow had walked up the road in the autumn. That was the beginning. That was everything.

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