And the bow he made with her, the day he showed her the staves out of which he fashioned it, the carving and the tillering and the care he took to make it a bow she would have a long time, to feed her and protect her, though protection was never something she thought she would need in the forest, until they came to the place of the walls. That was why she had burned it on the pyre with the man’s body, so blind with grief and rage was she for not having killed first the animal that killed her father and believing she no longer deserved what had been given to her and so it should go back to its
...more
