“Rise,” I say, and then I tell her what she has wanted to hear all her life: that someone, somewhere, needs her. That she is not nothing. I lead her out of the shadows. I make her into a devil, a legend, a butcher’s knife. I watch as she ages and hardens. I watch as her squire heals her again and again, with the same tenderness he had shown the flea-ridden girl in the straw.
