That's partly due to the kind of men I'd been buried in for more than a dozen years: half-witted townies who thought a youngish widow was anybody's meat; needle-toothed Bargainers who thought of anybody as meat for their God in the Ground. Morlock wasn't much to look at, maybe, but he wasn't like that. Plus he had very impressive hands: strong and many-skilled. I remember the first time I saw him lacing up both his shoes simultaneously, one hand per shoe, while keeping up his side of a conversation (as much as he ever did, anyway). Or the time my fifteen-year-old Thend bent his knife, using it as a prybar. Morlock took the blade, a steel blade mind you, in his hands and bent it back. It wasn't quite straight, but at least it would fit into the scabbard. Then that night, when we made camp, he set up a kind of portable forge full of flames that talked back to him, and he remade the blade better than before—all without a word of recrimination. And anytime a crow came by he would have a conversation with it, tossing it grain from his pocket for bits of semi-useless information.
