He arrived at the hole in the ground with the tavern that had been built around it. The glass windows of which she had been so proud were smashed out and now lay shattered in the dirt. A drift of dust gathered against the south facing walls. He walked between the half finished grandstand and onto the ring of wooden planks surrounding the pit. The creak of them under his feet and the rough dust over their smoothworn grains. Someone had carried away the grate. The red and white striped awnings now browned from dust and fluttering in the gentle breeze. Broken chairs and overturned tables lay where the king's men had jumped from them. He stepped over them to the bar. Its one mirror now a thousand between spiderwebbed cracks, each catching a piece of his body and face and a hundred showing an eye or nose or mouth. The bottles were gone. The counter stove in from where Ogre had used the [sergeant] as a club. Bloodstains across it. More streaked on the floor. A pile of ashes and the dogman's scorched jawbone.

He went to the kitchen and its cracked oven. To the trapdoor above the cell. He looked at its little iron handle. He remembered the way it dropped in place with the dull thud of wood on wood. The sound of the bar set across it.

"Oh shit," said someone behind him.

He turned. A dirty [beggar] in worn breeches with a scraggly beard and his hand around the neck of an empty bottle of clouded glass stood in shock at the sight of him. He was one of Booky's regulars. One who liked spitting on Orc from his spot in the rafters. The man lifted the bottle before his body as if it were a club and backed a step and fell over a chair and the holed soles of his shoes shot up toward the awnings. He scrabbled backward across the planks as if Orc was a whole army of orcs come to pillage his bottle.

Orc took a step toward him and thought to help him up. The man shrieked and grabbed at the left side of his chest and dropped the bottle. He shrieked again and flipped onto his knees and staggered to his feet and lurched away from the pit and through a gap in the windscreen and out to the seaway.

Orc let him go. He looked around. What was left to see? What was left to feel? He walked on before a posse arrived.

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He paralleled the seaway east, always staying well apart from it, always hiding when he heard or saw folk coming up on their tall horses or wheeled carriages, once nearly strangling an auburn dog who'd tracked off the seaway to growl and bark at his hiding place in the tall weeds. When he neared the [brigadier]'s estate he crossed the seaway to pass it by on the opposite side. In the low sunlight he saw the patina covering the iron rods of its fence and the olives' unpruned branches and some disfigurement to one of the marble lions that roared beside the gate. But he didn't look. Not really.

Late the next day he turned down the track to the brothers' farm. He walked the edge of the field out to the old oak and knelt in his old place out of the sun between the cradle of two roots. The bark was brittle and dry. The branches were empty of leaves. Any acorns were long since scavenged and buried before the passing winter. He walked to the other side where he used to look out at the rows of yellowing corn and at the distant house, but an enormous limb and its thousand branches had come down, torn away in the wind from dryness or perhaps from the same blight that fouled the corn. He stood and looked at it and [felt] as if he had reunited with an old friend newly widowed by some creeping and consuming disease.

Something made him look up and he saw the [yeoman] brothers in the distance, each leaning on a [scythe] and watching him. He lifted his arm to them. One touched the broad brim of his hat.

He left.

He avoided the track back to the seaway, cutting across country by hacking through thickets and eating berries from between their thorns and sleeping in the clear spaces made by the shade of scraggly blue oaks. Twice he heard the baying of hounds in the night and readied to fight. As a storm whipped up on the third day he came to the outskirts of her olives.

Ogaz had said he wasn't orc, but he had been called one all his life and all his life he'd believed it. And for an hour before a bonfire on a faraway beach it had been true. But the rest of the time it hadn't. Nineteen years he had lived a lie. It was past time he learned why.

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> -1 [Rage]: Sometimes I imagine his return to those places. I hope they brought him some measure of peace... (6/10).

> +1 [Renown]: I knowed that humie. I'd have plucked out his eyeballs and turned em around so he'd hafta to watch his screamin ugly rat face and thataway he'd have known what it was like for us staring up at him from the pit... (4/10).

> +1 [Awareness]: That's about when he started believin there ain't nothin different between dirt and men besides their arrangement. Hell, maybe he was right about that... (6/10)