Dammeth Crick

The widower who keeps the Sowers' Rest on the Highbridge road — doesn't hold with gods, tithes Old Harrow's compost-heap anyway, and has taken in every stray the corridor's sent him since the fever took his wife.

Dammeth turns the heap every frost morning and sets the milk out every dusk, and if you point out those are both a kind of prayer he'll tell you it's just good farming and good manners, in that order. He buried three of the people he loved most inside four years and answered it, in the only language he has, by feeding whoever the road hands him next — a lamed dog, two farmhands he can't afford, any traveler who'll trade a story for supper. He does not talk about the fever. He talks about the weather instead, at length, and everyone who stops twice at the Rest learns to hear that for what it is.