Description
Abeni, whose name means A cherished gift; one long awaited, stands where the village ends and the world begins. She was long in coming, and her people have never forgotten it. She gives no speeches. She learned young that the one who must announce her authority has already spent it. When the men argue at the fire they look toward her before they have finished, and she says nothing, and the argument settles itself.
She sees the roads ahead. Not one road, which would be a mercy, but all of them, branching and branching, each one paid for in a different coin. Ask her what tomorrow holds and she will tell you that tomorrow holds forty things, and thirty-nine of them will not happen, and she cannot tell you which. So she chooses. Every morning she chooses, and the village wakes into the road she picked and calls it an ordinary day.
She keeps her distance, and they call it coldness. Consider the woman who has seen your death in eleven different seasons and greets you each morning without flinching. That is not distance, that is a discipline. She holds all of them at arm’s length and she holds all of them, and she does both with the same arms. Her collar is heavy. She wears it straight.
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