Page 26 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Second card," I say, when Neve reaches for the stack after lunch, which is a word I am using for eleven almonds. "Hardship. Something asking me to say I'm struggling."

What has been the hardest part of the last five days?

"Third card is a comparison. Me against him."

In what ways are you and your partner different?

Ghorlan comes down off the roof where he has been lapping fresh bark over a seam.

"How."

"Same way you can tell a spruce from a hemlock at forty yards."

"That is bark and needle set."

"Right. And this is a young woman with a laminated stack and a manager four hundred miles away who wants three specific sentences out of me before dark." I hand him the last almond, which he takes after the pause he always takes, which I have stopped commenting on. "They're not writing a show. They're filling in a form."

At eleven, a second crew comes up the trail with tents.

Actual tents. Two per team, in stuff sacks, still creased from the factory, handed over by a safety officer in a high visibility vest who reads from a laminated sheet about a low pressure system arriving tonight with sustained winds of forty and gusts above sixty.

"Mandatory," she says. "You keep them for the duration. Weather protocol, it's in your contract, page thirty-one."

"We have a shelter," Ghorlan says.

"You have a lean to."

"I have a lean to with a ridge beam and a deck."

"Sir, I have a form."

He takes the tent. It is the size of a loaf of bread. He holds it in one hand and turns it over, and his thumb finds the tag sewn into the seam, and he reads the tag the way other men read a will.

"Two person," he says.

"Two person," the safety officer agrees.

He looks at her.

She looks at six foot eleven inches of timber framer.

"Two average persons," she says, and leaves.

The confessional happens at four, on the stump, with the light going gray and my hands wrapped in the cuffs of a jacket that has been wet since the drop.

Neve sits down with the case. Bear comes in close, and then closer, which he only does for one kind of card.

"Okay," I say. "Last call of the day. This one's the carry."

Ghorlan looks up from the trough.

"They've been circling it since Day One," I say. "The first card I ever got was describe what it is like to be carried. They'll come back to it. They always come back to it, because the audience voted on Day Three and the audience gave us a burden, and burdens are how you find out what story you're in."

Neve opens the case.

The card comes up.

Has he ever frightened you?