Sing Up the Dark

Vanka shaves her head in the early shadows of dusk, beside her sister's slumbering shape. She shaves away long lank locks of glossy black; she shaves away her husband's touch, her half-remembered mother's fingertips; she shaves away a lifetime's children who will never quicken, and when the first sob threatens she chokes it out into song, her rasping voice rising with the darkness to the stars' lonely eyes, singing, singing, singing up the darkness – not in the high tongue of the dark lords on their black horses, but in Orsi, her people's language, a tattered shroud of a tongue that refused to accept its own death.

Vanka of Ten Thousand Scars

An officer and tribal leader at the time of the War of the Ring, Vanka is one of very few orc women to rise as high as she has; another is her sister, Irinna, an elective mute and perhaps even a greater force to be reckoned with on the battlefield than Vanka herself, which is a high compliment indeed.