I read a trilogy several years ago where the hero had lost his hand in a fight where his wife died. He met a pregnant girl he nicknamed Spark. She lost her baby in a fight alongside the hero when she caught the special knife he threw to her to kill the beast they were fighting.
I can't remember the name of the books. The hero has fashioned a mechanical hand of sorts but eventually gets a sort of 'ghost hand'.
Does anyone know the name of these books?
The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the summary of the first book courtesy of Wikipedia.
Fawn, a farmer girl of about 20, has run away from her family, because another Farmer has impregnated her and made it clear that he will not acknowledge the baby as his own. Dag, a Lakewalker patroller, first encounters Fawn hiding up in a tree. Later, they meet again, when Dag saves her from some slaves of a malice. Then she assists him in killing the malice, and, in the process, the ground of her unborn child creates a new sharing knife. Eventually, they realize that they are in love, against the customs of both their cultures, and the real story begins.
Dag does indeed have a missing arm, replaced by a mechanical one (multiple attachments for various situations). One of the nice bits of what Bujold did was to establish that having an interchangeable hand has some advantages in terms of being able to specialize, but there are still massive drawbacks to wearing a prosthetic. Dag nicknamed Fawn "Spark" because of how bright her inner spirit, her Ground, is.
