The trouble began when she was five, and her great-uncle marked her particular fondness of striking her older sister with her cutlery.
“A warrior-breaker born!” he crowed. “Let her have better to strike with!” And so he gifted her a training-blade and a tutor, and when she had worn both down to nubs another, and another, and another. She slept and ate (the flesh of the milkfruit) and trained and killed her older sister in an argument at the age of twelve and was presented with her grandmother’s blood-gilded armour at the age of sixteen and by the time she was twenty it had been readjusted six times to incorporate the breadth of her muscles and guts and fierceness and then she took the war-name Merry and she was ready at last to be sent to battle.
She killed many people for some time, and in many places.
The day when it happened was after a victory, but it could’ve been any. Merry drank much and stamped her feet and stood for her honours and smiled wide. Then she woke early, trained her forms, and decapitated half the regiment under her command – some one-after-another and some all-at-once.
Then she walked, and every league she walked she stopped and she placed the headless body of one of her soldiers on a tree so that her path was marked well, for the ground was growing unruly, bucking off the soil and showing its ancient stone bones, which she followed like a hound on the scent. And so she plunged into the tangled lands that lay alongside the water, where the only things that grew on the rock were moss and the only thing that grew on the moss were antiquity-pines, whose sap-sticky trunks were made of knots and whose knots were made of spite and whose branches leaned to point in the direction of the windsd. She strode through the bogs uncaring of leeches, cut down bears for her breakfasts, sang until the birds fled, and stamped as she walked to feel the satisfying crunch of fragmenting gravel underfoot. When she saw boats in the water, she followed them, and so she came to a driftwood-and-reed village nestled under a hill of stone (as all the hills were in the tangled lands) that was crested with a grove of huddled and wind-combed antiquity-pines so old they were as much growing on each other’s needles as they were the moss.
“Wake up!” shouted Merry gleefully, waving her spear overhead with happiness. “Here! See! I am Merry! Look at what I can do!” And so saying she cut a house in half, along with a fisher and two of their relations. “I am strong! I am the strongest I have ever known and I am bored! I am here to find what may kill me! Tell those who seek to kill me that I rest at the top of the hill under the pine, and I will fight them until one comes who can kill the strongest, and then you must bury me there and mark their name upon my grave! I am hungry and you must bring food at each day’s end! Do this or I will kill you!”
“Merry,” said the village elder, an old and stooped man who had just confirmed the deaths of his nephew, niece, and sibling, “you will never be buried here.”
“Wrong!” shouted Merry, and she threw the elder high into the air, from whence he fell into the water and broke like a dry branch. “Food by sundown or I will come down the hill! I’m not picky!”
So saying, she ascended the stone hill, clambering over pink-and-grey granite as softly rounded as pillowcases, and examined the wind-blown antiquity-pines in their grey dozens. “Too many!” she shouted. “Boring! Confusing!” Thus incensed, she struck down each and every pine save the most ancient and massive that lay in the grove’s heart, and from the others she built a fire and sent up a pungent and tarry smoke-signal to any who might have lost her trail in the winding maze that was the tangled lands of the water.
“The trees will be missed,” ventured the lead fisher who brought the fat silvery bodies of Merry’s evening meal. “They blocked the wind when it came from the west.”
“I am strong!” shouted Merry in happy rebuttal. “It does not matter to me, and if it matters to you, that doesn’t matter to me either!” But she was fed and happy and so only threw the fisher down the hill with one hand, which broke four of her ribs before she wrapped herself in a bed of pine-boughs and slumbered under her tree.
Less than a week passed before the first pursuers came. Six grey-wrapped deserter-hunters, armed with nooses and bows. They came for Merry in the night and they left down the hill one at a time, limb by limb.
After that came the other half of her old regiment. That lasted two days and two nights, only ending when they occupied the village and seized Merry’s evening meal – oh, the rage in her eyes when she stamped down the hill and snapped their necks. “Fight me properly or not at all!” she shouted as she held her last sergeant underwater and watched the bubbles still, just as she had once done for her youngest cousin. “Ugh!” It put her in a foul mood that only stilled when she demanded larger meals from then on, and she spent much of the night sharpening her spear’s edge with her old medals, the metal-on-stone scraping haunting the dark and sparking outraged replies from every owl in miles.
The next day, a brave hero arrived.
Merry knew them on sight and liked them just as quickly. They were short and stocky and simply clothed; their armour was largely worn cloth and scantly aged metal. They wielded a very sturdy stick, hardened and wrapped for handling, tipped with a razored shard of clearest glass that parted air like flesh as it moved and they walked heedlessly barefoot upon the morning-heated rock and the dry needles.
“Hello!” she shouted to them. “Are you here to kill me?!”
“Yes,” said the brave hero. They took a drink from their little water-pouch and put it down on the ground. “I smelt the smoke and saw the bodies and heard terrible things. You must be stopped.”
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled. The hero was quick and strong and far braver than Merry, but she had grown up feeding on the flesh of the milkfruit every day – a king’s ransom spent every fifth year of her life – and she was a giant from it: more than double their height, four times their weight, twice as many lungs, and filled with unending vigor for violence. The sun was low and curdling the clouds on the horizon’s edge by the time the hero fell, but fall they did – a slipped foot, a staggered breath, a sluggish recover, and Merry’s spear struck them down.
“Bravery cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she cast their spear into the trunk of her pine with such force that it stuck there, shivering. “Let another try and make this place my grave!”
“You,” said the hero quietly, with what little breath they had that was not bloody, ‘will never be buried here.”
“What?!” shouted Merry. But there was no answer, and that night she slept with more annoyance than she would have hoped when the day began.
When Merry woke the next day she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, where her skin was thickest. She ignored it as she practiced her forms but did not forget it, so when the night came she slept lightly and carefully. Because of this, the knife meant to slip into her neck was slapped away, and the cunning hunter who had dared step into her reach leapt back, cursing the light of the moon.
“Hello!” she shouted, rousing a chorus of furious owls. “Are you here to kill me?!”
The cunning hunter hurled a glass vial that splattered the front of her breastplate.
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled. The cunning hunter was fast and strong and far, far more clever than Merry, but she wore the antique and impossibly valuable blood-gilded armour of her grandmother, which did not rust when doused with liquid grit, nor rot when engulfed in snakesmoke, not sear when slapped with flash-salve, nor admit the presence of any blade however thin and quiet and quick and skillful, and at last she stepped to the quick into the hunter’s reach, grasped him in a hug, and shook him until his spine snapped.
“Cleverness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she snatched his last poisoned blade from his failing grasp and stamped it into the roots of her pine with one foot, hard as a hammer-blow. “Let another try and make this place my grave!”
“You will never be buried here,” whispered the hunter quietly.
“What?!” shouted Merry, and she shook him again, but he spoke no more, and her sleep was troubled again.
When she woke next there was dried spit in her throat and glue in her eyes and someone waiting for her.
“Hello,” said the kind elder. She was old, almost as old as her husband had been when Merry threw him into the water. “I brought tea.”
“I don’t eat breakfasts!” shouted Merry.
“This isn’t breakfast, it’s business. And you don’t need to eat it, you can just try it.”
“Good!” shouted Merry, and she tried both cups down to the dregs, which were smoky and smelled of berries and sharpness.
“I would like to ask you to move on,” said the elder.
“Hah!” shouted Merry. “Where to? This place suits me just fine!”
“Exactly so!” said the elder. “Make it suit you more still! Take off your armour, leave your spear, come down to the water’s edge and sleep in a house. Catch fish. Eat more than one meal a day. Build things. Fix things. Grow old. Maybe fall in love, if you’d like to.”
“I don’t understand any of that, and I don’t care about things I don’t understand!” shouted Merry. “Why should I?!”
The elder held up three of her fingers, old and crooked as the branches above. “You are running the fishermen ragged, you are upsetting the owls, and you will not find what you ask for here.”
“I don’t care!” shouted Merry with redoubled force. “And I will have what I want or I will crush you all with my bare hands!”
“Oh foolish Merry,” sighed the elder, and she looked into Merry’s eyes with a sympathy that could overflow the seas. “You will never be buried here.”
The elder was slow and feeble and much, much, much kinder than Merry. All of this repelled her, and when she struck at her she recoiled back, much as she remembered her timid older sister once shrinking from a mouse. The body fell and for the first time in her life she felt herself inadequate.
“Kindness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry. “Kindness cannot change me! It shouldn’t! It won’t! Let another try and make this place my grave!” And she hurled the elder’s shawl, which was festooned with quartz, up, up, up, until it caught in the branches of her pine like a spiderweb.
And then, the wind came from the west.
Firm, fierce, and forceful it came, and it found one lone, scarred, harried antiquity-pine with a sail in its crown, and it struck that pine down, and the lead-dense knotted trunk of that pine clove Merry’s blood-gilded helmet, cleft her milkfruit-hardened skullcap, and slammed both to the hilltop so hard it raised a plume of moss and needles for six leagues.
***
The villagers came up the hill that evening. They built a pyre for the elder’s body, and planted the cones of the lost trees, and they raised a marker.
HERE LIES THE STRONGEST
SLAIN BY
HER CARELESSNESS
But there was nothing buried under it, for nothing – not even the fall of Merry – could break the endless, ageless stone of the tangled lands to make a grave big enough for any creature larger than a mouse.
So they threw her body into the water, where the fish took it, and they speared and netted the fish, and thus some good came of it all in the end.
The armour they sold piece by piece.The trouble began when she was five, and her great-uncle marked her particular fondness of striking her older sister with her cutlery.
“A warrior-breaker born!” he crowed. “Let her have better to strike with!” And so he gifted her a training-blade and a tutor, and when she had worn both down to nubs another, and another, and another. She slept and ate (the flesh of the milkfruit) and trained and killed her older sister in an argument at the age of twelve and was presented with her grandmother’s blood-gilded armour at the age of sixteen and by the time she was twenty it had been readjusted six times to incorporate the breadth of her muscles and guts and fierceness and then she took the war-name Merry and she was ready at last to be sent to battle.
She killed many people for some time, and in many places.
The day when it happened was after a victory, but it could’ve been any. Merry drank much and stamped her feet and stood for her honours and smiled wide. Then she woke early, trained her forms, and decapitated half the regiment under her command – some one-after-another and some all-at-once.
Then she walked, and every league she walked she stopped and she placed the headless body of one of her soldiers on a tree so that her path was marked well, for the ground was growing unruly, bucking off the soil and showing its ancient stone bones, which she followed like a hound on the scent. And so she plunged into the tangled lands that lay alongside the water, where the only things that grew on the rock were moss and the only thing that grew on the moss were antiquity-pines, whose sap-sticky trunks were made of knots and whose knots were made of spite and whose branches leaned to point in the direction of the windsd. She strode through the bogs uncaring of leeches, cut down bears for her breakfasts, sang until the birds fled, and stamped as she walked to feel the satisfying crunch of fragmenting gravel underfoot. When she saw boats in the water, she followed them, and so she came to a driftwood-and-reed village nestled under a hill of stone (as all the hills were in the tangled lands) that was crested with a grove of huddled and wind-combed antiquity-pines so old they were as much growing on each other’s needles as they were the moss.
“Wake up!” shouted Merry gleefully, waving her spear overhead with happiness. “Here! See! I am Merry! Look at what I can do!” And so saying she cut a house in half, along with a fisher and two of their relations. “I am strong! I am the strongest I have ever known and I am bored! I am here to find what may kill me! Tell those who seek to kill me that I rest at the top of the hill under the pine, and I will fight them until one comes who can kill the strongest, and then you must bury me there and mark their name upon my grave! I am hungry and you must bring food at each day’s end! Do this or I will kill you!”
“Merry,” said the village elder, an old and stooped man who had just confirmed the deaths of his nephew, niece, and sibling, “you will never be buried here.”
“Wrong!” shouted Merry, and she threw the elder high into the air, from whence he fell into the water and broke like a dry branch. “Food by sundown or I will come down the hill! I’m not picky!”
So saying, she ascended the stone hill, clambering over pink-and-grey granite as softly rounded as pillowcases, and examined the wind-blown antiquity-pines in their grey dozens. “Too many!” she shouted. “Boring! Confusing!” Thus incensed, she struck down each and every pine save the most ancient and massive that lay in the grove’s heart, and from the others she built a fire and sent up a pungent and tarry smoke-signal to any who might have lost her trail in the winding maze that was the tangled lands of the water.
“The trees will be missed,” ventured the lead fisher who brought the fat silvery bodies of Merry’s evening meal. “They blocked the wind when it came from the west.”
“I am strong!” shouted Merry in happy rebuttal. “It does not matter to me, and if it matters to you, that doesn’t matter to me either!” But she was fed and happy and so only threw the fisher down the hill with one hand, which broke four of her ribs before she wrapped herself in a bed of pine-boughs and slumbered under her tree.
Less than a week passed before the first pursuers came. Six grey-wrapped deserter-hunters, armed with nooses and bows. They came for Merry in the night and they left down the hill one at a time, limb by limb.
After that came the other half of her old regiment. That lasted two days and two nights, only ending when they occupied the village and seized Merry’s evening meal – oh, the rage in her eyes when she stamped down the hill and snapped their necks. “Fight me properly or not at all!” she shouted as she held her last sergeant underwater and watched the bubbles still, just as she had once done for her youngest cousin. “Ugh!” It put her in a foul mood that only stilled when she demanded larger meals from then on, and she spent much of the night sharpening her spear’s edge with her old medals, the metal-on-stone scraping haunting the dark and sparking outraged replies from every owl in miles.
The next day, a brave hero arrived.
Merry knew them on sight and liked them just as quickly. They were short and stocky and simply clothed; their armour was largely worn cloth and scantly aged metal. They wielded a very sturdy stick, hardened and wrapped for handling, tipped with a razored shard of clearest glass that parted air like flesh as it moved and they walked heedlessly barefoot upon the morning-heated rock and the dry needles.
“Hello!” she shouted to them. “Are you here to kill me?!”
“Yes,” said the brave hero. They took a drink from their little water-pouch and put it down on the ground. “I smelt the smoke and saw the bodies and heard terrible things. You must be stopped.”
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled. The hero was quick and strong and far braver than Merry, but she had grown up feeding on the flesh of the milkfruit every day – a king’s ransom spent every fifth year of her life – and she was a giant from it: more than double their height, four times their weight, twice as many lungs, and filled with unending vigor for violence. The sun was low and curdling the clouds on the horizon’s edge by the time the hero fell, but fall they did – a slipped foot, a staggered breath, a sluggish recover, and Merry’s spear struck them down.
“Bravery cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she cast their spear into the trunk of her pine with such force that it stuck there, shivering. “Let another try and make this place my grave!”
“You,” said the hero quietly, with what little breath they had that was not bloody, ‘will never be buried here.”
“What?!” shouted Merry. But there was no answer, and that night she slept with more annoyance than she would have hoped when the day began.
When Merry woke the next day she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, where her skin was thickest. She ignored it as she practiced her forms but did not forget it, so when the night came she slept lightly and carefully. Because of this, the knife meant to slip into her neck was slapped away, and the cunning hunter who had dared step into her reach leapt back, cursing the light of the moon.
“Hello!” she shouted, rousing a chorus of furious owls. “Are you here to kill me?!”
The cunning hunter hurled a glass vial that splattered the front of her breastplate.
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled. The cunning hunter was fast and strong and far, far more clever than Merry, but she wore the antique and impossibly valuable blood-gilded armour of her grandmother, which did not rust when doused with liquid grit, nor rot when engulfed in snakesmoke, not sear when slapped with flash-salve, nor admit the presence of any blade however thin and quiet and quick and skillful, and at last she stepped to the quick into the hunter’s reach, grasped him in a hug, and shook him until his spine snapped.
“Cleverness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she snatched his last poisoned blade from his failing grasp and stamped it into the roots of her pine with one foot, hard as a hammer-blow. “Let another try and make this place my grave!”
“You will never be buried here,” whispered the hunter quietly.
“What?!” shouted Merry, and she shook him again, but he spoke no more, and her sleep was troubled again.
When she woke next there was dried spit in her throat and glue in her eyes and someone waiting for her.
“Hello,” said the kind elder. She was old, almost as old as her husband had been when Merry threw him into the water. “I brought tea.”
“I don’t eat breakfasts!” shouted Merry.
“This isn’t breakfast, it’s business. And you don’t need to eat it, you can just try it.”
“Good!” shouted Merry, and she tried both cups down to the dregs, which were smoky and smelled of berries and sharpness.
“I would like to ask you to move on,” said the elder.
“Hah!” shouted Merry. “Where to? This place suits me just fine!”
“Exactly so!” said the elder. “Make it suit you more still! Take off your armour, leave your spear, come down to the water’s edge and sleep in a house. Catch fish. Eat more than one meal a day. Build things. Fix things. Grow old. Maybe fall in love, if you’d like to.”
“I don’t understand any of that, and I don’t care about things I don’t understand!” shouted Merry. “Why should I?!”
The elder held up three of her fingers, old and crooked as the branches above. “You are running the fishermen ragged, you are upsetting the owls, and you will not find what you ask for here.”
“I don’t care!” shouted Merry with redoubled force. “And I will have what I want or I will crush you all with my bare hands!”
“Oh foolish Merry,” sighed the elder, and she looked into Merry’s eyes with a sympathy that could overflow the seas. “You will never be buried here.”
The elder was slow and feeble and much, much, much kinder than Merry. All of this repelled her, and when she struck at her she recoiled back, much as she remembered her timid older sister once shrinking from a mouse. The body fell and for the first time in her life she felt herself inadequate.
“Kindness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry. “Kindness cannot change me! It shouldn’t! It won’t! Let another try and make this place my grave!” And she hurled the elder’s shawl, which was festooned with quartz, up, up, up, until it caught in the branches of her pine like a spiderweb.
And then, the wind came from the west.
Firm, fierce, and forceful it came, and it found one lone, scarred, harried antiquity-pine with a sail in its crown, and it struck that pine down, and the lead-dense knotted trunk of that pine clove Merry’s blood-gilded helmet, cleft her milkfruit-hardened skullcap, and slammed both to the hilltop so hard it raised a plume of moss and needles for six leagues.
***
The villagers came up the hill that evening. They built a pyre for the elder’s body, and planted the cones of the lost trees, and they raised a marker.
HERE LIES THE STRONGEST
SLAIN BY
HER CARELESSNESS
But there was nothing buried under it, for nothing – not even the fall of Merry – could break the endless, ageless stone of the tangled lands to make a grave big enough for any creature larger than a mouse.
So they threw her body into the water, where the fish took it, and they speared and netted the fish, and thus some good came of it all in the end.
The armour they sold piece by piece.The trouble began when she was five, and her great-uncle marked her particular fondness of striking her older sister with her cutlery.
“A warrior-breaker born!” he crowed. “Let her have better to strike with!” And so he gifted her a training-blade and a tutor, and when she had worn both down to nubs another, and another, and another. She slept and ate (the flesh of the milkfruit) and trained and killed her older sister in an argument at the age of twelve and was presented with her grandmother’s blood-gilded armour at the age of sixteen and by the time she was twenty it had been readjusted six times to incorporate the breadth of her muscles and guts and fierceness and then she took the war-name Merry and she was ready at last to be sent to battle.
She killed many people for some time, and in many places.
The day when it happened was after a victory, but it could’ve been any. Merry drank much and stamped her feet and stood for her honours and smiled wide. Then she woke early, trained her forms, and decapitated half the regiment under her command – some one-after-another and some all-at-once.
Then she walked, and every league she walked she stopped and she placed the headless body of one of her soldiers on a tree so that her path was marked well, for the ground was growing unruly, bucking off the soil and showing its ancient stone bones, which she followed like a hound on the scent. And so she plunged into the tangled lands that lay alongside the water, where the only things that grew on the rock were moss and the only thing that grew on the moss were antiquity-pines, whose sap-sticky trunks were made of knots and whose knots were made of spite and whose branches leaned to point in the direction of the windsd. She strode through the bogs uncaring of leeches, cut down bears for her breakfasts, sang until the birds fled, and stamped as she walked to feel the satisfying crunch of fragmenting gravel underfoot. When she saw boats in the water, she followed them, and so she came to a driftwood-and-reed village nestled under a hill of stone (as all the hills were in the tangled lands) that was crested with a grove of huddled and wind-combed antiquity-pines so old they were as much growing on each other’s needles as they were the moss.
“Wake up!” shouted Merry gleefully, waving her spear overhead with happiness. “Here! See! I am Merry! Look at what I can do!” And so saying she cut a house in half, along with a fisher and two of their relations. “I am strong! I am the strongest I have ever known and I am bored! I am here to find what may kill me! Tell those who seek to kill me that I rest at the top of the hill under the pine, and I will fight them until one comes who can kill the strongest, and then you must bury me there and mark their name upon my grave! I am hungry and you must bring food at each day’s end! Do this or I will kill you!”
“Merry,” said the village elder, an old and stooped man who had just confirmed the deaths of his nephew, niece, and sibling, “you will never be buried here.”
“Wrong!” shouted Merry, and she threw the elder high into the air, from whence he fell into the water and broke like a dry branch. “Food by sundown or I will come down the hill! I’m not picky!”
So saying, she ascended the stone hill, clambering over pink-and-grey granite as softly rounded as pillowcases, and examined the wind-blown antiquity-pines in their grey dozens. “Too many!” she shouted. “Boring! Confusing!” Thus incensed, she struck down each and every pine save the most ancient and massive that lay in the grove’s heart, and from the others she built a fire and sent up a pungent and tarry smoke-signal to any who might have lost her trail in the winding maze that was the tangled lands of the water.
“The trees will be missed,” ventured the lead fisher who brought the fat silvery bodies of Merry’s evening meal. “They blocked the wind when it came from the west.”
“I am strong!” shouted Merry in happy rebuttal. “It does not matter to me, and if it matters to you, that doesn’t matter to me either!” But she was fed and happy and so only threw the fisher down the hill with one hand, which broke four of her ribs before she wrapped herself in a bed of pine-boughs and slumbered under her tree.
Less than a week passed before the first pursuers came. Six grey-wrapped deserter-hunters, armed with nooses and bows. They came for Merry in the night and they left down the hill one at a time, limb by limb.
After that came the other half of her old regiment. That lasted two days and two nights, only ending when they occupied the village and seized Merry’s evening meal – oh, the rage in her eyes when she stamped down the hill and snapped their necks. “Fight me properly or not at all!” she shouted as she held her last sergeant underwater and watched the bubbles still, just as she had once done for her youngest cousin. “Ugh!” It put her in a foul mood that only stilled when she demanded larger meals from then on, and she spent much of the night sharpening her spear’s edge with her old medals, the metal-on-stone scraping haunting the dark and sparking outraged replies from every owl in miles.
The next day, a brave hero arrived.
Merry knew them on sight and liked them just as quickly. They were short and stocky and simply clothed; their armour was largely worn cloth and scantly aged metal. They wielded a very sturdy stick, hardened and wrapped for handling, tipped with a razored shard of clearest glass that parted air like flesh as it moved and they walked heedlessly barefoot upon the morning-heated rock and the dry needles.
“Hello!” she shouted to them. “Are you here to kill me?!”
“Yes,” said the brave hero. They took a drink from their little water-pouch and put it down on the ground. “I smelt the smoke and saw the bodies and heard terrible things. You must be stopped.”
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled. The hero was quick and strong and far braver than Merry, but she had grown up feeding on the flesh of the milkfruit every day – a king’s ransom spent every fifth year of her life – and she was a giant from it: more than double their height, four times their weight, twice as many lungs, and filled with unending vigor for violence. The sun was low and curdling the clouds on the horizon’s edge by the time the hero fell, but fall they did – a slipped foot, a staggered breath, a sluggish recover, and Merry’s spear struck them down.
“Bravery cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she cast their spear into the trunk of her pine with such force that it stuck there, shivering. “Let another try and make this place my grave!”
“You,” said the hero quietly, with what little breath they had that was not bloody, ‘will never be buried here.”
“What?!” shouted Merry. But there was no answer, and that night she slept with more annoyance than she would have hoped when the day began.
When Merry woke the next day she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, where her skin was thickest. She ignored it as she practiced her forms but did not forget it, so when the night came she slept lightly and carefully. Because of this, the knife meant to slip into her neck was slapped away, and the cunning hunter who had dared step into her reach leapt back, cursing the light of the moon.
“Hello!” she shouted, rousing a chorus of furious owls. “Are you here to kill me?!”
The cunning hunter hurled a glass vial that splattered the front of her breastplate.
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled. The cunning hunter was fast and strong and far, far more clever than Merry, but she wore the antique and impossibly valuable blood-gilded armour of her grandmother, which did not rust when doused with liquid grit, nor rot when engulfed in snakesmoke, not sear when slapped with flash-salve, nor admit the presence of any blade however thin and quiet and quick and skillful, and at last she stepped to the quick into the hunter’s reach, grasped him in a hug, and shook him until his spine snapped.
“Cleverness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she snatched his last poisoned blade from his failing grasp and stamped it into the roots of her pine with one foot, hard as a hammer-blow. “Let another try and make this place my grave!”
“You will never be buried here,” whispered the hunter quietly.
“What?!” shouted Merry, and she shook him again, but he spoke no more, and her sleep was troubled again.
When she woke next there was dried spit in her throat and glue in her eyes and someone waiting for her.
“Hello,” said the kind elder. She was old, almost as old as her husband had been when Merry threw him into the water. “I brought tea.”
“I don’t eat breakfasts!” shouted Merry.
“This isn’t breakfast, it’s business. And you don’t need to eat it, you can just try it.”
“Good!” shouted Merry, and she tried both cups down to the dregs, which were smoky and smelled of berries and sharpness.
“I would like to ask you to move on,” said the elder.
“Hah!” shouted Merry. “Where to? This place suits me just fine!”
“Exactly so!” said the elder. “Make it suit you more still! Take off your armour, leave your spear, come down to the water’s edge and sleep in a house. Catch fish. Eat more than one meal a day. Build things. Fix things. Grow old. Maybe fall in love, if you’d like to.”
“I don’t understand any of that, and I don’t care about things I don’t understand!” shouted Merry. “Why should I?!”
The elder held up three of her fingers, old and crooked as the branches above. “You are running the fishermen ragged, you are upsetting the owls, and you will not find what you ask for here.”
“I don’t care!” shouted Merry with redoubled force. “And I will have what I want or I will crush you all with my bare hands!”
“Oh foolish Merry,” sighed the elder, and she looked into Merry’s eyes with a sympathy that could overflow the seas. “You will never be buried here.”
The elder was slow and feeble and much, much, much kinder than Merry. All of this repelled her, and when she struck at her she recoiled back, much as she remembered her timid older sister once shrinking from a mouse. The body fell and for the first time in her life she felt herself inadequate.
“Kindness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry. “Kindness cannot change me! It shouldn’t! It won’t! Let another try and make this place my grave!” And she hurled the elder’s shawl, which was festooned with quartz, up, up, up, until it caught in the branches of her pine like a spiderweb.
And then, the wind came from the west.
Firm, fierce, and forceful it came, and it found one lone, scarred, harried antiquity-pine with a sail in its crown, and it struck that pine down, and the lead-dense knotted trunk of that pine clove Merry’s blood-gilded helmet, cleft her milkfruit-hardened skullcap, and slammed both to the hilltop so hard it raised a plume of moss and needles for six leagues.
***
The villagers came up the hill that evening. They built a pyre for the elder’s body, and planted the cones of the lost trees, and they raised a marker.
HERE LIES THE STRONGEST
SLAIN BY
HER CARELESSNESS
But there was nothing buried under it, for nothing – not even the fall of Merry – could break the endless, ageless stone of the tangled lands to make a grave big enough for any creature larger than a mouse.
So they threw her body into the water, where the fish took it, and they speared and netted the fish, and thus some good came of it all in the end.
The armour they sold piece by piece.