“Old woman,” he says, and his voice was now loud enough to make the valley rumble, so that stones broke loose from the walls and rolled down to the bottom, breaking trees as a person would break broomstraws, “I tell you for the last time. Move! I wish to pass.”

At last she looked up at him and says, “I am old and weary and the day is hot. If you will bring me water to slake my thirst, I will move out of your way, great lord.”

Crooked was not pleased, but he wasn’t mannerless, and the woman was in truth very, very old, so he went to the stream beside the road and filled his hands and brought it back to her. When she had drunk it down, she shook her head.

“It does not touch my thirst. I must have more.”

Crooked took a great boulder and with his hand of bronze he hollowed it into a mighty cup. When he had filled it in the stream he brought it back to her, and it was so heavy, when he set it down it made the ground jump. Still, the old woman lifted it with one hand and drained it, then shook her head. “More,” she says. “My mouth is still as dry as the fields of dust before the Stone Man’s palace.”

Marveling, but angry, too, at how his journey had been halted and bollixed, Crooked went to the stream and tore up its bed, pointing it so that all the water flowed toward the old woman. But she only opened her mouth and swallowed it all down, so that within a short time the stream itself ran dry, and all the trees of the valley went dry and lifeless.

“More,” she says. “Are you so useless that you cannot even help an old woman to slake her thirst?”

“I do not know how you do those tricks,” he says, and he was so angry that his banished uncle’s fire was a-dancing in his eyes, turning them bright as suns, pushing back the very shadows that covered the valley, “but I will not be courteous any more. Already I must carry the load of shame from my family’s defeat, must I also be thwarted by an old peasant woman? Get out of my way or I will pick you up and hurl you out of the road.”

“I go nowhere until I have finished what I am doing,” the crone says.

Crooked sprang forward and grabbed the old woman with his hand of ivory, but as hard as he pulled he could not lift her. Then he grabbed her with his other hand as well, the mighty hand of bronze which its strength was beyond strength, but still he could not move her. He threw both his arms around her and heaved until he thought his heart would burst in his chest but he could not move her one inch.

Down he threw himself in the road beside her and said, “Old woman, you have defeated me where a hundred strong men could not. I give myself into your power, to be killed, enslaved, or ransomed as you see fit.”