“Each of you, think of a gift,” my father had said before he left. “When I return, I will make a trip to town to finish closing out the estate, and I would like to bring you home something special.”

I did not tell him that my home was there, in the town where my mother had lived and died, and not here, in a remote mountain valley without so much as a single library.

Juniper, whose voice at least never wobbled precariously, asked for a lute. Aspen begged him for a new dress, or at least some cloth to have new ones made here.

“What, have you already read every book in the world?” Aspen had teased me when I was slow to reply.

What use were books, I didn’t say aloud, if all they did was show you worlds and lives that could never be yours?

“Bring me a rose cutting, like the ones mother grew in the garden in town,” I asked instead. “Just a small one. I can plant it by the well in the spring.”

Not even Aspen had anything to say to that.

My father had raised his hand to my cheek, a hand that was more calloused now than I remembered it being as a child.

“You are your mother’s daughter,” he said to me, and none of us missed the tears that brightened his brown eyes.

I had regretted my angry thoughts. It was not my father’s fault that she was gone, any more than it was his fault that the autumn before last had boiled the sea into a roiling stew of storms, smashing his ships to jagged timbers and his fortune with it.

We had lost my mother and we had lost our home, but I could bring roses back into our lives, if nothing else.

“Mercy.”

She tilted her head.

The word had meant something once.

Mercy was the swift knife, following the arrow.

Mercy was the rattle in the lungs after a long sickness, the smile that slipped into sleep and faded.

Mercy was death, in the mountains.

This man smelled of wet fur and blood. At least he had not soiled himself, like the other two. Beneath the smell of hides were old odors: salt, wood, spices. Smells that did not come from the mountain.

Her lips slid down over her teeth.

She moved her tongue in her mouth, remembering the feel of words, and raised her spear.

“Please, I have three daughters. They will starve, without me. You must let me go.”

The spear weighed nothing in her hand. Death was as light as air.

“You asked for mercy,” she said. The sounds were wrong, her pronunciation off.

“Yes, please, I will do anything. Anything you ask.”

He did not understand.

Death was wiser.

Three daughters.

Pain stirred.

Once, another man had had a daughter.

Her fist tightened.

Death would have been wiser then, too.