For readers of #Circe and #TheHandmaidsTale, Kiran Millwood Hargrave's THE MERCIES is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and about a love that could prove as dangerous as it is powerful.
To know more about 'The Mercie...
The commissioner and his wife have been here a week, but the stitched pelts are still folded ready by the door of Maren's house. Their exchange with Commissioner Cornet made her uneasy, though Maren knows it could have been worse: she might have been too slow to stop Mamma mentioning the drum.
When she chided her at home, her mother had closed up like a shell, and Maren grew less sure her loose talk of Diinna was in error. She will have to watch them, the women she calls her family – they have grown apart so starkly it feels dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the commissioner's face when the Sámi rites were mentioned.
She knows, of course, that such things are looked down on. Pastor Kurtsson had frowned at the silver-birch shrouds, but he had allowed it. Commissioner Cornet seems not to understand that things work differently here. This was Sámi land, though they would not call it that. Sailors still sometimes call on Sámi for good wind, for good fortune, and Toril, despite all her protests, went to Diinna when she needed help bearing a child. But the commissioner's disgust has sharpened her to things she had not noticed before: how the Sámi who used to set up their laavus on the headland in summer have not come in years, how Diinna is the last Sámi left living in Vardø.
When she tells Diinna of the exchange, she only shrugs as Erik grabs at her thick braid, chewing the end between sore gums.
'I am used to such ignorance,' Diinna says, eyes fixed on Mamma's back
Maren feels alone in her disquiet, as if she is the only one seeing a storm approach.
It isn't until her mother grows tired of tripping on the skins and snaps that she will take them herself, that Maren finally scoops them up and makes for the second boathouse.
The day is crisp and she is comfortable in her woollen dress. The mud has hardened into its churned ridges, digging into her soles. Toril is beating a blanket on her front step and the women studiously ignore each other, Toril sending a cloud of foul-tasting dust into Maren's mouth. She slaps the worst of it from the reindeer skins.
The second boathouse is closed up and quiet, but smoke is rising from the stack and the place where the runes had been is painted in fresh, gleaming white. She isn't sure where they got the paint from: no one apart from Dag's mother insists on a job that only creates more work rather than lessening it. She listens a moment before she knocks, but can hear nothing.
A minute later, the commissioner's wife, Ursula, opens the door, her hair loose about her round face.
