The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy

by Megan Bannen

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

Not Yet Available

Release date: August 23, 2022

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 320

Sample

It was always a gamble, dropping off a body at Birdsall & Son, Undertakers, but this morning, the Bride of Fortune favored Hart Ralston.

Out of habit, he ducked his head as he stepped into the lobby so that he wouldn’t smack his forehead on the doorframe. Bold-colored paintings of the death gods—the Salt Sea, the Warden, and Grandfather Bones—decorated the walls in gold frames. Two green velvet armchairs sat in front of a walnut coffee table, their whimsical lines imbuing the room with an upbeat charm. Vintage coffee bean tins served as homes for pens and candy on a counter that was polished to a sheen. This was not the somber, staid lobby of a respectable place like Cunningham’s Funeral Services. This was the appalling warmth of an undertaker who welcomed other people’s deaths with open arms.

It was also blessedly empty, save for the dog draped over one of the chairs. The mutt was scratching so furiously at his ribs he didn’t notice that his favorite Tanrian Marshal had walked through the front door. Hart watched in delight as the mongrel’s back paw sent a cyclone of dog hair whirling through a shaft of sunlight before the bristly fur settled on the velvet upholstery.

“Good boy, Leonard,” said Hart, knowing full well that Mercy Birdsall did not want her dog wallowing on the furniture.

At the sound of his name, Leonard perked up and wagged his nubbin tail. He leaped off the chair and hurled himself at Hart, who petted him with equal enthusiasm.

Leonard was an ugly beast—half boxer, half the gods knew what, brindle coated, eyes bugging and veined, jowls hanging loose. In any other case, this would be a face only his owner could love, but there was a reason Hart continued to patronize his least favorite undertaker in all the border towns that clung to the hem of the Tanrian Marshals’ West Station like beggar children. After a thorough round of petting and a game of fetch with the tennis ball Leonard unearthed from underneath his chair, Hart pulled his watch out of his vest pocket and, seeing that it was already late in the afternoon, resigned himself to getting on with his job.

He took a moment to doff his hat and brush back his overgrown blond hair with his fingers. Not that he cared how he looked. Not at Birdsall & Son, at any rate. As a matter of fact, if he had been a praying man, he would have begged the Mother of Sorrows to have mercy on him, no pun intended. But he was not entirely a man—not by half—much less one of the praying variety, so he left religion to the dog.

“Pray for me, Leonard,” he said before he pinged the counter bell.

“Pop, can you get that?” Mercy’s voice called from somewhere in the bowels of Birdsall & Son, loudly enough so that her father should be able to hear her but softly enough that she wouldn’t sound like a hoyden shouting across the building.

Hart waited.

And waited.

“I swear,” he muttered as he rang the bell again.

This time, Mercy threw caution to the wind and hollered, “Pop! The bell!” But silence met this request, and Hart remained standing at the counter, his impatience expanding by the second. He shook his head at the dog. “Salt fucking Sea, how does your owner manage to stay in business?”

Leonard’s nubbin started up again, and Hart bent down to pet the ever-loving snot out of the boxer mix.

“I’m so sorry,” Mercy said, winded, as she rushed from the back to take her place behind the counter. “Welcome to Birdsall & Son. How can I help you?”

Hart stood up—and up and up—towering over Mercy as her stomach (hopefully) sank down and down.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said, the words and the unenthusiastic tone that went with them dropping off her tongue like a lead weight. Hart resisted the urge to grind his molars into a fine powder.

“Most people start with hello.”

“Hello, Hart-ache,” she sighed.

“Hello, Merciless.” He gave her a thin, venomous smile as he took in her oddly disheveled appearance. Whatever else he might say about her, she was usually neat as a pin, her bright-colored dresses flattering her tall, buxom frame, and her equally bright lipstick meticulously applied to her full lips. Today, however, she wore overalls, and her olive skin was dewy with sweat, making her red horn-rimmed glasses slide down her nose. A couple of dark curls had come loose from the floral scarf that bound up her hair, as if she’d stuck her head out the window while driving full speed across a waterway.

“I guess you’re still alive, then,” she said flatly.

“I am. Try to contain your joy.”

Leonard, who could not contain his joy, jumped up to paw Hart’s stomach, and Hart couldn’t help but squeeze those sweet jowls in his hands. What a shame that such a great dog belonged to the worst of all undertaking office managers.

“Are you here to pet my dog, or do you actually have a body to drop off?”

A shot of cold humiliation zinged through Hart’s veins, but he’d never let her see it. He held up his hands as if Mercy were leveling a pistol crossbow at his head, and declared with mock innocence, “I stopped by for a cup of tea. Is this a bad time?”

Bereft of adoration, Leonard leaped up higher, mauling Hart’s ribs.

“Leonard, get down.” Mercy nabbed her dog by the collar to drag him upstairs to her apartment. Hart could hear him scratching at the door and whining piteously behind the wood. It was monstrous of Mercy to deprive both Hart and her dog of each other’s company. Typical.

“Now then, where were we?” she said when she returned, propping her fists on her hips, which made the bib of her overalls stretch over the swell of her breasts. The square of denim seemed to scream, Hey, look at these! Aren’t they fucking magnificent? It was so unfair of Mercy to have magnificent breasts.

“You’re dropping off a body, I assume?” she asked.

“Yep. No key.”

“Another one? This is our third indigent this week.”

“More bodies mean more money for you. I’d think you’d be jumping for joy.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response. I’ll meet you at the dock. You do know there’s a bell back there, right?”

“I prefer the formality of checking in at the front desk.”

“Sure you do.” She rolled her eyes, and Hart wished they’d roll right out of her unforgivably pretty face.

“Does no one else work here? Why can’t your father do it?”

Like a gift from the Bride of Fortune, one of Roy Birdsall’s legendary snores galloped through the lobby from behind the thin wall separating it from the office. Hart smirked at Mercy, whose face darkened in embarrassment.

“I’ll meet you at the dock,” she repeated through gritted teeth.

Hart’s smirk came with him as he put on his hat, sauntered out to his autoduck, and backed it up to the dock.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked Mercy as he swung open the door of his duck’s cargo hold, knowing full well that she would find the question unbearably condescending.

As if to prove that she didn’t need anyone’s help, least of all his, she snatched the dolly from its pegs on the wall, strode past him into the hold, and strapped the sailcloth-wrapped body to the rods with the practiced moves of an expert. Unfortunately, this particular corpse was extremely leaky, even through the thick canvas. Despite the fact that he had kept it on ice, the liquid rot wasn’t completely frozen over, and Mercy wound up smearing it all over her hands and arms and the front of her overalls. Relishing her horror as it registered on her face, Hart sidled up to her, his tongue poking into the corner of his cheek. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but—”

She wheeled the corpse past him, forcing him to step out of the autoduck to make room for her. “Hart-ache, if you don’t want my help, maybe you should finally find yourself a partner.”

The insinuation lit his Mercy Fuse, which was admittedly short. As if he would have any trouble finding a partner if he wanted one. Which he didn’t.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” he shot back. “And look who’s talking, by the way.”

She halted the dolly and pulled out the kickstand with the toe of her sneaker. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t see anyone helping you either.” He fished inside his black vest for the paperwork she would need to complete in order to receive her government stipend for processing the body, and he held it out to her. He had long since learned to have his end all filled out ahead of time so that he didn’t have to spend a second longer in her presence than was necessary.

She wiped one hand on the clean fabric over her ass before snatching the papers out of his hand. Without the consent of his reason, Hart’s own hands itched with curiosity, wondering exactly how the round curves of her backside would feel in his grasp. His brain was trying to shove aside the unwanted lust when Mercy stepped into him and stood on her tiptoes. Most women couldn’t get anywhere near Hart’s head without the assistance of a ladder, but Mercy was tall enough to put her into kissing range when she stood on the tips of her red canvas shoes. Her big brown eyes blazed behind the lenses of her glasses, and the unexpected proximity of her whole body felt bizarrely intimate as she fired the next words into his face.

“Do you know what I think, Hart-ache?”

He swallowed his unease and kept his voice cool. “Do tell, Merciless.”

“You must be a pathetically friendless loser to be this much of a jerk.” On the word jerk, she poked him in the chest with the emphatic pointer finger of her filthy hand, dotting his vest with brown rot and making him stumble onto the edge of the dock. Then she pulled down the gate before he could utter another word, letting it slam shut between them with a resounding clang.

Hart stood teetering on the lip of the dock in stunned silence. Slowly, insidiously, as he regained his balance, her words seeped beneath his skin and slithered into his veins.

I will never come here again unless I absolutely have to, he promised himself for the hundredth time. Birdsall & Son was not the only official drop-off site for bodies recovered in Tanria without ID tags. From now on, he would take his keyless cadavers to Cunningham’s. But as he thought the words, he knew they constituted a lie. Every time he slayed an indigent drudge in Tanria, he brought the corpse to Birdsall & Son, Undertakers.

For a dog.

Because he was a pathetically friendless loser.

He already knew this about himself, but the fact that Mercy knew it, too, made his spine bunch up. He got into his autoduck and drove to the station, his hands white-knuckling the wheel as he berated himself for letting Mercy get to him.

Mercy, with her snotty Oh. It’s you. As if a dumpster rat had waltzed into her lobby instead of Hart.

Mercy, whose every word was a thumbtack spat in his face, pointy end first.

The first time he’d met her, four years ago, she had walked into the lobby, wearing a bright yellow dress, like a jolt of sunlight bursting through glowering clouds on a gloomy day. The large brown eyes behind her glasses had met his and widened, and he could see the word form in her mind as she took in the color of his irises, as pale and colorlessly gray as the morning sky on a cloudy day.

Demigod.

Now he found himself wondering which was worse: a pretty young woman seeing him as nothing more than the offspring of a divine parent, or Merciless Mercy loathing him for the man he was.

Any hope he’d cherished of skulking back to his post in Sector W-38 unremarked vanished when he heard Chief Maguire’s voice call to him from the front door of the West Station, as if she had been standing at the blinds in her office, waiting to pounce.

“Marshal Ralston.”

His whole body wanted to sag at the sound of Alma’s voice, but he forced himself to keep his shoulders straight as he took his pack out of the passenger seat and shut the door with a metallic clunk. “Hey, Chief.”

“Where you been?”

“Eternity. I took out a drudge in Sector W-38, but it didn’t have a key. Decomp was so bad, I decided to bring him in early. Poor pitiful bastard.”

Alma scrutinized him over the steaming rim of her ever-present coffee mug, her aquamarine demigod eyes glinting in her wide brown face.

Hart’s lips thinned. “Are you implying that I’m a poor pitiful bastard?”

“It’s not so much an implication as a stone-cold statement of fact.”

“Hardly.”

“You have no social life. You work all the time. You don’t even have a place to hang your hat. You might put up in a hotel for a few nights, but then you come right back here.” She jerked her thumb toward the Mist, the cocoon of churning fog that formed the border of Tanria beyond the West Station. “This shithole is your home. How sad is that?”

Hart shrugged. “It’s not so bad.”

“Says you. I assume you took the body to Cunningham’s?”

“No.”

She raised an I take no bullshit from you eyebrow at him before leaning on the hood of his duck, and Hart frowned when she spilled a few drops of coffee onto the chipped blue paint. It was rusty enough as it was; she didn’t need to go making it worse.

“Look, Ralston, we rely on the undertakers. We need them to do their jobs so that we can do ours.”

Great. A lecture from his boss. Who used to be his partner and his friend. Who called him Ralston now.

“I know.”

“You are aware of the fact that Roy Birdsall almost died a few months ago, right?”

Hart shifted his weight, the soles of his boots grinding into the gravel of the parking lot. “No.”

“Well, he did. Heart attack or something. In theory, he’s running the office, but Mercy’s the one taking care of everything at Birdsall & Son—boatmaking, body prep, all of it.”

“So?” His tone was petulant, but the memory of a disheveled Mercy with corpse rot smeared over her front made a frond of guilt unfurl in his gut.

“So if you’re going to patronize Birdsall’s, cut Mercy some slack and play nice. If you can’t do that, go to Cunningham’s. All right?”

“Yep, fine. Can I go now?” He adjusted his hat on his head, a clear signal that he was preparing to exit the conversation and get on with his job, but Alma held up her free hand.

“Hold on. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”

Hart grunted. He knew what was coming.

“Don’t give me that. You’ve gone through three partners in four years, and you’ve been working solo for months. It’s too dangerous to keep going it alone. For any of us.” She added that last bit as if this conversation were about marshals in general rather than him specifically, but Hart knew better.

“I don’t need a partner.”

She gave him a look of pure exasperation, and for a fraction of a second, Hart could see the old Alma, the friend who’d been there for him when his mentor, Bill, died. She dismissed him with a jerk of her head. “Go on. But this conversation isn’t finished.”

He’d walked a few paces toward the stables when Alma called after him, “Come over for dinner one of these days, will you? Diane misses you.”

This peace offering was almost certainly Diane’s doing, and he could tell that it was as hard for Alma to deliver her wife’s invitation as it was for Hart to hear it.

“Yep,” he answered and continued on his way to the stables, but they both knew he wouldn’t be standing on Alma and Diane’s doorstep anytime soon. Although he and Alma had long since made peace on the surface of things, the old grudge hung in the air, as if Bill’s ghost had taken up permanent residence in the space between them. Hart had no idea how to get past it, or if he wanted to, but it was painfully awkward to miss a friend when she was standing right behind him. It was worse to miss Diane. He almost never saw her anymore.

The stables were dark compared to the brutal sunlight of Bushong, and blessedly cooler, too. He went to the stalls to see which mounts were available. He knew it would be slim pickings at this time of day, but he was unprepared for how bad the pickings were: a gelding so young, Hart didn’t trust it not to bolt at the first whiff of a drudge; an older mare he’d taken in a few times and found too slow and plodding for his liking; and Saltlicker.

Saltlicker was one of those equimares that bolted for water every chance he got and maintained a constant, embittered opposition to anyone who dared to ride him. Some marshals liked him for his high-spiritedness; Hart loathed the beast, but of the three options, Saltlicker was, sadly, the best choice.

“Wonderful,” Hart griped at him.

Saltlicker snorted, shook out his kelp-like mane, and dipped lower in his trough, blowing sulky bubbles in the water, as if to say, The feeling’s mutual, dickhead.

All at once, an oppressive sadness overtook Hart. It was one thing to dislike an equimaris; it was another to have the equimaris hate him back. And honestly, who did genuinely like Hart these days? Mercy’s barbed insult, which had followed him all the way from Eternity, surfaced in his mind once more.

You must be a pathetically friendless loser to be this much of a jerk.

She had a point. Only a pathetically friendless loser would face his nemesis time and again to pet her dog for five minutes.

Maybe I should suck it up and get another dog, he thought, but the second he entertained the idea, he knew he could never replace Gracie. And that left him with nothing but the occasional visit to Leonard.

Hart knew that he needed to get to his post, but he wound up sitting against the stable wall, shrouded in shadows. As if it had a mind of its own—call it ancient muscle memory—his hand snaked into his pack and pulled out his old notebook and a pen.

When he had first joined the Tanrian Marshals after his mother died, he used to write letters to her and slide them into nimkilim boxes whenever he and his mentor, Bill, made their way to the station or to a town. Then, after Bill was killed, Hart wrote to him, too, mostly letters full of remorse. But he hadn’t written to either of them in years, because at the end of the day, it wasn’t like they could write back. And that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? For someone—anyone—to answer?

Poor pitiful bastard, the blank page splayed across his thighs seemed to say to him now. He clicked open the pen and wrote Dear, hesitated, and then added the word friend.

He had no idea how much time passed before he tore out the page, folded it into fourths, and got to his feet, relieving his aching knees. There was a similar relief in his aching chest, as if he’d managed to pour some of that loneliness from his heart onto the paper. Glancing about him to make sure he was unobserved as he crossed the stable yard, he walked to the station’s nimkilim box and slid the note inside, even though he was certain that a letter addressed to no one would never be delivered to anyone.

Mercy cranked up berth number five and watched as the unfortunate man whom Hart Ralston had brought in the day before surfaced from the well, which had kept his body chilled at a steady fifty-five degrees overnight. He wasn’t overly large, but he wasn’t tiny either, and moving him onto the dolly would go easier with two.

“Zeddie? You there?” Mercy called hopefully up the basement stairs, but it was Pop who answered her, his voice too eager for her liking.

“He’s not in yet. Need help with something, muffin?”

“No. Nope. I’m good. I wanted to show Zeddie how to work that tricky kink in berth number five’s rope.” It wasn’t a lie, per se, but she didn’t want Pop doing anything that required physical exertion, such as helping her move a corpse. He wasn’t so great on stairs these days either. His knees popped alarmingly with each step. After his heart attack six months ago, the doctor had said that he needed to retire, at least from the heavy-duty work of undertaking, which was why he was upstairs running the office in Mercy’s stead, and she was down here, working as the interim undertaker until Zeddie was ready to take over, which, in theory, was happening this morning. If he ever showed up.

Annoyed with her brother for being late on his first day as the official undertaker of Birdsall & Son, Mercy maneuvered the indigent’s remains onto the dolly by herself, rolled the body into the lift by herself, added several more pounds to the counterbalance by herself, and pulled down on the lift rope by herself, hand over hand, until she felt it hit the end of the line. She liked the way her muscles worked, hefting and hauling, pushing and pulling, as if this job were the reason why the Three Mothers had made her bigger than nearly every other woman on the island of Bushong, and taller than most men, too.

Of course, there was one man who towered over her, or rather, one demigod. Too bad Hart Ralston’s divine parentage came with a heaping spoonful of arrogance, so evident in the way he cocked his head and put his hands on his hips, drawing attention to their slimness, the way his rapier belt hung off them in the most irritatingly sexy way possible. It annoyed Mercy to no end that after years of putting up with that insufferable marshal, some primal inner instinct continued to think he looked good enough to eat.

She locked the rope in place and whistled as she headed upstairs, the rubber soles of her red canvas shoes making a satisfying thud, thud, thud on the treads. Since Zeddie had yet to arrive, she decided that now would be a good time to broach the subject of her father’s languishing to-do list. She popped her head into the office where Roy Birdsall sat at her old desk, his reading glasses propped inexplicably atop his bushy eyebrows.

“I don’t know if you remember my mentioning this last week, but we’re out of cedar and larch, and now we’re running low on salt, too. And urns.”

“I’ll write up the orders this morning as soon as I’m done balancing the books. I promise.”

“Very, very, extremely low. And it wouldn’t hurt to order more keys. We’ve had a run on unidentified bodies lately. Should I write this down?”

“I’m old, but I’m not that old. I’ll remember.”

“Because I can write this down if you want.”

He shook his head with a grin. “Sometimes, you are just like your mother.”

Mercy knew this was the highest of compliments coming from the mouth of Roy Birdsall. She kissed his more-salt-than-pepper curls and counted off the to-do list on her fingers. “Cedar. Larch. Salt. Urns. And remember to order more keys.”

Pop saluted her, but the gesture was somehow less than reassuring.

With that, Mercy left his office. She was about to head to the boatworks when she heard Horatio’s familiar rapping at the front door, his talons clacking against the wood. “I’ve got it,” she called to her father on her way to the lobby to let in the nimkilim. The owl stood on the welcome mat as he did every morning, six days a week, his white feathers garbed in a particularly dapper emerald waistcoat and silk trousers, an ensemble that seemed remarkably out of place in a dusty border town like Eternity.

“Ah, good morning, Miss Birdsall,” Horatio hooted in a way that also said, I was once a messenger to the Old Gods, and yet you made me wait on this kitschy doormat. But Mercy found the owl’s old-school hauteur charming, so she gave him her usual bright smile as he stepped his standard three paces into the lobby on his bare bird feet. He fished out a slim packet of letters from the tasteful, soft leather mailbag slung across his back and handed it to Mercy. “I rather like this modern style you are trying on these days. I’ve never seen anyone make overalls work, yet here you are, the very picture.”

Mercy dimpled. A compliment from Horatio, even one sniffed with patronizing admiration, was cause for celebration. Her beloved dress collection had been gathering dust in her bedroom closet upstairs for six months now, but she found that her new coveralls and dungarees offered fashionable opportunities alongside their practicality.

“Thank you,” she said, patting the floral scarf that bound up her hair as she took the daily death notices from the countertop and handed them over. Then she fished a coin from the bowl she kept behind the counter and gave it to the nimkilim as well. Horatio sniffed at the silver glinting on the white feathers of his wing and was about to bid her good day when Mercy held up a folded piece of paper she found on top of the stack in her hand.

“There’s been some kind of mistake, Horatio. This letter isn’t addressed to Birdsall & Son.”

“A mistake? I think not.” The owl tugged up on a chain around his neck, and a pair of reading glasses popped out from beneath his waistcoat. He plunked them onto the end of his beak with the feathery tips of one wing as he took the paper from Mercy with the other. He studied the blank outer fold as if there were something to read there. Then he thrust the letter at her once more. “As I said, it is for you.”

Mercy took the note, frowning at it in confusion. “But… there’s no address.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Where?”

Horatio flapped a wing vaguely toward the paper in her hand.

“Still don’t see it,” said Mercy.

“Just because human beings can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, my dear. I should add that this missive is not addressed to Birdsall & Son. It is addressed to you, personally.”

“To me?” A thrill shivered up her spine. The only person who sent her non-business-related mail was her sister, Lilian, who sometimes found hilariously tacky postcards on the road. “Who’s it from?”

“Goodness, how would I know?”

“The same way you know it’s for me?”

Horatio gave a tittering hoot. “Darling, reading the direction is the sum total of my powers in that regard. Pesky privacy laws and all that. Which is a shame, I can tell you, for there are so many letters I would love to read prior to delivery. Are we quite finished here?”

“I—”

“Excellent. Ta-ta.”

“Bye,” Mercy replied absently. She stared down at the folded paper in her hand, bewildered, as she flipped the front door sign to “Open.” Behind her, she heard the door to the kitchenette squawk on hinges in need of oiling and turned around in time to see Pop trying to sneak into his office with a steaming cup of coffee.

“No! Nope!” Mercy said, pointing an accusatory finger at him.

Pop sulked like a giant toddler. “Aw, muffin.”

“You know what Dr. Galdamez said.”

Defeated, he went into the kitchenette to dump out his coffee as Mercy unfolded the note and read.

Dear friend,

I suspect that I’m writing to someone who doesn’t exist. But if you do exist, and you’re out there somewhere, I guess this letter is for you.

I have recently been informed that I’m a dickhead, by an equimaris no less, and before you go defending me, please know that it’s true. I am a dickhead. I’m not sure when or how it happened, and I don’t think I’ve always been a dickhead, yet here we are. I have to confess that there is one person in particular who brings out the complete and utter dickhead in me, and I wish I knew what to do about that.

Do you have someone like this in your life, a person who rubs you the wrong way, and no matter how often you promise yourself that you will rise above it all, you let them goad you every single time? I hope you don’t, for your sake, but if you do, my condolences.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this person brings out the worst in me, and I have come to the following conclusion: Most days are just days, you know? Just me plodding through the hours between when I get up and when I go to bed. But whenever I’m around this one person, this individual who gets under my skin like no other, I feel more strongly the presence of an undeniable truth that is always there, lurking, hovering, waiting for me around every bend in the road.

Loneliness.

There. I said it. Technically, I wrote it, but committing it to ink makes it truer.

I’m lonely. So this woman who very clearly does not like me reminds me that there are very few people left in this world who do. And my circumstances are such that I don’t know how to solve that problem.

Maybe that’s why I keep putting myself in her crosshairs. Maybe there’s a strange comfort in knowing that at least one person feels something for me, even if that feeling could best be described as hate.

Well, this is a dismal letter. Sorry about that. For what it’s worth, I feel better for having written it, to have applied the weight of my loneliness to a piece of paper rather than to my own heart for a change. Thanks for that, my friend. I hope my words haven’t weighed you down.

Or are you lonely, too?

Sincerely,

A friend

Mercy gaped at the inexplicable pouring out of a heart that she held in her hand, from a person as real and substantial as the paper on which it had been written, but as fragile and easily torn, too. Who had sent it? And why had Horatio insisted that this letter was addressed to Mercy when the writer clearly didn’t know who she was?

The front door opened, and Mercy folded up the letter and shoved it into the pocket of her dungarees in time to see her brother, Zeddie, saunter into the lobby, brazenly hip in his green shirt and slim-cut pink pants, his golden curls perfectly disheveled, the picture of twenty-year-old callowness. He carried a greasy bag with one hand while stuffing half a glazed doughnut into his mouth with the other. Like Mercy, he was tall, but unlike