“...Hey, Lutz. You were close with Myne, weren’t you? Say something about her.”
Lutz thought back over the two and a half years he had spent with Myne. At first, she couldn’t even walk to the gate. She had wanted to make books but didn’t have paper or ink; she had tried weaving grass fibers together, then making clay tablets... Even when she eventually did manage to make paper, there was a lot more she needed to do before she could make a book.
“Myne would always collapse as soon as she decided to do something, but she always worked hard to get what she wanted. When we first started, she’d get out of breath just walking to the well, but in the end she could walk all the way to the forest on her own.”
“Oh yeah, that reminds me... She sure did a lot of weird things, like shave wood and mess around with clay.”
“Didn’t you two boil wood in a pot, Lutz?”
Fey and his friends who had gone to the woods with Myne started talking about what they remembered her doing there. That must have encouraged Lutz’s family to start talking too.
“All the recipes Myne thought up tasted great.”
“Myne learned letters and math while helping Gunther at the gate, and she taught all that to Lutz, too. She was smart.”
“Oh yeah? I didn’t know about that.”
After their baptism, Lutz had become an apprentice merchant and Myne an apprentice shrine maiden in the temple, but he didn’t talk about that in public since temple shrine maidens didn’t have a very good reputation. As far as everyone here was concerned, she was just helping out at the gate and doing the paperwork that Lutz brought back from the Gilberta Company. Barely anyone knew what Myne had really been doing since her baptism.
Myne had founded a workshop in an orphanage, made ink, and then finally made books; became Johann’s patron and had him make metal letter types for her; funded Heidi’s research into colored ink; and after some trial and error with Ingo, finished a printing press. She was amazing.
And Lutz wanted to tell everyone that, but he couldn’t. He had no idea how much about book-making was safe to talk about.
“Myne was weak and slow to grow,” Effa began, holding Kamil in her arms. “We were always scared that she might not live to see the next day. Tuuli started getting more independent when she was two or three, but it took Myne until she was five. Before then, she would always cry about how unfair it was that only Tuuli was healthy, or how unfair it was that we all got to go outside.” It seemed to hurt her as a mother that Myne hadn’t been born a healthy child.
That was probably the old Myne, Lutz thought. The Myne he knew would never cry about things being unfair. She worked hard to get stronger on her own terms, and while she often ran in circles, she was always dedicating her all to getting books to read.
“But once she did stop crying about things being unfair, she started getting mad about things. She’d say ‘I hate this body!’ and start cleaning the house until she broke out in a fever. She’d do weird dances until she fell over, and say eating certain things was good for her body before ending up getting stomach aches,” Effa continued with a small smile.
...Now that’s the Myne I know. It was easy for Lutz to remember and visualize all the weird things Myne had done.
“It was around when she stopped crying and getting mad about things all the time that she started going to the forest with Lutz. She never expected to be the same as normal kids, but she still got strong enough to go outside and join festivals. To think that, after all that, she would be taken away from us like this...”
Having said their piece, Myne’s family shed tears and offered no more words. But everyone understood: their daughter had finally gotten healthy, only to be killed by an outsider noble who had then stolen her body. It would be a quiet funeral. Under the glow of the dancing fire that lit the plaza, Gunther silently carved a grave marker for Myne out of wood, tears running down his cheeks all the while.
They waited out the night, taking turns to nap. When second bell rang, the wives began distributing bread and tea; it was forbidden to eat meat before the funeral was over.
After finishing their simple breakfast, they shouldered the light board and headed to the temple. They needed to report the death, and then collect a medal permitting the burial. When they arrived, the temple gate’s guard let them into the chapel. It was standard for gray priests to handle the deaths of city-goers, but for some reason the High Priest was there this time.
“A seven-year-old born in the summer named Myne? Very well.”
After leaving them to wait in the chapel for a bit, the High Priest returned with a flat white medal, which he handed to Gunther. It was the medal Myne had stamped with blood during her baptism. These served as a show of government approval for the burial, and as substitute gravestones for poor commoners who couldn’t afford their own.
With the medal in hand, they went to the graveyard outside of the city. As there was only a light box on the board, the men shouldering it were able to walk quicker than they usually would. They were also quieter than usual, since none of them knew Myne very well.
They buried the box in the corner furthest from the graveyard’s entrance. It didn’t take long to dig the grave since the wooden box was so small. Gunther pressed the medal against the grave marker he had carved. It stuck tightly
