A Mercy

The fifth chapter returns to Florens’s perspective. She is still in the forest, trying to sleep in the cold. As she lies there in the dark, she remembers an incident when Sorrow relieved herself while they were at the market, not caring that other villagers could see her. Rebekka had slapped her and admonished Sorrow on the way home, but the young woman did not cry. Florens remembers how she had not cried when her own cloak and shoes were stolen on her way to the Vaark’s farm as a child. The thoughts make her sad, so she turns her thoughts to the Blacksmith instead. She says, “I don’t know the feeling of or what it means, free and not free. But I have a memory” (69). Florens equates this freedom to choose to a memory she has of Rebekka running naked to Jacob after a moose frightened her while bathing. Florens had not understood what Rebekka was afraid of, or why she had run to her husband. Lina had explained that “We never shape the world…the world shapes us” (71). Florens decides at once, lying alone in the darkness of the woods, that the Blacksmith is her “shaper” and her “world” (71).