Piotr the giant sat in the kitchen in his house, which occupied the tops of ten different mountains and was always hidden from below by a disguise of clouds, and removed the shoes from the box his wife had given him. "Oh," he said carefully, "they're very nice. Very lovely." And they were; the soles had a spring to them, which he felt when he pressed into the heel with his enormous thumb, and the leather for the uppers was soft and thoroughly worked. The hides of at least a hundred cows must have gone into each shoe. He tried the left one on.
"I've seen how you rub your feet after you've been trampling the countyside all day," Galena said with a shrug and a smile. "Perhaps these would be kinder on your feet than those two boulders you carved holes into."
"I'm sure they will be," said Piotr, even as he thought about all the little truths still hidden from her after all those years: that there were times when he didn't want to trample the countryside; that it felt right for him to wear large rocks, so sharp and heavy, on his feet; that he often was glad that it didn't take long for him in his boulder-shoes to pillage and ruin an entire town. Sometimes, it was best if the end came quickly.
"Thank you," Piotr told Galena as he slipped on the other shoe. It was the one kindness at the moment that he could offer her.
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