Elder Merel

Merel had not always been so patient. Long ago, as a young teacher, she had been a great giver of answers.

She'd loved to explain. A student would stall on a puzzle, and Merel would sweep in and lay the whole thing out — see, block here, because otherwise they swing the mill there, and then — elegant and complete. The students would nod, dazzled, and copy it down. And the very next puzzle, they'd be just as stuck, because she had done all the reading of the board, every time, and left them nothing to do but admire her cleverness. Bright young pieces stayed helpless year after year, and Merel couldn't understand why, until her own old teacher told her the truth.

"You keep reading the board for them," the old teacher said. "So they never learn to read it themselves. A puzzle you solve in front of a student teaches the student that you are clever. A puzzle the student cracks after a long hard silence teaches the student that they are. Stop giving answers, Merel. Start asking questions and waiting. The waiting is the whole gift." It was hard — agonizing, at first, to watch a student struggle and hold her tongue. But Merel learned to ask one small guiding question and then wait, however long it took, and she watched, astonished, as pieces who cracked a puzzle themselves walked away able to crack the next one alone. She never went back to answer-giving. She became, instead, the patient elder who asked.

The green had grown up around Merel over the years, the way a House grows around its wisest piece. When a new keeper of the green first came to her and asked why she refused to just tell the students the answers, Merel answered as she answered everything — with a question.

"When you solved your first hard mills-puzzle alone," she said, "after a long, frustrating silence — do you remember the move?"

"Every stone of it," the keeper admitted.

"And the puzzles your teachers solved for you?"

The keeper was quiet a while. "...Not one."

"So," said Merel, and asked nothing further, because she had made her whole point by asking rather than telling — which was, of course, exactly the point.

Merel's hardest student was a quick, clever piece named Isla who read half the board brilliantly and then pounced — spotting her own best mill in an instant and grabbing for it without ever checking what the opponent could do back.

Merel set her a puzzle. Isla found a mill in a heartbeat. "This one! I close this mill, don't I? Just tell me I'm right!" Merel did not tell her. "You can close that mill," she agreed. "And when you take your piece — what does your opponent do on their next turn?" Isla looked, impatient. "They... they close their mill. And snatch my—" She stopped. Her lovely quick mill let the enemy close a bigger one right back. "So which piece should you take, to stop that?" Merel asked instead of answering. Isla went quiet — really quiet, reading the whole board now, both sides, all the lines, for the first time. It took her a long squirming while. Then her face changed. "Oh. I don't close my mill first. I take their threatening piece first — break their almost-mill — and then mine is safe—" She found it, the whole answer, herself. "Now," said Merel, with the faintest smile, "you will remember it."

Isla stopped pouncing on the first half of the board she read. She learned to read the whole of it — her threats and the enemy's — before touching a stone. And every answer she found in that patient silence, she kept.