The Letter

            Toricel woke with the first sliver of dawn.  She was unerring in this.  Always.  Stirring with the first silver moments of night lightening into day.

            There was frost in the air this morning, and it took a small effort of will to roll from between straw and blankets, into the cold of the waking world.

            She went over to the fireplace, coaxed the embers back into a breath of flame, placed a copper bucket of water over them to heat.  She tied her hair back, before walking barefoot to the window, opening the shutters, staring out into the frozen still image of fields, forests, old stone walls.  There was nothing moving out there until she went out herself – bare feet crackling on the frost, breaking stems of wild grass underneath them.  Her feet were used to it, they barely felt the cold anymore.

            She was several hillsides above the rest of the village, cut off from view of them by the lines of lichened boulders that bordered her land.  She preferred it, the quiet, the solitude, the sense of this world having stopped.

            Life was quiet.  Life was hard and easy, exhausting and peaceful, certain and tenuous and still safe.

            She blew into her reddened, weathered palms as she walked the short distance to the well.  She drew fresh water, carried it home.  Took a log from the stack and chopped it into kindling.  Checked on the goats, then the pigs, then the chickens – who’d gifted her overnight with three fat eggs.

            Inside, she washed herself from the bucket, wincing a little at water that was barely warmed.  The eggs she placed gently in the basket, before the letter caught her eye.

            She’d been gone maybe a half hour.  No time for any ordinary person to have walked up here, slipped in, left the letter and gone again.  No time.  And why would they?  Why should they even notice her, or know of her, or think to call?  Or imagine she could read?

            And yet the letter rested there, on the battered table, beside a tin plate and a knob of butter.  Fine vellum, rolled and ribboned, sealed in dyed magenta beeswax.  There was no possibility of unseeing it.  No matter what she wished.

            I am not that Toricel.  I have not been her in nearly twenty years.

            But the letter waited.  It knew it could out-wait her.  And she knew, over time, her eyes would continue to be drawn to it, her fingers would itch at her.  Her bitter curiosity would wonder at what could have made them leave this for her.

            So be it then.

            She’d been called every name in the imagination, but she had never yet called herself coward.

            The vellum unfolded.  And she realised, as she began to read, that it made no difference what the words said, the letter on its own was enough.  Its complicated presence.  She felt the transformation as it wove through her body, ignoring the protest in her bones, the horror in her mind.  The warmth that rose up from her belly was a scouring fire, suffusing through her veins, glittering over her skin to bring out shades of blue and red, to paint her face in the stripes of her true form, to birth the horns from beneath her temples, to seep into her eyes, letting her see in details and colours she’d shied away from all these years.

            I was happy enough.

            I had a home.  Of sorts.

            But the cottage would have to burn.  The goats, chickens, pigs, would all have to run free.  The strangers coming calling would have to be left to wonder at the scars on the land.

            Toricel stowed the letter in her belt, and walked out into the harsh winter light.

Picture credit/discredit:  writer's own work