ELISE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seated in her rocking chair, propped up with pillows, Elise stared out the window of her family’s thatch-roofed home. Through the glass, a snowy valley could be seen. It stretched between mountains and was traversed by a stream that flowed gently past the house. So high were they in the mountains that when the rains fell the stream did not flood, but countless miles away it grew into a rushing river larger than imagining. Titon claimed their creek at the top of the world was the start of the mightiest river of the land. The Eos, he said, was so wide that a man could not swim across it, so plentiful that a fish could be speared by an arrow shot without aim, and that grasses grew along the banks so thick that goats could grow fat and produce milk year-round. All this was fantasy, she knew, yet in her heart she somehow believed him to be speaking truth. For all the years they had spent together, she had never known him to tell a lie.

Everything she had she owed to Titon, a giant, fearsome, dangerous man, a man whose axe had taken countless heads—heads of foes and heads of friends—but never of those undeserving. He was the most rare and noble of men. He was the stone that formed her hearth. And she did not deserve him.