TWENTY-SIX WINTERS

They called him a changeling because he looked different from everyone else in the village. The children when he was young were cruel to him, and as they grew older they didn’t get any better, just slyer about how they enacted their torments.

Eyes were always upon him no matter where he went in public. The stares followed him along with the whispers about his strangeness. His oddity. The differences that he couldn’t control or change.

Some called him cursed. That was why the color had been leached from him before he was born. That was why even the slightest bit of sun would cause his skin and eyes to burn.

Others called him a curse, one that had been cast upon the village and that they were forced to bear. It was why no one dared to harm him, for fear of calling down the wrath of the god of death.

Everyone believed that he had been touched by death. It was why he’d been garbed in white from the moment of his birth. He’d been cast in the color of grief and mourning.

He was a curse, they all agreed. It was only the kind of curse that they argued about.

And sometimes he wondered, and he feared, what would happen when (not if) they finally decided that his death was the only answer. He knew that the moment they no longer feared reprisals for harming him, they would happily see him dead. Because they hated him because they feared him and they feared him because they hated him. He could see it in the way they looked at him and even more in the way some refused to look at him at all.

Some of his earliest memories had included villagers warding off the evil eye when he walked past with his mother. She had only touched him when she was forced to and had only taken him with her until he was old enough to be left alone. And then one day she’d been gone, her clothes missing from the wardrobe, and not even a note left behind. And the villagers had let him stay in the house and they’d provided him a monthly stipend until he was old enough to work, but he knew it was only their fear of the gods that had them help him.

If they could have, they would have let him die. It wouldn’t have been murder to simply turn their backs and let him fade away from hunger and neglect. But they were too scared of the kind of spirit he would become, as though he would return wrapped in vengeance to punish them. As though he cared enough about them to hate them the way that they deserved.

He didn’t know what was wrong with him, that he couldn’t hate them. That he pitied them so.

He’d raised himself on the words of books he’d found in his grandfather’s old shed. Books that no one had touched for decades and that his mother had surely never read. She’d barely spoken of his father’s father other than to say that it was his house in which they lived. That he had died before Yeager was even born.

And he lived his childhood dependent on the fearful “kindness” of the villagers. And he grew up in that house alone with no one to talk to and no one to care when he hurt himself or when he succeeded at the tasks he set himself.

And when he was an adult and their charity was no longer to be expected, he took up wood carving and hunted small game. And he survived on what he hunted and grew, and he treated and sewed together small furs into larger blankets, and he sold them and his carvings to the peddler that would pass through the village.

And without his knowing, he began to gain a fame of his own. Because his carvings were clever and beautiful and had a charm that townspeople could not resist.

He grew famous without his knowing, and when he was twenty-six winters old the lord of the region came to call. And he was lauded for his great talent, and while he was still reeling from the surprise of it all, he discovered a truth that no one had ever said:

His grandfather had been a man of means. So much so that he’d owned the vast stretch of land upon which the village had been built. Land that he had never sold but that he had rented to the villagers. Land that they had never told Yeager belonged to him.

His mother had been spending his money for all the years that she had been away, even after she’d married again and started herself a new family. And he had never known, because he was a curse and no one ever said.

And the lord was kind to him, kinder than anyone he had ever known. And it was the lord that told him of the beauty he created with his hands and that later made him realize the beauty he possessed in his face and his form and his voice…

Yeager could never see the beauty of himself for himself, but he saw it in the lord’s eyes. In the way the lord spoke to him and made him feel. In the love that grew between them, watered on the happiness that knowing each other brought.

And when the lord–Miskar–asked him to come away from the village, to live in his keep and stay by his side forever… Yeager didn’t hesitate to say Yes.

And his curse was broken. Because while the sun still burnt his tender flesh, he could cover himself in veils of silk and enjoy the light. He could bask in the love Miskar gave him, and for the first time and the rest of his time he could enjoy the world and the life he had been given.

He had been born a changeling, different from everyone in the village, and though it took him twenty-six winters, he came to realize that he was not a curse but a blessing. A joy. The love of someone’s life.

And he was happy and whole and he left the village behind and never felt the need to look back.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley
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