Her Mother's Secret

By noon on the fourteenth day, Ilse could see the candle flame, and the dust in the library window, and her mother’s handwriting, and she read the notebook alone, as she had said she would.

It took four hours. The tally was slow even with the key. She did it at the library desk with the door shut and a pot of Rurik’s tea going cold, turning oats and salt and horseshoes into letters and letters into her mother’s voice, and some of the time she forgot to breathe, and had to stop and put her pen down and do that on purpose.

She wrote the plain text out on loose sheets as she went. Afterwards she could never decide whether that had been a Reader’s habit or a daughter’s.

Emeric asked me. I am writing this so that it is written somewhere, and I am writing it in his…