Realistic fantasy portraits on a forearm

He came up the valley road the winter the well froze, and nobody opened the gate for him. Brother Tomas, already half blind, heard something dragging itself through the snow and went down with a lantern. There sat the Elder, grey as wet stone, his brow hanging over him like an eaves, and one pale blue eye that was the only part of him still seeing clearly. Beside him stood a girl no higher than a hay fork, ears pointed like the tip of a leaf and green eyes that did not blink at the lantern. She had walked him from the river, she said, because he could no longer find the way himself.

The abbot wanted them both sent back to the forest. But the Elder had once been a copyist, and his fingers still knew the psalter by touch, so Tomas set them down in the scriptorium beside the stove. The girl read aloud while the old one corrected her from memory. By Lent she could recite the whole of the Rule without a stumble. In summer she planted marigolds along the wall outside the cells, because the Elder said the bees would find the abbey sooner for them.

The thaw came early the year the abbot died. The Elder pressed the psalter into the girl's hands, told her the road was open, and sat down on the cold step to wait for the last of the snow to go. Nobody saw him leave. In the morning Tomas found the step bare, and the marigolds burning orange and red in the wet ground where he had been sitting, and the girl gone down the valley with the book under her arm, reading aloud to herself as she walked.