Alvina

I was thirteen when my mother died.

This was the first time I really understood what it meant to hate. Whether it was people, places, or circumstances, I was filled with a boiling rage for everything around me.

It was so consuming at first, I’m sure colors could have changed and I wouldn’t have noticed.

I was a really mean thirteen year old because of that, but eventually, the overflowing rage ebbed a little over time.

Although it doesn’t matter if I’m no longer a hurricane of fury, the damage has been done.

No one in the village will talk to me anymore. They don’t get it.

They’ll whisper as I pass and talk behind their hands about who I am and how unstable I am. They call me a witch because of how I act out, but I don’t particularly care.

I don’t want to talk to any of them anyway. They’re all annoying and obnoxious, they’re self-centered and never willing to lend a hand.

When my mother was dying, no one wanted to help.

I had demanded over and over to healers that they help her whenever she got sick, but they all declared there was nothing they could do and eventually they would manage to slip away from me.

I yelled at my mom every day to get up. I tried to get out of her bed and to eat. I forced her out into the pathetic garden we had and tried to make her do something. Anything to get the blank look off her face.

Do something! I screamed over and over when all she could do was lay in bed, and when death came to claim her, I screamed so loud my only friend Kenna heard me and she held me before I ruined the only home I ever had by breaking everything in a fit of rage.

Now, with no parents left, I live with Kenna and her mom Helena. Even when people call her cursed for being seen with me.

Maybe she will be. Maybe something about me is cursed and getting too close will kill you. That’s all I can think about when I kneel beside Helena who lays on a makeshift bed of blankets and sheets, a sickness claiming her body until she can hardly open her eyes to look at me.

After another failed attempt at curing a sickness no one has seen before, I leave behind Kenna who sits beside her mom with tears in her eyes.

Slamming the door behind me, my skin heats with anger and frustration. My fists curl into themselves as I walk down the street with the intention to find another healer. A better one. Someone who can help.

As I pass by bakeries and blacksmiths and jewelers, people around me part, none coming more than a few feet away from me. I glare at each of them. I hate the stupid village we live in. I hate how people beg in the streets and everyone has to look out for thieves. I hate how everyone marvels at the castle in the distance. How the flags of Varasia wave in the wind. Every time I see the blue flags and they wave at me, all I can feel is that they mock me. Mock everyone here for being dirt poor. Mock us for the jewels we don’t have, for the ratty fabrics we have when they wear dresses of velvet and silk and wear crowns on their heads.

Sometimes I wish each of those stupid flags would catch fire. I wish they would burn to nothing. I wish I could throw all the pristine jewels and clothes into the dirt under my feet. I want to paint the white walls of the castle red for every person they kill by neglecting us. For every person that goes hungry. Every person who couldn’t be cured. Red on their walls. Each drop for the people they imprison under those pretty castle walls.

I sneer up at the flags and throw open the door to Margaries. Margarie is the best healer in the village. The problem with her is that she was one of the people who tried to take every penny my mom had. When she was coughing her throat raw and was pale as a sheet, begging Margarie for help, she only claimed she had better paying customers and if we wouldn’t give her the price she demanded, she couldn’t help us. She is vain and selfish and on more than one occasion I imagine cursing her as if I were a real witch. I would curse her to be as sick as my mother. I would watch her beg me for help as I shut the door in her face.

The door shuts behind me and I face the front desk where the chair Maragrie usually sits in is empty. Herbs and medicines fill the shelves behind the desk and in the surrounding space are more practical things to buy for absurd prices. Some bottles of her own mixes claim aid for different things like health, infection, and colds. She’s older than my mom was, and behind the natural coloring she puts in her hair, I know she’s graying with old age. People think her age chalks up to wisdom and that’s why she’s known as the best healer. Although, I wonder if Margarie really is a witch because she never tells what she puts in her medicine mixes. I bet they’re all bullshit and she just puts a spell on them.

I guess lucky for her if anyone is going to be killed for witchcraft, it’s going to be me.

“Margarie!” I yell into the store.

I know she’s here. She just sits in the back drinking tea and reading books. I’ll bet the tea is spelled too, considering the only tea around here tastes like dirt.

“Margarie!” I yell again

She finally comes out from the back meeting my glare with a too-sharp smile. She wears what is probably the fanciest dress owned in this town. The purple floor-length gown is accented by jewelry of stones and beads which she probably conned from some poor store owner.

Her brown hair is put up in a ridiculous updo and just from the look of her, I know she would do well in the royal court. She’s as vain and conniving as the rest of them.

“Alvina, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” The way she looks at me like she knows I want something and she knows she won’t give it to me, makes me wish with all I am that I could throw every one of those bottles at her.

I reel it in. I press down the burning anger and I put my hands behind my back to keep her from seeing the way they shake with pent up energy.

I look at her with purposeful disdain, head to toe, and when I meet her eyes, my smile is sharp and unpleasant. “Some things never change, do they?”

Her laugh is poison in my ears, the faux pleasantness in her tone grates down my spine.

“How true. I think I hear every day now about the village witch. They really never do change” She enunciates the last words as she looks down at me, head to toe like I did to her. Her serpentine smile says all I need to know about how she’s poised to bite.

I match her smile. I won’t back down to her.

“I know someone who’s sick,” I say, looking at my nails, making sure she knows I care for nothing about her.

Don’t let her know you care about them. Don’t show her how desperate you are, because she will use anything she can to rob you blind. “and I need medicine. Think you have it?” I ask in a condescending tone, trying to bait her.

I give her the barest details. I don’t so much as let an eyebrow move to give away my thoughts but damn her, Margerie already knows. She knows because when I came here with my mom before, I yelled and threatened. I hit the desk she sits behind until things fell over and left scuff marks on the ground if only to have the satisfaction that she would have to clean it up. Now, with my face free of emotion, with no signs of my thoughts, she knows I’m hiding, and unfortunately for me, Margarie has been playing this game longer than me.

Her smile is feline. Like she’s caught me as a bird in a cage and is circling, circling until she pounces. “I see. You must be pretty desperate to come back here when I know we both remember how it went last time.”

The cool expression I was keeping breaks as she toys with me. I glare and point steadily at her, taking a step closer. Hoping above all I’ll intimidate her for even just a second.

“Will you help or not” I seethe at her.

She tuts like I’m nothing but a disobedient child “Such fire, Alvina. You know my price. No need to get so feisty. What would your mother say, Ali-vee?”

Light explodes behind my eyes.

She knows my mother called me that. How dare she talk about her at all.

Ali-vee was my mother's nickname for me and she knows that. How dare she use it to talk down to me, to try and hurt me.

Every brush of the air in the room feels electric against my skin, and when I slam my hands down on her desk, I seem to be able to feel every single grain of wood under my palms.

A crack resonates through the room. Only when she jumps back, her eyes widening with astonishment and fear do I register the wood under my palms falling to the ground in two pieces. The table she usually sits at has been split in two, the two halves falling to the floor as everything she set out to display falls after it, like going down a slide before crashing and breaking in a pile on the floor.

The red-hot anger dissipates from my body as we both look at the broken table on the floor.

“With all the money you scam off people, I would think you could at least get a decent table” I tell her with a curl of my lip, although my words are shaky and the heat behind them is hardly a flame.

I take advantage of her stunned silence to grab a jar of her medicine on my way out and put it in my pocket before slipping out the door, slamming it.

“Kenna?” I call out as I slip into her house, or as much of a house as it can be. Kenna is about as lucky with her riches as I am, and while the town we live in is already dirt poor, Kenna is doing worse than most, which says a lot. Even when I do my best to help get her things, not many people want to give charity to a witch.

“Over here,” she says from the spot in front of the fireplace which is lit with as best a fire she could manage. I walk over to them as she sits in her usual spot kneeling in front of Helena who lays in front of the fire, shivering, even as I see the sheen of sweat on her forehead.

“Hi Helena,” I say to her, even when I know I won’t get a response. She stopped being lucid about a week ago. Her eyes never cleared from the cloudiness that frequented them and she never seemed to come back from wherever she is in her mind. If she is anywhere. Sometimes I wonder if she’s already dancing with death somewhere far away as they come to claim her body.

I pull Margaries jar from my jacket pocket and hand it to Kenna who looks at it with confusion.

“How did you get this?” she asks me. She knows I can’t buy it. Not when no one wants to give me money for any work I do, always saying amongst themselves how they refuse to give witches the opportunity to curse them and their families.

“I’m very persuasive” I shrug at her, hoping to dismiss her curiosity, but I should have known with Kenna that she would be too smart and stubborn for my efforts.

“Did you steal it?” she asks

I purse my lips together in an effort to think of what to say that doesn’t sound like I fought with her, broke her table, and stole it on my way out.

“Alvina”

“I say, I didn’t steal nearly enough with all the money she steals from the people of this village”

She turns back to Helena with the jar in her hands “You need to be careful, Alvina. It’s bad enough people fear your temper, if you give them a reason, they’ll cast you out entirely”

Coming to sit next to her, I can’t help but bite out, “I don’t see how that’s entirely a bad thing”

She doesn’t look at me as she unscrews the lid but each word hits me as she says, “You would be fed to the wolves and beasts in the woods. You would be vulnerable to the upcoming winter, you would have no food, no comfort, no medicine,” she holds up the jar in emphasis.

When I don’t say anything in return, she turns the jar in her hands, looking for a label of any kind, but as Margarie doesn’t do anything other than put the mixture in a jar, she looks at me and asks, “what do I do with it?”

I take it in my hands, not entirely sure myself. The mixture inside is pale green with a thick, jelly-like consistency. I bring it up to my nose and jerk back at the acidic smell. It burns my nose and I’m not entirely sure it hasn’t turned my brain to liquid with how strong it is.

“I’m going to assume it’s non-consumable,” I say in a strained voice. The burning feels as though she put actual fire in the jar.

When the burning passes, I look at it suspiciously, wondering if Margarie knew I took it and cursed it.

Kenna frowns at the jar “Well if it’s that bad from just an inhale, I don’t know if I want to use it if I don’t know how”

I nod in understanding. I wouldn’t want that anywhere near me if I was Helena. “I know… someone who can look into it.”

Kenna's eyes narrow at me “Who do you know?”

I understand her suspicion, most people in this town have either faced my anger and left with a lifelong resentment towards me, or have heard of me from those people and want nothing to do with me.

“Oh, you know… just friends” I answer vaguely.

Kenna rolls her eyes knowing she won’t get an answer from me. “Well, if you trust them, then I trust you.”

Such small words, but they hit me right in the heart. Kenna isn’t a person who will love you from the beginning, she won’t admit her thoughts and feelings, she is caring to only those who earn it. It’s rare to hear such things from her, and from someone who gets insulted and called a witch daily, it hits harder than any insult could when she says things confirming her care for me.

She hands the jar back to me and stands up, wiping dust from her clothes. “We’re almost out of food. With winter coming, we need to stock up better than last year. Can you go out for more water?”

Last winter was brutal. It always is, but last year especially was bordering on dangerous. Food is hard enough in the whole village, and for two people who no one wants to give food to, it’s easy to starve.

Even with Kennas cool exterior, I know the stress sits on her shoulders. She’s worrying about Helena’s health and how to keep us all from going hungry.

“Yes, of course,” I nod to her with a seriousness that I hope she understands means I will always be there for her and Helena.

She nods and puts on her coat. A red jacket made from wool with five buttons down the center. Its color is washed out and dull from use and some parts are worn out, but it’s beautiful. Something everyone in the village can envy.

It was a present from her father. She doesn’t talk much about him, but when your father abandons you to go work in the pristine city of Varasia surrounded by royals and power figures, it’s bound to leave a sour taste in your mouth.

He used to send things from the city– necklaces and dresses and parchment for writing. Kenna sold each of them, with no real use for them other than to barter and trade for blankets and food, and medicine.

We don’t talk about him. Although, sometimes I catch her looking at her coat for too long or watching families on the street interact with joyous laughter. I know better than to ask, she won’t explode or cut you with quick words, but the silence she’ll plunge into is unnerving to no end.

We walk down the street together, both pointedly ignoring the people around us. We walk until the fork in the road where we then separate to take different paths. She goes down the one on the left into the part of town where the shops and vendors are, and I take the one on the right, into the forest of Mallahan.

Not many people dare to venture too far into the forest, we all hear the stories of three-headed beasts who walk with the silence of a panther or giant wolves with claws like knives, some people even fear the forest itself, saying if you wander too far the trees will close in on you until you are doomed to walk the forest, lost forever.

But every time I walk down this path, past the threshold of the forest, I don’t feel the need to turn back, I feel drawn farther in, like a beckoning hand and a soothing voice, calling to me. Come, it seems to whisper, come.