Chapter 1
Chapter One – The Road Behind Me
Thalindra
The name is Thalindra.
That is the name my mother whispered when I first carried breath into the world, and the one she repeated again and again when others turned their backs. Bloom of the valley, she said it meant—though no valley ever claimed me, and no village ever truly wanted me.
My father I never knew. My mother gave me only fragments, half-truths wrapped in riddles. A wandering man, she said. A traveler who carried the forest in his eyes and the sea in his voice. Some days she called him gentle; other days she grew quiet and bitter, as though speaking his name might reopen an old wound. I could never tell whether she had loved him, or only endured him. I never knew his name.
The village had its own answer. They said he was not wholly mortal—that he was one of the Fair Folk, an Elf who strayed too long among Men, leaving only me behind as proof of his folly.
I do not know if it is true. My ears are not as sharp as the Eldar’s, though keener than most. My eyes see farther, though I must squint to stitch or read. I am tall—taller than nearly every woman I have ever known—and I walk with a stride that unsettles men. I can labor long hours in the garden without tiring, yet hunger makes me sharp-tongued and quick to anger.
It might mean nothing. Or it might mean I am not entirely of the race of Men.
Whichever it is, the villagers never let me forget my strangeness.
I grew up in a rented cottage at the edge of their lands, where the fields surrendered to the forest. My mother taught me to kneel in the soil and listen. “The earth will tell you what it needs,” she would say, pressing my small hand to the ground. “And it will tell you what it can give.”
I learned the names of flowers before I learned the names of neighbors. I knew where violets hid in spring, where yarrow flourished, where foxglove grew tallest. Herbs were my inheritance, and with them the knowledge of healing. My mother showed me how to pound roots to ease fevers, how to brew bark for pain, how to stitch wounds so they would not fester.
That was my joy. When village children cried out with sickness, I ran with my satchel. When mothers wept, I pressed poultices to their infants’ brows. When men stumbled home from hunting or quarrels, blood soaking their tunics, I stitched them by firelight. Not because I delighted in their suffering—never that—but because usefulness felt like purpose, and purpose felt dangerously close to belonging.
Yet though they lived, though they clutched their children again, though they walked whole and breathing, they never looked at me with kindness. Gratitude passed like a shadow—brief and soon forgotten. Fear lingered longer.
Elf-blood. Witch-blood. Stranger’s child.
They shared bread, blood, and history—and none of it made us kin.
The worst came when soldiers passed through.
One autumn, when the leaves fell like flame, a company of them camped near the village. I was nineteen then, and my womanhood had begun to ripen fully: long dark hair falling to my waist, lips full as plums, hips widened by years bent over gardens. I had never thought much of it. Soldiers did.
One evening, as I carried water from the well, a captain caught me by the wrist. His grip was rough, his breath sharp with ale. “Such a pretty mouth,” he slurred, pressing closer.
I struck him with the bucket. Water burst over his face, and he staggered back, swearing. The village froze, holding its breath.
He laughed—but there was promise in his eyes, a promise that chilled me. And when the soldiers left days later, the villagers’ fear of them shifted neatly onto me.
“You tempted him,” they muttered. “You brought danger here.”
That was when I understood how thin the line was between their need and their hatred.
My mother’s death tore the last threads binding me to that place. Fever took her in winter, sudden and merciless. I tried every root, every herb, every prayer I knew—but it swallowed her all the same. I buried her beneath the hawthorn tree she loved, where she once tied ribbons when I was small. My hands bled from digging. My tears froze against my cheeks.
The villagers did not come to help me bury her.
They did not come for healing after.
I was alone.
So I left.
I did not leave to be found.
I left to stop shrinking.
The road is crueler than the village—but it does not pretend otherwise.
I have walked for ten days now. My boots are cracked, the soles worn thin. My skirts hang heavy with mud. My satchel, once full, is nearly empty. The knife I carry is so dull it would sooner bruise than cut.
Still, I walk.
I am tall, with a stride that eats miles, though hunger drags at me like chains. When I am hungry, my temper frays. Tonight I cursed aloud at a stone that bruised my foot, shouted at the bird that startled from a branch overhead.
“Fly, then!” I snapped. “Everything else does.”
The forest did not answer. Only the rustle of leaves, the distant creak of branches.
Shame followed quickly. I pressed my forehead to the nearest tree and whispered an apology. The bark was rough, grounding. Trees do not judge. Trees do not betray.
Loneliness, I have learned, is not the absence of people. It is the absence of welcome.
The wilderness has been kinder to me than men ever were.
I forage what I can—nettles for soup, mushrooms where they grow safe, berries when I am lucky. I drink from streams so cold they ache in my teeth. At night I make pallets of leaves, cradling my satchel as though it were a child. Inside it rests a small cauldron, a spoon, a handful of cooking herbs, and my favorite book—Tales of Fairies and Dragons, the one my mother kept for me when I was young. I have always loved adventures that were not my own. Give me a fire and a story, and I can forget myself for a while.
Sometimes, when I allow myself to dream, I imagine a cabin of my own. A small house tucked between trees, flowers climbing its walls, herbs hanging to dry from the rafters. A hearth where I cook only for myself. A garden blooming in riotous color. Bees humming lazily. A fox curled in the sun.
In those dreams, I am not witch or half-blood. I am simply Thalindra.
But dreams are fragile things.
That night, as I lay beneath the roots of an oak, hunger gnawing at me, sleep came uneasy. My mother’s satchel lay by my side, and I clutched the little pouch of seeds she left me. “Plant them wherever you go,” she had said. “Flowers will remember us, even when people do not.”
I dreamed then.
I stood in a forest I did not know. The trees were taller than any I had seen, their trunks silver, their leaves shimmering as though lit from within. Music drifted like wind through branches—voices I could not understand, beautiful and sorrowful at once.
A man stood at the edge of the glade, his back to me. His hair was dark as mine, his shoulders broad. When he turned, his eyes caught the light, and in them I saw oceans, storms, stars.
“Father?” I whispered.
But he did not answer.
He did not stay.
I woke with tears on my cheeks and the taste of salt on my tongue, knowing—with a quiet, aching certainty—that even answers might leave me alone.
Dawn broke pale and thin. My stomach growled, my limbs ached, but I rose and walked on.
There must be somewhere for me, I told myself. Somewhere beyond these roads and forests. A place to rest. To plant flowers. To live.
I did not yet know that home can be built, plank by plank, with those who choose to stay.
I did not know that the road was already leading me toward such a place.
Toward him.
