Disclaimer: This is not the final version as it will be available from the usual e-book sellers and eventually, bookstores. Rather, it should be seen as an (almost) final draft. If you are interested in becoming a beta reader, or you have any comments, suggestions or thoughts that you feel I should consider before publishing please drop me a line using the contact form.
Palady’s Passing
Ala had been in Thetwick for almost seventy years, as close as she could reckon it, when Palady passed away. It was early in the spring of the year 916, with snow still on the ground in many places, following a winter that had been unusually cold. There was only the slightest inkling of spring in the air and the lack of new life felt like an approprate backdrop for her funeral.
Ala was very sad, Palady had been her one constant during all her time in Thetwick, which almost felt like it was all she had ever known. Palady had lived a very long life for a human, outliving both her human daughter, Olivia and her granddaughter Amelia. No one had ever found out what had become of her other daughter Emma after her abduction by Selinan raiders. Amelia had died in childbirth, giving birth to Aubree, Palady’s youngest great grandchild. Palady’s long life was something Ala knew she should feel grateful for but she still felt very alone without the old lady. Aubree had been raised by Palady and Ala after Amelia and Olivia’s deaths. By then Palady had already been quite old, so Ala had played an important role in Aubree’s upbringing. It was Aubree who came to Ala’s rescue when Ala couldn’t stay in Palady’s house any longer.
The house Palady had lived in had been rented from one of the richer families in Thetwick, relatives of Palady’s deceased husband Jack. It was generations later though and no vestiges of a family relationship would allow Ala to live there for free. Ala had no income and she looked like a slight human girl not quite in her early teens, aside from the pointed ears that she always kept hidden under her long hair, a headscarf or a hooded cloak. In addition, women weren’t officially allowed to enter into contracts in the Westmarch or even anywhere in Iurrak, unless they were widowed. That wasn’t to say that Ala hadn’t seen it happen over the years, but the age humans perceived her to be and the fact that she was a half elf meant that such an arrangement wasn’t a possibility for Ala. Aubree’s offer to take her in was a great relief. Ala hadn’t really known what else to do and she had even seriously been considering leaving to live in the forest somewhere.
Aubree’s husband, Alexander, had died very shortly after she had married, even before they’d had any children. Aubree had always been close to Ala, even more so after her husband died. Having been mostly raised by Ala, there weren’t many secrets between the two of them. At Palady’s funeral, Aubree suggested that Ala should live with her. It was a little awkward at first of course. The two knew each other well, but Aubree was twenty three and used to running her own little household. Ala had hardly changed in twenty three years, being much like a young teen-aged human child that whole time. She was also used to taking care of everything for Palady. She and Aubree took a while to adjust, to balance their house together but they did find a way to comfortably complement each other after a time. Every so often, the fact that Ala wasn’t human would come up.
“You know Ala, it’s so hard to imagine that you’re probably even older than Palady was,” Aubree said thoughtfully once, when the were sitting together by the fire on a rainy night.
“I’m not completely sure that I am. But… you’re right… it has to be something like that.”
“Such a strange thing. I… well… humans I guess… we all think highly of a long life. But when it’s as long as yours. I see how hard it is for you to fit in among the rest of us.”
“It… well, sometimes it’s a bit unpleasant. Though it has its upsides, too.”
“I suppose. Well at this rate, I’ll be an old woman before you’re even marriageable. I think I would have liked to see that.”
“Marriage? No thanks.”
“Trust you to say that. Well, we’ll see. You’re so… timeless, I can’t really imagine it either. Sometimes it makes me feel weird.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not you fault. Probably because we Thets don’t get around much. I mean, you’re hardly the only half-elf in Taladaria, I’d think. Just, we’re not used to it out here in the Westmarch.”
Every few years they had a comparable conversation. It was really the only time Ala’s different nature ever came up. When they were out, Ala was treated like Aubree’s child sister and Ala played along, but the relationship was somewhere between equal and the other way round. Ala had picked the minds of anyone who was willing to talk to her for decades, after all and she knew an awful lot compared to almost everyone in Thetwick. She also knew the school’s whole curriculum better than the Sisters of Ceres themselves. Ala’s comparatively endless knowledge and skills were something Aubree had grown up with, so it didn’t unnerve her like it tended to do with the other villagers.
In fact, Aubree looked up to Ala. Ala loved Aubree and accepted the strange way her human relationships changed during her slow life. It wasn’t as if she had any real choice. Ala continually watched the lives of all the villagers passing her by. As she grew older and her body developed boys started to show an interest in her. She noticed them, of course. She didn’t find the attention unpleasant, but none of the boys in the village interested her. She had been around long enough to know exactly what boys of that age were driven by. Not that she didn’t have similar urges, she just wasn’t quite ruled by them. The boys were all so… small-minded. Even the human girls thought the boys were immature, so it made sense to her that she wasn’t interested in them, since she had been around so much longer than everyone else.
Young boys, especially younger brothers without any inheritance, were still regularly sent to join the Duke’s regiment. As Thetwick’s population grew, so did the number of children and also the number of boys who were sent to serve the Duke. Eldest sons inherited, girls grew up and had husbands and children. There were tragedies, small and big and sometimes violence. There was even a murder every decade or so. A man was caught and hanged in front of the whole town, once, for banditry along the road to the Ford Inn. It had been quite gruesome, making Ala feel queasy. Once, they even had to flee Thetwick, going north towards Oakharrow when a horde of Orcks came out of the southern mountains. The orcks were eventually driven back by the Duke’s regiment and the Levy, but several buildings in Thetwick were damaged or burned. Many men who had been in the levy had been killed. When they were able to return, signs of battle were still fresh, with defensive berms and stakes still visible all the way around the town.
Thetwick had good times and bad times during the years that Ala lived there. At times it had swelled to the size of a modest town while after the orck attacks in 861 and 926 it had taken years to recover, though the former attack, known as ‘The Great Horde’ had been the worst by far. Most of the town was built out of wood, which easily disappeared, or so it seemed to Ala who had been in Thetwick longer than many of the houses. A lot of houses had been destroyed during the orck attacks too.
Ever so slowly more stone buildings and even some fortifications were raised. They were built out of stone quarried a few miles upstream of the town. There was no wall around the town, but some of the richer families started building stronger houses as the years passed. Some more affluent inhabitants rebuilt parts of their house in stone as Thetwick became wealthier, for protection and durability. In the year 927 a grand building was erected by men sent by the Duke. Ala thought it was both a reaction to the Orck Incursion the year before and an effort to help Thetwick recover from the damage.
The meeting hall was was the largest and strongest building Thetwick had seen in living memory. It had strong walls, arrow slits and even a modest square tower, with crenellations around a pointed roof on top. Its building had been supervised by several the Duke’s men who had come all the way from Peyrepertuse to oversee the construction. One of them had been a master mason and he directed the building of the hall. It was a place for meetings, courts, festivals and a base for the levy. Outside the hall, a large area was marked out for the Duke’s use. It was the drilling field, where the levy was to meet and practice their skills. It was a square of a hundred by a hundred royal yards, surrounded by a row of solid oak trees that were planted around its perimeter. Even they seemed to grow faster than Ala did. From then on, the town had a Constable too, who customarily was elected by the council of elders to take care of the Duke’s and the towns’ affairs. The Constable also was the Lieutenant of the Levy and was in charge of drilling and leading the militia when it was needed. Ala almost never saw a Lieutenant actually practising with the militia, it was a part of the job that no one seemed to take very seriously.
\bigskip
Life was frustrating for Ala at times. Even when Palady had been alive everyone in the family had understood that emphasising Ala’s longevity among the people of Thetwick would make life harder. There was a lot of superstition and it was better not to give people cause to think about Ala as if she were something other than human. When Ala had moved in with Aubree they had also agreed that it was best if most townspeople didn’t think about Ala at all. The majority of the people of Thetwick knew of her presence, but they seemed to be prepared to ignore it as long as she stayed on the periphery of society. Partly because of that, Ala had always spent a lot of time out and about, ranging around the countryside. She was particularly good at finding edible mushrooms, far more than they could eat. She usually traded most of them for other foods. Mostly she was alone because it was so hard to find companions who didn’t eventually grow uncomfortable with her. Humans expected her to be friends with children who looked like they were in the same age bracket. As Ala was vastly older than those human children that didn’t work very well. On the other hand, older humans tended to treat her like a child, which Ala didn’t like either. Every so often Ala found someone she was friendly with for a while, but it never seemed to take long for the differences in the rates that they aged to come between them, or, as also happened frequently, for the friend in question to be forbidden to speak to her because she was a half elf.
She did make the acquaintance of some of the hunters, offering to help them in exchange for things like an occasional hide or some meat. This was a partnership that worked well as it required little talking and was always focused on the task at hand. Most of the professional hunters tended to be a kind of loners too. Hunting was a profession for those who preferred to be out in nature, left to their own devices. She learned many things from them, things like how to set snares, skinning rabbits, boars and deer, cooking over a fire and how to hunt with a bow and fend for herself. The hunters were used to working alone and it was easier to talk with them individually than when she was in the town. That seemed to apply at least as long as the subject was related to hunting. She learned a little fletching from them too, enough to make herself a serviceable hunting bow.
She did grow, ever so slowly, slowly developing into a beautiful young girl, seemingly in her teens. She had continued to dye her hair a mousy brown colour just as Palady had always insisted she do. It had actually taken decades before Ala really knew what her real hair colour was.
“Ala, your roots are showing again,” said Aubree one afternoon.
“Already?” Ala sighed.
“You could just… you know… not dye it? Your natural colour is so wonderful.”
“No, I promised Palady.”
“I know. Well, I think we still have everything we need to make more dye from the last batch. I’ll mix some up for you. You might need to bring back some nettles with you from the forest, we’re probably going to need more of those.”
“I will.”
Palady had made her promise to keep it brown after she died, which she dutifully did as often as she remembered to.
Ala’s favourite job was helping the many horse breeders of Thetwick. Not many of them would tolerate her around their farms at first, but there had been a few since she’d started looking like she was in her teens that hadn’t turned away her help with grooming and walking the horses. At one of the farms, the owner saw her whisper a huge unruly breeding stallion that no one else dared approach to calmness and that was all that was needed for her to be given more substantial jobs. Eventually, word got around that she had a knack for horses. Ala knew that the Duke had given a number of his Regiment’s former cavalrymen a grant of land in Thetwick, as well as a contract to supply warhorses. It had developed into Thetwick’s most important source of income from outside the county. Thetwick had become famous for its horses in the decades that Ala lived there. Even the Duke of Taladaria himself was said to ride Thetwick bred destriers, a fact the villagers were all very proud of.
Ala just liked the fact that the horses didn’t judge her. The majestic creatures always seemed to really like her, especially when she spoke to them in elven. The only thing that fascinated her more than horses was swords and swordplay, though there was no way for a young girl in Thetwick to do more than watch the levy on those rare occasions when it was called out to practice. When they did, something in the back of her mind told her that they didn’t really know what they were doing, though she never said anything. Sometimes some young men would start a group for weapons practice, but that usually didn’t last for long either. She had tried to join in when boys were playing with wooden swords many times but she had always been turned away, sometimes violently. In the rural culture of Thetwick, a sword wielding girl was unimaginable.
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