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Thetwick
The village she lived in was called Thetwick. It was the only settlement of note in the Westmarch, a thinly populated area mostly covered in trees and bushes, at least to the north of the village. The trees were thickest in the southern part of the March, with large stretches of proper forest and hills that grew bigger the closer you got to the Irin Mountains that made the natural Southern border of the March. In the North, the hills were a little lower and the vegetation wasn’t as thick.
Thetwick was more or less in the middle of the March, next to a river, the Clearflow, that was navigable up to Thetwick for small boats a few months most years. It was a logical place to put goods ashore and she had heard that it had used to be a busier route once, long before Ala came to Thetwick. The river was fordable at the upstream end of Thetwick and the road had once forked to the North to Oaktown and West to Seraphim from there. There was still a weathered stone marker near the town square which indicated the distance to both places. Both roads were barely dirt tracks anymore and had mostly been reclaimed by nature.
When Ala arrived, Thetwick housed no more than thirty families but it steadily grew during the years she lived there. Her mother had told her that Thetwick had grown and shrunk many times in the past and that it was growing again because the Duke was giving free land to those willing to move there. From the point of view of a trader or traveller, the Westmarch was a dead end on the western border of Iurrak. Even if you wanted to travel on the West or North from Thetwick, the journey was hard and often impossible with any kind of cart or wagon.
For Ala, there wasn’t much else she could do except go to school. As she got older she mostly helped her mother’s with chores and anything she could do to contribute to the welfare of the household.. Sometimes there was work she could do, like out in the fields during the harvest. Everyone was needed then, even people as small as half elf children. She liked being out, in the wilderness, particularly in the forests to the south. She never felt quite at ease in town. Most of the humans treated her much the way they treated young human children, which meant that she was largely ignored. Ala sort of understood why. She was the only half-elf in the village and she was probably also the only half- elf that most of them had ever seen. She didn’t like it though. She was decades older than the other children… older than most of the adults too. She had learned that most humans didn’t like it when she pointed that out. She’d had time to learn all the basic things humans were taught as they grew up several times over but no one other than her mother and siblings ever really acknowledged that her long life might make any difference. Even they mostly acted like she was a human child.
When she wanted to be alone, she snuck away to the ruined tower near the town. In the beginning it had been quite a long walk and she could only go when the grown ups were very busy with other things. When she was a little older she would run all the way. It was her favourite spot. She would tell herself all the elvish stories that she knew in her head. Sometimes she would sit down an recite her tales to the animals. Many of them seemed to like that and she could just sit there feeding animals out of her hand. She also spent a lot of time wandering around the nearby forest whenever she could slip away. Sometimes she would look for edible things, like berries and nuts, mushrooms or roots. She didn’t know why she liked the forest so much, it just felt a little bit like home. She wondered if it was just that all forests smelled alike. Would she feel this way in every forest? She was quite good at foraging food and useful materials from the forest and she always made sure to take things home with her that made life a little easier and food a little more abundant.
She wasn’t exactly sure when or where she had learned so many elvish stories or how she knew which plants tasted good and which ones were safe to eat. She could recite many stories from memory and often did, when she was at the ruins alone. She never got sick from the things she ate and sometimes she thought she vaguely remembered a beautiful woman with coppery skin who had taught her which plants to choose and how to tell apart those that were very similar but poisonous. It always left her wondering if she was making it all up? Was it because she wished she knew her mother, or did that coppery skinned woman actually exist?
Sometimes she’d make a little fire. One of the first times she did so, she realised for the first time that the flames did as she asked, easily appearing or disappearing, growing hotter or colder, or bigger or smaller. The effect was mesmerising and she couldn’t stop herself from coaxing the flames to follow her will for hours. Eventually she managed to put the fire out, realising that she would only make it home after dark. Even then, she was hesitant. She knew that wasn’t completely normal to be able to make fire do your bidding and it worried her. She had heard about witches, about how they were bad and what people did to them. She immediately decided it would be safest hide her new found ability completely and never use it again. It was hard though, because using it, feeling the energy flowing through her felt good and exciting. She was too fascinated to stop trying things with her new discovery and tried more and more things whenever she felt she’d been able to check that she was truly alone.
Before long, she didn’t even need kindling. She settled on not telling another living soul about it, not ever. As long as she kept it just to herself and only practised where she was sure she wouldn’t be seen, people wouldn’t do the horrible things to her that were done to magicians, she reasoned. Even in Thetwick, women had been burned at the stake for being witches, the last one, a midwife, had been burned a short while before Ala had arrived in the village. She didn’t think that she could really be counted as a magician, but she wasn’t sure the villagers would believe her if she conjured fire out of thin air. It did feel good though, calling her ’little trick’, as she thought of it. She used it whenever she made her fires, but only when she’d made completely sure she was alone. Every now and again, she’d forget the time, scaring her mother when she came back after dark. She did always try to be on time, because she could see how much it worried the sweet woman if she was out at night.
Because the other children grew quicker than she did, she had been forced to learn to defend herself. In each generation of chil dren, there were always a few bullies. She was very small and she watched other children grow right past her every year. A boy named Edgar Marchmain relished tormenting whoever and what- ever he could. She once found him tormenting a cat, tying things to its tail. She pulled a useful looking hazel branch off a bush and brandished it.
“Stop that! Take that off her tail!” She screamed at him. “Right now!” He glanced at her, putting on an air of disinterest. It was probably for the benefit of his audience, a small group of slightly younger boys whose job it was to assist him in his torments as well as cheer him on.
“Buzz off, stinking half-elf, or I’ll tie them to you!” He said, laughing out loud with his friends.
Ala stomped towards him, though she was a head shorter. He hadn’t expected it so he stumbled unsteadily to his feet, raising his hand to strike her. She was quicker though, whipping him across the face with all her might with the branch, causing him to fall down with a yelp of pain, clutching his temple. His friends were as surprised as Edgar was, but one of them reacted as she was about to bend down to free the cat. “Get her!” There were three of them, all bigger and heavier, but she sensed they felt uncertain. Edgar was still on the ground holding his bleeding brow and whimpering. She knew she probably wasn’t going to win against them in a fair fight, so she turned towards the first one, who had yelled and wanted to grab her. She feinted with her branch and then kicked him in the shin as hard as she could, producing a satisfying yelp. With him in the way of the other two, she kicked the other shin for good measure, which caused him to bend forward and squeal even harder. Next, with his head now in a good position to hit it, she took the opportunity to punch him in the face, feeling with satisfaction how his lip burst against his lower teeth. She then turned and started running. With two of them out of the fight, the last two only made a token effort to pursue her. She went back to find the cat as soon as she dared, but the animal had managed to extricate itself out of its predicament by the time she got to it.
Edgar had a scar over his eye for the rest of his life. Her mother really couldn’t get out of punishing her for that and she had a sore bottom and back for several days. She knew her mother didn’t really disapprove of her saving the cat and no one really believed that she’d beaten both boys to a pulp, but coming home with the offending hazel branch still in her possession meant that she wasn’t really able to deny that part of the incident when her mother questioned her.
She learned how to use her size and speed and she found she had an infinitely deep well of brutality to call on when bigger children tried to bully her. She might be smaller, but she was older, meaner when needed and had more experience. Also, because she grew so much more slowly it was like her body was less unwieldy than the rapidly growing human children. It was always like they were still trying to get their constantly changing bodies under control. Bullies usually only made a single attempt before figuring out she wasn’t an easy target. Her reactions were brutal and she wasn’t scared to really hurt someone if cornered. She usually had them running for home, crying, in seconds.
Once she even knocked a tooth out of a boy much bigger than her. The grown ups didn’t even believe him when he claimed that such a small girl had done it. Ala felt he had deserved it, he’d been tormenting insects, pulling out legs and wings. She had warned him to stop once, but it was years after the Marchmain incident, so he made the mistake of ignoring and insulting her instead. She’d pretended to leave, walking by him and then threw herself on the back of the boy’s head as he was bent over the insects he was torturing. She’d used her entire weight, little as it was, to smash his face into the stone he’d been using as a torture chamber. She got away with it that time, since no one believed the boy when he claimed she’d done what she had.
Even though she had no particular qualms about violently defending herself or others, ageing so slowly that her childhood encompassed many generations of human children meant she periodically had to reestablish her reputation as a dangerous adversary. It also didn’t always work and she got a lot more practice defending herself and running away than she would have liked. Every generation there were a few children who thought they could get the better of her and every time she had to make it clear that they weren’t going to manage. She preferred to do so in such a way that they didn’t try again and got quite good at escalating to a unreasonbly harsh reaction before her assailants realised their mistake.
Her mother thought she should visit the school as much as possible, but relented eventually when she realised there wasn’t anything left there for Alagariel to learn. It became too awkward. Alagariel was still about the size of many of the human children that started school when she’d completed the entire curriculum several times. Most of her classmates from years before had al- ready married and had children. That was strange, mostly for those class mates. By then Ala had already long gotten used to the lives of humans passing her by. She’d had a lot more time to grow used to being different than the humans around her ever got, so she could understand why it was difficult for the humans. Even so, she didn’t like losing friends just because they turned into grown ups while she stayed childlike.
Sometimes her former classmates moved away. Quite a few boys, particularly younger sons, left to join the Duke’s regiment when they were twelve or thirteen. A few of them left with a caravan almost every spring. It was a bit of an event each time, with their families seeing them off. Their siblings often cried and sometimes even their parents. Most that left, if they came back at all, only did so many years later. She’d heard that quite a few boys died while they were soldiers for the Duke too. Such events were important news in town and were always accompanied by an official scroll with the sad news being handed to the town scribe by a visiting caravan master. Very occasionally, a man came back to the Westmarch after thirty five years of service in the Regiment, with a grant of land from the Duke in his pocket. This sometimes caused problems since the best land close to Thetwick was often already occupied by farmers who had no official rights to it.
The girls often married into a different town or one of the few small hamlets that dotted the Westmarch. Some even left the Westmarch altogether, though it was rare for anyone to travel further than Sheffield, the first Barony in Taladaria to the east. The way humans customarily lived their lives emphasised how Alagariel was different. She sometimes wished she’d been born human. At the same time she knew she wouldn’t really fit in to a life like that. The woman she lived with, Palady, wasn’t really her mother, of course. She knew she had been adopted. In her memories there were several tall and beautiful women, but she didn’t even know who was who. She wasn’t even completely sure that it wasn’t just wishful thinking, that she wanted there to be family in her memories. When she’d come to Thetwick, Palady had had two daughters of her own, Emma and Olivia, as well as her husband Jack. Jack had died young, which had made them all very sad. He’d been a gentle man, indulging his wife’s passion for taking in strays, both children and animals, without complaint. He’d always been friendly to Ala too, though he’d obviously seen her as different to his own children.
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