Hara and the Witch

Chapter 14: There is More Than One Type of Storm

'I don't- what is that? A quest killer? I've never heard of-'

'How small was your town, exactly?'

'It was a village. Apparently.'

'Small,' Plim said sagely, now sitting in Hara's lap and staring at Marigold avidly. 'And doves don't gossip,' she said, answering the question in the witch's gaze. 'We leave that to pigeons.'

'Neither of you...' Marigold shook her head in disbelief. 'But you're- and you've-' She took a deep breath. 'How are you not dead?'

'Luck, mostly,' Hara and Plim said in unison.

'The quest killer...'

'Kills quests?' Hara guessed, though for the lightness of her tone she could not meet Marigold's eyes. 'Saves time on fruitless endeavours?

'She kills questers.' The silence was heavy, thick and slow and Hara didn't think she could breathe. 'Haven't you noticed how few of you there are? The quest industry has been wiped out in the last decade. Hardly anyone joins anymore and almost all who do... they meet Trif.'

Hara stood, Plim fluttering into the air around her head before settling on her shoulder, feathers growing dimmer each second. Hara's hair swirled softly at her shoulders, catching the change in the weather and her emotions. As she looked around, the field they had landed in stretching out around them in waves of grass, a solitary tree on the horizon, Hara's eyes narrowed and her cheeks grew hot with anger and... disappointment.

She had always been proud of her mother, understood her; the longing to explore the world, to go on quests and to- to help people, it had always been a part of her, too, so even as the memories of Trif grew more distant, Hara felt they were connected, each holding a string that would keep them together, that would, in the end, lead them back to one another.

Hara headed for the tree, her feet moving in a rhythm that was predictable, unchanging, her destination growing visibly closer even as her mind felt far away, her emotions coursing though her so fast she couldn't see one before it was gone, replaced by another, on and on and on, her cheeks a canvas for the ever changing emotions that skimmed across them, until-

She reached the tree and paused, inhaling deeply.

It was massive, the solitude of the land giving it all the room it needed to spread out, branches and roots uninterrupted in its journey. As the wind picked up, pushing clouds across the sky at a pace Hara could hardly stand to watch, the leaves of the tree, a chestnut, twirled, rustling and whispering an filling the world with their stories.

She focused on that, on the sound each individual leaf was making as it spoke to its companions, the light shifting and distant through the leaves. There was a comfort in the sound, in the patterned bark and the wide trunk, the branches that reached out this way and that, curved and looking impossibly magical.

'Do you think she's after us, Plim?' Hara asked finally. She tried to picture her mother, to place before her the images she had of Trif, but her memory failed her and her mother was replaced by Charvay, wearing a familiar expression of bafflement. The sight of her aunt was a comfort, strange and familiar and like stepping into a home you know well.

'Maybe it's a different Trif,' Plim wondered, but Hara knew it was an unfounded hope, even if she appreciated Plim for it.

'No... it's her. It... it feels right.' She produced the blade and looked at it, wondering for the first time why her mother had ever left it, what she had wanted from Charvay, who Hara had never known to share their dreams of a life outside the village. She wondered if they had been close, before her birth, and what Charvay had felt when she realised what Trif had done.