Bellarke One Shots Book 2

74) Your Heart and Your Mind (They Are Mine, and They're Lovely)

"Thank you," he says. "I thought I was supposed to tend the hearth."

She shrugs. "I think she wanted you out of the way, as much as anything. And fed. But witches aren't nice for free."

"Is that the kind of thing she teaches her apprentice?"

"No, that's why I became her apprentice."

"Are you going to start looking like a witch?" he asks, unable to help it.

That gets a smile out of her, and she looks like a girl again, not a small, serious adult. "What do witches look like?"

"Old and warty. With a snaggle tooth," he teases.

She laughs. "How many witches have you met?"

"Just the one. But everyone knows what witches look like. I've never met a prince either, but I know what one looks like."

"What's that?"

"Tall, dark, and handsome."

"You're tall and dark, and handsome enough. Are you a prince?"

"No."

"Then I can be a witch."

He grins, and the expression feels strange on his face. But he likes this odd little witch girl. "You look like a princess. And you act like one too."

"You're an expert on a lot of things you've never seen, aren't you?"

He shrugs. "I read a lot." He doesn't mention he only has the one book; he reads it enough.

"You can read?" She sounds impressed.

"Why couldn't I?"

"Not everyone can. Well, so long as you're here, you might as well read to me, then."

"You can't read?"

"I need to work," she says. "You can read to me while I do it."

She sounds so serious that he doesn't even ask what work she can have to do, with her mistress gone. They clean up together and go to the back room of the cottage, the private part. It has more books than he's ever seen in one place.

"Pick what you like," she says, sitting down at a desk. He can see a mortar and pestle, and jars full of dried leaves and berries. She pulls some out, deliberate, and begins to grind them together. "Anything is fine with me."

That's how it goes for four days. Bellamy works in the witch's garden during the day, and Clarke feeds him and makes him read to her in the evening. He sleeps on a cot, which is about as comfortable as the one he has at home, and except for missing his sister, he might not mind staying forever. It's comfortable, and he even forgets a little why he's there, sometimes.

On the fifth day, the witch comes back and tells him, "I cannot save her. But the next one will be saved. Get your sister, there is still time enough for you to say goodbye."

In his grief, he doesn't manage to thank either of them, doesn't know what he does say when he takes his leave, and he doesn't even think of the witch and her apprentice for a long time, because there are so many things to be done, his sister to care for, work to be found, their own home to tend. In the years that follow, he'll sometimes remember that he spent a few days living in the witch's cottage with her the serious little witch girl, and it was much more pleasant than he could have hoped the days before his mother's death would be.

But in truth, he barely thinks of them at all for seven years, until Octavia falls sick, and he remembers the witch saying the next one, and his legs can't take him to the old cottage on the outskirts of the town fast enough.