Dancing in the Starlight: Part 6

[Gael]

I had mentioned previously that Elspeth was not a witch. That did little to stop others from calling her that behind her back or more openly to me. She had no altar in the house or in the woods outside, no fire with cauldron bubbling away over it. She did not cackle; her laughter was actually quite infectious most of the time. But she did not attend church services and had little time to spare on those few occassions when some priest or preacher decided to pay us a visit 'for the benefit of our souls.' There was a greenhouse attached to our house in which she grew a wide variety of herbs and a basement area set up for growing mushrooms and she did brew potions and concoct poultices and ointments using these. Occassionally, somebody might show up on our doorstep wanting her to 'make a love potion' or some other such nonsense. These got shooed away quickly and with even less ceremony than shown quickly exiting holymen. Other times, most often in the dead of night, we'd find a girl weeping on our doorstep. Almost without variation, she would have discovered that she was pregnant and 'wanted to do something about the baby' before it would show. These, Elspeth would bring inside, brew some tea (nearly always with storebought tea bags) get her to calm down enough to tell her story and listen to some advice. Nearly always, Elspeth would arrange an appointment with a doctor in North Bay and counselling to get her to either keep the baby or at the very least, see the pregnancy through and arrange to place the newborn up for adoption. Only twice did I know her to do otherwise, once to a girl who had been raped by her father and once with one who had been assaulted by her church's priest. These both got an herbal mixture that induced as painless a miscarriage as Elspeth could arrange. She visited the priest. Two days later, he was found in his office with a bullet hole in his temple.

 

As for the father, I was twelve when that particular girl showed up. Elspeth arranged for the girl, barely older than me, to be cared for by a family in Tornto. Then Elspeth spoke with Master Qing. He gave his consent...and I dealt with the father. I did not kill him, just as Elspeth did not kill the priest. Unlike what Elspeth did, though, when I was finished, and he was finally released from hospital, he never so much as looked at a woman or child again.

 

I did mention I had a temper, didn't I?

 

By that time, that temper was nearly fully under control and a fire I could call upon. If his injuries were not enough incentive to never touch somone again, the humiliation of having them done to him by a girl even younger and smaller than his daughter was enough to ensure that behavior. I was very careful to not do any damage that would be fatal, nothing that would not heal...

 

In time...

 

I look back at that and, while it was necessary to put that into my story to help you understand that, while I may have been a child, I was not innocent. I also look back and can see how close I was to being what I was being groomed to become.

 

There was more to Elspeth than her herbalism skills. More to her library than what I read. There was a room with several shelves of books I was not permitted to even look upon, let alone read. "Later," she would tell me.

 

My friendship with Jennifer deepened and, over some time, I gained other aquaintances at school; some I could even come close to calling friends.

 

Around the time I turned thirteen, puberty had hit in full force and I felt like I had grown six inches taller over the previous winter. Not very many boys taunted and teased me any more. Not that I didn't have more than a little apprehension at the glances I was now gaining. I'd seen enough of Elspeth's occassional nighttime visitors to have some idea just what those looks could mean. Those looks also meant that there were more than enough girls to take up the name-calling that the lack of boys doing so dropped. If one listened to them, I had carnal knowledge with more than half the boys in North Bay.

 

In the summer of my thirteenth year, Elspeth took in somone she called an apprentice. He was the grandson of a friend of hers who lived in Wales. Like me, he was an orphan, but his parents had died in an automobile accident and his grandmother had only found out about him barely two years before.

Thus, in June of 1981, I met Darien Llewellyn.

 

He was eighteen, tall, stocky, brown hair that was starting to thin and bright blue eyes that never seemed to not be smiling.

 

And he knew magic.

 

Jennifer was over at the time when he arrived at the house. I'd seen smaller cars but only rarely out here. Trucks, vans, station wagons, large sedans; that was the general rule both for people living up here and vacationers. Small cars like the Chevrolet Monza Darien drove, belonged in the cities.

 

I liked him immediately.

 

His car...

 

After we'd been speaking for a while, I'd gotten close to the car and I guess I must have leaned against it.

 

Next thing I knew, I was about twenty feet away, picking myself up off the ground, and Jennifer was laughing as she looked at Darien.

 

"What did you do?"

 

I think I managed to stammer out an 'ow...' as I got rather shakily to my feet.

 

It wasn't an electrical shock, it wasn't a physical force. It was simply a...push. And it had come from the car.

 

"Gay!" Darien said as he helped me stand the rest of the way up, "Miriya is a friend. Friend!"

 

I felt...something...from the car. It felt like the same you might expect from a dog that had decided it didn't like you. And my brain was working overtime.

 

"Shouldn't she be a Ford?" I asked. I'd survived being not liked by almost an entire student body as well as most of the teachers; I'd be damned if I was going to let a car get the better of me.

 

"Technically, she should be able to fly, too," Darien admitted with a chuckle. "And time-travel. I'll try to teach her to not bite, Miriya. Call it...a really interesting anti-theft system."

 

Gay never did 'bite' me again. Though I can't say I ever really got along that well with her.

 

Elspeth taught Darien what she knew of magic. He tried to teach me some in return, and I was able to incorporate just a bit of what he taught into the martial skills Master Qing taught me. But if there was magic in me, it was purely physical.