Nasty Little Witchling

The building that contained the school was close to the market. I had been nervous all morning about coming here. Every time Trissa tried to explain it to me I went back to whenever Mother had taught me, and had to convince myself not to refuse.

The vendors were starting to lay out their wares and I reminded myself to go back to the cottage to get the rest of my roe. People in vastly different types of clothing mingled about, glancing to the stores to see when they would accept customers.

Trissa had persuaded me to not wear my nice clothes again before they were washed, so I was in some of her sister's old clothes. She’d redone my braid the night before and I was playing with the end of it as we walked in. I noticed familiar faces filtering into different rooms, not that I remembered most of their names.

One of the people I did recognise gave me a glare as we followed him into a room. Greyson must not have liked me hitting him with the seed, but it was part of the game, so he couldn’t have been that upset. Trissa was more worried about him and Jacob while my mind was already occupied with what school would be like.

Inside the room, long tables with four chairs each sat in rows facing a rough-looking dark green wall. A few of the chairs were already taken.

I moved into a row Trissa pointed out and sat next to the window, she took the next seat. She called over two girls, who had just walked in, to come sit next to us.

I leaned forward to see as she introduced them as her friends Katlyn and Eyla. They took up the other two seats and had similar shades of brown hair and soft features on faces that resembled each other.

They said they were twins but made a point that they were fraternal.

I listened as Katlyn talked about the new items her dad was bringing into the town and explained the ones Trissa’s parents might be interested in. The two families lived on the same street and I gathered they were close from their repeated mention of past dinners and sleepovers.

A few people wearing similar clothes to the two pairs I owned came in and sat in their own area. When we all played outside the walls, and everyone wore clothes meant to get dirty, it was hard to tell if there was any division, but here it was made clear.

Jacob came in last with the teacher, an older man with stubble and long robes. He was the same age as Trissa’s dad and looked like he spent more time holding a pencil than a cleaver.

Jacob moved behind Katlyn to lean down between her and Trissa. “Mind moving Katlyn? I need to talk with Trissa about something.”

“Don’t ask her to move, we can speak later,” Trissa said.

Jacob looked at her, but didn’t respond. “C’mon Katlyn, please.”

“Jacob is there something wrong?”

“No Mister Matus, just asking Trissa something.”

“Well you can do that afterwards, there's a free seat up here,” Mister Matus said, and pulled out a chair in the front row.

Jacob sighed and moved to plop down in the seat.

Katlyn leaned towards us with a massive grin stretched across her face. “I heard you kneed him in the balls yesterday. What’d he do? Grab your chest?"

“What?” Trissa spluttered. “He grabbed my shoulder and I stomped on his foot. He would never—I would never.”

“See told you we couldn’t trust stories from him,” Eyla added. “I bet he wasn’t even there. ‘Seen with my own two eyes,’ my ass.”

“That's one thing his eyes—”

“Do I need to separate you three before I start?” Mister Matus asked.

“No Mister Matus,” the three mumbled.

He sighed dramatically. “Well on a more interesting point, I see a new face in my class. Would you like to introduce yourself, at least for my own benefit.”

I decided I didn’t like him when all eyes turned to see who he was talking about.

Trissa lifted under my elbow. I took the hint, stood up and tried very hard not to notice everyone looking at me. “Hello, Mister Matus. I’m Valeria.”

He raised his eyebrows, I didn’t know what else he wanted. “Well it’s nice to meet you Valeria. I don’t think I’ve heard an accent like yours before, where abouts in the duchy are you from?”

“Here?”

He looked to Trissa for help. I looked to Trissa for help. Trissa tugged me back down to my seat.

“Sorry she’s shy. Valeria started living with us recently.”

There were a few whispers I couldn’t hear well enough from the rest of the class.

“No no, sorry for making assumptions. Let’s get on with the class. We learnt about area last week. The first shape we learnt was a square, but that’s simple. Can anyone remind us how to calculate the area of a triangle? Yes, Milia.”

“Half the bottom multiplied by the height.”

I tried to recall if I knew that. It seemed so simple compared to a circle—which I had done often in measuring ingredients for Mother—but even with the answer I couldn't remember learning it. The first question of the first lesson and I didn’t know the answer. It seemed I’d be needing Trissa’s help after all, or go to a younger age group without her.

“Good. Now did anyone manage the question I left you with last week? How many bricks would it take to fill in the triangular roof?”

“360!”

“Jeremey if you had raised your hand I would have told you it's unfair since your father constructs houses. It was supposed to be a trick question, but now no one is going to say their answer.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it. Now I’m sure everyone was able to calculate the area, but the trick was you couldn’t divide it straight away by the area of the brick. Builders have their own formulas for their calculations. In this case it’s this.” Mister Matus picked up a white stick. He scraped it across the green wall so that it left white streaks as he wrote out the formula.

…

“Now that we’ve covered area, we can move onto volume. If you took a cup and drew an outline of its bottom on a piece of paper, that would be the area,” he said and drew a circle on the board. “We know how to calculate that area, but what if I asked how much water can fit inside the cup?”

He continued to draw a cup and numbers for its width and height. “How many litres do we get with a cup of these measurements?”

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Valeria, where have I lost you?”

“Zero point two three litres,” I said. Mother wanted the alchemy solutions to three decimal places, but the last number kept slipping away from me. After hearing how he handled other people's wrong answers I didn’t think he would scold me for that, so I didn’t feel too afraid to say it.

“Ah…yes, that’s correct. Well done, Valeria.”

My racing heart swelled with pride at his words. I had been scared to raise my hand. This was probably the only topic he had talked about all class that I had done before. I wanted to prove Trissa hadn’t made a mistake bringing me here, or be moved to a class without her.

…

Mister Matus ended the class with a question on how long a certain water tank would last in a town where the people each used a certain amount of water each day. The answer was eleven days, but he specified he wanted to hear the answer next week, so I didn’t say anything.

A finger poked me under the ribs and I almost jumped. I turned to the culprit who was smirking at me. “You didn’t tell me you were good at mathematics…Why are you good at mathematics?”

“I’m not, volume of liquid is the one thing I’ve done before.”

“Ah huh, well I hope you're also secretly great at religion and history otherwise you’ll hate this next class as much as the rest of us.”

Jacob had come back to lean on the desk in front of Trissa. “Oh, you don’t like my grandmother's class?”

“No one does, asshat,” Eyla said from the side.

“No one was talking to you,” Jacob said and turned back to Trissa. “So…Father got a telegram from the baron that the duke is sending a representative here next week…I…am sorry for using you as a shield, will you convince your parents to come to the dinner he’s planning?”

“Why would the duke be sending a representative here?” Katlyn asked.

“None of your business,” Jacob said. “So, I apologised, and forgive you for being violent with me. Can I tell my father you’ll talk to your parents?”

Trissa hummed and sighed. “I suppose I can let them know.”

“And—not to be mean—but Valeria can’t come,” Jacob continued, a bit awkwardly and glancing my way.

Trissa patted my leg under the desk. “I’m sure Val didn’t want to come anyway.”

I nodded, I did not and assumed I wasn’t invited to begin with. There was no chance they would want someone like me at that dinner.

“To your seats children,” a womanly voice intoned. “You as well Jacob.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

This woman had more, or maybe stronger, mana than Madam Iraya. My eyes tracked her as she walked to the front with a large leathery book under one arm. When she turned to look across the room our eyes met and she had the same look of confusion as the Madam before smiling. “Ah, I assume since you are sitting next to the Hasting girl you must be that child.”

“Yes, I’m—”

“I am too old to be trying to remember your name girl,” she said and started flipped through whole sections of the book. “We shall continue with our reading of The Tome, verse on the seventh priestess.”

She picked up the now open book with the pages flipped only part way through the entire thing, walked over to our desk, and placed it facing me.

“We shall start with having you read it for us, if you cannot read a word just sound it out.”

“Madam Grath, I could read instead,” Trissa said.

“No need, Hasting. If the girl cannot read then we will know to drop her down to the younger classes.”

I looked down at the book to see small text where the letters flowed into each other. Large flicks at the start and end of each sentence. It didn’t look as bad as what witches did to witch script to try make it unique to them.

“From here—”

Madam Grath smacked my hand away. “Do not touch, I shall flip the page once you are done.”

“In the year four hundred and seventy…three? Of enlightenment the continent welcomed in a new baby prince, the future emperor of our great nation. The gracious Mother…”

“Zalarya,” Trissa whispered to me.

“She needs to learn Hasting, I will help when she struggles.”

I looked back down at the book and saw a very stylized Zalarya was the next word. It was not one I recognised, so I was grateful to Trissa since I would have struggled.

“...Zalarya bestowed the prince upon us as both a gift, and a test. The baby was born without sight. No son of the god Emperor Urakel would be born with such a defect, if not for Mother Zalarya’s influence. The best of our most blessed ones spent many days and nights developing a weave for the prince. Many lessers courageously sacrificed their sight, and sometimes lives, in the testing. As a testament to the blessing bestowed upon the most worthy of us, we succeeded in creating the correct weave of mana to cure the prince of his blindness.”

Madam Grath didn’t flip it over to the next page like she had been doing before. “Now, class, can someone tell her what she did wrong?”

Lots of hands flung up. “You.”

“It’s against the law to call mages and regular people those words anymore, she should have skipped over them when reading. Same with ‘god’ in front of the emperor’s name.”

“Yes, hear that girl? This is an older copy from before the times when outsiders could pressure us into changing historical text. A text, I might add, is from a time when we ruled this continent. You need to skip out some parts otherwise you might get dragged away by the watch, your ineducation will give you a pass this once.”

Trissa was asked to read next and the story continued with the new prince. At fourteen he managed to create his own spell for dark vision so no mage would experience the darkness he did. At seventeen he went off to quell a disturbance in the northern territories. There was a single sentence to mention a second prince and later a princess, but the priestess went back to writing about the first right after.

The next person who read started from the writing of the eighth priestess and was now onto the prince's ascension to emperor. An emperor whose main accomplishment was the near total conquering of an island nation to the north-east.

“Any questions on what we have read?” Madam Grath said after taking the book back.

A few hands went up and she called on a boy near the front.

“My parents say witches are evil and that's why we executed them, but won’t say why,” he asked.

I sat up straight from my slouched position.

“Anything about my subject?” she said and went to call on another person.

“My dad called it barbaric,” the next one said. “Said she should have had a trial.”

“Very well…it was already established she was a witch and after what a coven of them did to the capital, and our last king, it is understandable that she was promptly executed,” Madam Grath said. “A king that was related to the prince we were reading about, although distantly.”

The next question asked was on why we did not rebuild the capital or elect a new king. The answer was that the seven duchies couldn't agree on where and the seven dukes who could vote in a king couldn't agree on who.

Her lesson ended with reminding everyone we could not call mages 'blessed,' or refer to non-mages as anything derogatory—like the book. I had not heard anything about that before, so I didn’t see why that was necessary.

“She does that on purpose,” Trissa said with her head down on the desk. “That tome is probably from her great-grandmother's time, we don’t get many books, but it’s not that bad.”

“Does what?” I asked.

“Reminding us that mages used to have all these titles and people like us were considered less for not having mana."

“But, she told us not to do that?”

Trissa moved the hand she was lying on and patted my shoulder. “It’s sweet how naive you are sometimes.”

Jacob didn’t come to talk to Trissa again this time as the next teacher walked in with a chickadee perched on his shoulder. I ignored the man dressed in plain brown pants and tunic.

I immediately reached out, the bird looked around while fluffing out their feathers and flew to my outstretched finger. Their small talons latched around it while I used my other hand to stroke their head.

“Polo? Come here you silly bird,” the teacher said while making clicking sounds.

Polo looked back at him, then to me. I didn’t ask him to stay and I felt their mind decide to fly back to the teacher since he was the one who fed them regularly. “Sorry 'bout dat. Did you have peanut butter this morning cause usually he’s really good about staying put.”

“I’m not surprised Mister Salica didn’t even notice you’re new,” Trissa whispered to me.

Mister Salica started talking about different types of wood and what their best uses were, fire, buildings, smoke, bows, and mulch. He didn’t use the chalk or a book. He just talked and talked…and talked.

I was interested for a while, but it soon got a bit much even for someone who’d spent her whole life amongst trees.

Everyone looked like they were about to fall asleep with the way they were slumped in their seats. I was watching Polo and trying to put together his vague feelings, they seemed easier to understand than the wildlife in the forest, but still murky.

My best guess by the end of the lesson was impatience and when Mister Salica handed them a piece of nut pinched in his fingers the feeling vanished and was replaced by elation. The chubby little thing had been hungry.

Trissa got up to stretch once he was gone. “We can go have lunch early since this next lesson isn’t for us.”

“Can we join you?” Katlyn said.

Trissa looked at Eyla. “You still don’t want to learn how to use mana?”

“Nah, they don’t teach you any combat spells and if I learn how to repair items or water crops then the nagging to help would never end. I don’t even have much mana to begin with, so every spell gives me a heartache,” Eyla said.

I turned to the rest of the class and noticed that the only ones still sitting had mana.

“Francie's?” Trissa asked.

“As long as you’re paying,” Eyla said.

I trailed behind the three of them. I hadn’t been invited out loud, but I felt that Trissa would have said yes if I asked to come with them. Francie's turned out to be a small eatery and we took a table for four while Trissa went up to a counter.

“So, Valeria. What’s it like living with Trissa? What’s her room like? She never let us in. I’m convinced she has a shrine up there,” Eyla said.

“You can ignore her, younger sisters are such strange creatures,” Katlyn said.

“Hey, Dad isn’t sure how many times he mixed us up when we were just born, I could easily be older.”

My eyes bounced between the two as the back and forth slowly devolved and events later than a year ago were being brought up.

Trissa saved me from them getting bored and turning on me again by bringing to the table a plate of white meat on the bone and baked tubers, still steaming.

We managed to get through most of it until Eyla let out a long, low burp and proceeded to finish it off. The table next to her with a young man and woman gave her weird looks, so I noted to continue not doing that near people. I'd only been eating the potatoes which was the reason for the leftovers.

With full bellies, we made our way outside the gates and laid in the grass until everyone arrived from their own lunches. The game of the day was a repeat of stingers with Greyson chomping at the bit to start it off. The looks he sent my way were somewhat worrying.

Eyla and Katlyn came with Trissa and me into the cornfields and I did the same thing I’d done to Patela the other day. Keeping as far away from Greyson’s presence as possible.

We gave ourselves away a few times, at least the other three did when they started giggling when Greyson shouted for us to quit hiding. Eyla was convinced I’d learned some kind of mana detection spell and wanted me to teach her it.

It was possibly my favourite day in memory. Never mind, I knew it was my favourite day and I fell asleep easily that night, snuggling deep into the soft bed.