A Past Life
The village of Adare was a small one, at best. Made up of only the barest requirements, it had few houses and even fewer shops. But it was well for the people there, who were content to keep to their sheep and weaving and homecrafts. Their lives were simple and that was enough for them, and they scorned those who thought any more could be needed in life than what they had.
However, though they might be content to live their lives in so small a sphere of being, the truth was that certain necessities of the village had never managed to be. And while they often found ways to get around this lacking, there was simply no real way of geting around the fact that the village had no doctor, and was simply too small to merrit planned visits of a travelling one.
So the town turned instead to a woman who lived on top of the small grassy hill that overlooked the village. Known only by her first name (since she had never married and thus had never aquired a last name), Althia was a solitary woman. Yet while she kept to herself as far as sociality went, the town knew they could rely on her to relieve them of any and all ailments.
Althia was no doctor, and could not be given that she was a woman. But in the eyes of any of the villagers, she was just as good if not better than any practitioner of medicine. Better, in fact, since rather than use new technology (which the simple villagers scorned as unnecessary) to heal, Althia used something the village had a great deal of - plants.
She had shown up one day with not an ounce of gold to her name, laden with child. And while the villagers were wary of strangers, they could not turn away a pregnant woman and so offered to let her stay for a while. And in exchange for the villagers hospitality, Althia in turn offered her own services. And while, at first, the villagers were wary of her strange elixers, they soon welcomed her with open arms as she healed ailments they had once counted as certain death to their number.
By the time Althia was near her birthing time, she had gained the trust of the villagers so much that she was welcomed as one of them, and had a small home built on the top of the hill by those men of the town who had wood and nails to spare. And it was well for her, for the hill was covered in many types of medicinal herbs which she had previously had to climb the slope from the village to get to.
It was here that she gave birth to a baby girl, with the aid of the village's only midwife. The babe was a healthy one, with a cry that spilled from her lips mere moments after she had parted from her mother. She had all that a normal child should have, and the midwife was quite pleased with how well the birth had gone. The tea, she said, that Althia had drunk, must have been the reason the birth had been so easy.
Althia agreed, having brewed the drink herself from the blossoms of the tara vine, a plant that flourished near her home.The sweet smelling flowers, when brewed in hot water, were known to Althia to ease the pain of childbirth, among other things. And so, in honor of her craft and the daughter it had so easily afforded her, Althia named the child Tara.
The midwife showed her how to hold the child and bring her to breast, and then went about the buisness of cleaning up the mess that comes with birth. And it was then, in the first moment Althia truly had alone with her child, that reality struck fast and hard. For when the babe opened its eyes, they were not the pale blue of a normal infant, but a deep, striking violet.
Althia let out a gasp, causing the midwife to turn and question what was wrong. But Althia knew she could not say, and tried to still her heart as she replied that Tara had merely bitten too hard on her breast. Satisfied with the reply, the midwife turned away once more, leaving Althia to her troubled thoughts. Violet eyes was a sign of True Craft, something the woman hoped she would not pass onto her child, for witchcraft was feared throughout, and in a village so small as this one, it would surely mean the babe's death.
She dismissed the midwife, then, as soon as she had finished making the hut presentable once more, saying she could more than handle herself should anything go awry. With a nod of her head, for the midwife knew Althia was well versed in healing, the midwife left, leaving the herbalist to her child and her new life.
Althia became more soliary as the years went on, keeping more and more to herself, her daughter being the only true steady prescence in her life. Tara, too, grew up solitary, being kept by her mother from the interaction of the village. It was for her own protection, Althia said. Protection from those who could not understand her. Tara never truly understood her mother's reasoning, but obeyed the restrictions out of love for the woman who had raised her.
Tara turned, then, to books for entertainment. Her mother had many, many volumes lined on the shelves in their home, and Tara found she quite enjoyed sneaking them out to the sun-kissed rock outside the kitchen window where she would spend hours deep within their pages. She felt as though she could feel the world in their pages, through the hundreds and thousands of plants the volumes contained, ranging from the simple beauty of a crimson rose, to the very herbs in the potion Tara drank every day at the direction of her mother. "For your health", she had said, and Tara did not question it, though there seemed to be no mention of such properties in any of the books.
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