AN: this story is unformatted, because this site is incapable of grasping the concept of blank lines or indentations. For the proper, formatted version, please visit my AO3 - Archiveofourown.
The proper way to kill a witch, Daud knows, is to take her eyes first, to prevent the Outsider from looking through them and down on this world. Clever fingers will work dark magic, so they have to go next. Then, the witches' voice must be stilled, so that she will never speak another curse or use it to seduce the good faithful, and to that purpose it is best to fill her lungs with brine.
Daud knows, because he sees and hears all, curled up in the vat that his mother shoved him into when the men with the masks came.
He is sure his mother is no witch, and he would have told them so, would have screamed it at them until they had to listen, but he had promised not to, and clasps both hands over his mouth, hard.
The truth is, she is just good with plants, a skill she passed on to her son. Daud can distinguish the parsley he chopped earlier for the meal, burning now in its pot over the fireside, from the poisonous plants that look alike and that only a fool or a person tired of life would choose to eat. He knows the leaves of the sharp-smelling wild garlic from its sly cousins, tasty blueberries from belladonna – the fair lady in black who will take you straight to the Void. Daud has learned that the red fruit of yew can be eaten if you pick out the seeds, or offered as a whole to others.
"Left for friends," his mother always used to tell him, for as long as he can remember, referring of course to the shelves that line the walls of their tiny cottage, "Right for enemies."
She isn't like the other women from the villages surrounding the patch of wilderness where they live. She doesn't look like them, either. She doesn't like wearing shoes, and she crushes elderberries with linseed oil and uses the mixture to dye her hair blue and purple. He thinks it looks beautiful, like the petals of lilac, but the villagers fear her.
Witch, they whisper. All the same they come calling when winter makes their throats sore and their lungs thick with cough.
Marks of the Outsider, they mutter with one breath, eyes glued to the patterns that cover her hands and arms, and plead for her to save their fevered children with the other.
She laughs in the face of such accusations, and tells him not to pay any heed to the talk of commoners.
"Doesn't it hurt?" Daud asks one day as he watches her dip the bone needle in the ink, and then draw a bird's skull on the back of her hand, beads of blood and black oozing with every stab.
"It does," she replies, but never tells him why she does it.
The summer Daud turns eight they have enough coin saved up for him to go to the school in the next village. It's over an hour's walk away, but the time passes quicker with every trip spent in the company of only the rustle of leaves and birdsong.
Daud likes the lessons, but not the other children, and his teachers say he shows promise.
His mother gifts him a knife with a horn handle on his tenth nameday.
"You would have gone on your first sanddragon hunt by now," she says wistfully. "You wouldn't have earned the right to carry this with my people, but you have earned it in my eyes."
Daud is too excited to find out that there is a place where dragons are real to worry about being worthy of the gift.
The absence of his father, of whom he only knows that he sailed a pirate vessel, is a fact Daud is indifferent to. His mother refuses to talk about the man, and the boy does not care enough to risk her ire by asking too many questions. She is the strongest person he knows, and the scariest too.
Once, a band of men pays them a visit. Their smiles seem false and their eyes are shifty. They say they are here for healing, but none of them look sick, and Daud's mother runs them off with a tirade of curses that would surely even strike fear into the heart of the Outsider himself, and a meat cleaver to give point to her screaming at them to never come back.
Indeed, they do not come again.
They send for the men in the masks instead.
She picks him up, for the first time in years, and runs to the pasture, sheep and goats scattering with panicked bleats. The vat she tells him to hide in is what the livestock eat out of. It is smells and he can barely fit, and he protests against being stuck in there like fodder.
"Hush, don't make a sound, my boy," she says, such urgency in her voice that it makes him quiet down. "Don't let them find you. Do you understand?"
He nods frantically, even though no, he doesn't, and her lips burn hot against his brow as she kisses him.
When her warmth leaves, Daud feels cold all of a sudden. He is alone, shaking, and old enough to know that something terrible is about to happen.
Wandering eyes, conducts for the Outsider to this world no more.
Restless Hands, stilled forever.
Lying tongue will speak no more seditious falsehoods.
"Dreadful business, Brother Jerome," a deep voice says in the aftermath, when the silence still rings with the echo of screams. "Dreadful, but necessary."
They search the house for heretic artefacts, they kill the animals just to be sure – but they do not find him, and eventually they pack up and leave.
Daud doesn't know what else to do, so on the morning of the next day he uncurls from his hiding spot, feeling strangely empty inside, like the gutted carcass of one of the animals they sometimes butchered for food. Everything hurts from a night spent curled up into a tight ball. His feet snag on roots as he stumbles down the familiar path, stiff-legged and hollow-eyed.
He arrives halfway into the first lesson, but is excused from his tardiness without question since it is the first time.
He never speaks of what had happened, but even so they come for him a month later, men from the city wearing swords at their hips and the uniform of the guard.
They learned of his mother's fate. The property is seized – Daud isn't sure what that means, except that he is dragged screaming and kicking onto a cart – and his new home becomes the orphanage in Karnaca.