Hecate Hardbroom was not a fanciful woman. She was more of a spirit connected to the earth. Collecting herbs and plants grounded her, made her feel alive, a swoop of satisfaction in her heart whenever she crumbled soil through her fingers and felt the strands of herbs imprinted under her fingertips. Her favourite smell was tomato leaf in the rain. It soothed her, gave her the balance that she needed each day. She was rarely without it.
Only once had she felt so incredibly off kilter. Her annus horribilis. The worst year of her life when a classmate had maliciously set her hair on fire. Her long dark plaits, so neat and prim, so lovingly cherished by her aunt, had been reduced to a painful scraggly mess in a matter of minutes.
Hair grows, the matron told her comfortingly after she had tended to the traumatised student. It hadn't even been the worst of it, Hecate knew that. But it had been such a wrench to shed her identity, all that she had known, to become a new one so abruptly. The burn on her shoulder blade had healed remarkably well. Youthful healthy skin said the nurse, she knew how lucky she had been. She was constantly told that it could have been worse, as if her feelings had to be dampened down to spare the mortification and reputation of the girl who got suspended for her crime.
But the first year had been agony. She couldn't dress the wound herself and had to rely on the matron to do it, a process that she hated. The pain had trickled from the burn and into her bones, scorching her heart along the way. She shied away from fire, preferring to control her need for warmth with extra layers. She sat in the shade all that long hot summer and refused to eat hot food for a year. The matron had carefully cropped her hair and Hecate waited patiently for it to grow back. As soon as she was able, she pinned it up, out of the way in a bun, too high for anyone to interfere with it. Some of her classmates mocked her for looking like an old lady but Hecate didn't care. She could control her image then. Control had become her mainstay for the rest of her life. She took comfort in that.
She'd never walked in the same way again, as if the year of hell had been branded into her spine. From that point on, her movements were careful, rigid, sharp. Not too sharp but she couldn't move in the same lollopy manner as she had done when up until she was fourteen. Slouching and dancing had sent that searing pain through her shoulder so she'd grown out of the habit. Every day that she pinned up her bundle of hair, she was happy to see that it was there. It symbolised her strength and resilience when she thought herself too young and soft.
Sometimes she caught sight of it in the mirror. Dimity had whimsically said it was in the shape of a bird. Hecate had dismissed it as nonsense but truth be told, sometimes when she squinted at it, it did…look a bit like a bird. She supposed that it did look like it had wings.
She didn't need wings. But very rarely, the thought crept up on her that it was nice to have them in a way, even if it was indelibly seared into her skin.