The witch was a very old woman, though she did not look it. Very, very old and learned. Whether or not she was wise… Ah, well that is another question, one we shall not go into at the moment.

But the witch was very old and very learned, and she had lived in that wood for a very long time, longer than anyone could remember.

No one had ever seen the witch, but they knew of her all the same, because such things as witches have a way of being known, and though never believed in, never forgotten either.

In that time she had never, in the long years she had lived in the wood, met another human person, keeping herself secreted away by magic. She had been there a very long time, and who knows where she had been before or whom she knew. If one might dare to guess at such a thing when it comes to witches, it is possible to suppose that she was lonely. It might even be supposed that she was bored.

This is as good an explanation I can give as to why, when she felt the boy approach, she went out in raven form and observed him. Whether it was pity or curiosity that led her to make her house, long hidden, visible to him, perhaps no one can know.

"Why have you come, child?" Asked the witch, and the boy bristled. He would have been displeased at being called a child when he was the age he looked to be, and that was five years past. But the boy did not speak his outrage, if he was lucky he might grow to be prudent yet.

"I came to ask if there was any way to break my curse," the boy said.

The witch laughed. "You are not cursed," she said, "You only died."

"Oh," said the boy. And he gathered all his courage to himself, tilting his head up to look her in the face as he said, "Then what must I do to bring about my eternal rest?"

"You misunderstand me," said the witch, "You died, you are not dead now. You are not human, you are like me."

"I'm a witch?"

"Only if you want to be. You are immortal. Our kind do not age and we cannot be killed save by decapitation."

"And I can do nothing to change this? I cannot be an ordinary son to my father? A man of my clan?"

"You cannot. You were never any of those things to begin with, Duncan, it was only ill luck that you died as young as you did. You were not your father's son by birth, and eventually you would have died and learned the truth regardless."

The boy swallowed the lump in his throat as he thought of his home, as he thought of his place in the world as it disappeared from beneath him. But he realized when it was gone, that it had already been fading away a long time. It ached to know that he was not his parents' true child, but it was an old ache already.

"I can't go back now," said the boy.

"No," said the witch, "You cannot. You may stay here if you like. I will teach you."

"I don't know that I would make a very good witch," said the boy. It was the politest way he knew how to say that he very much did not want to be a witch, and he knew better than to be impolite in the witch's house. He did not know what he did want to become, or what could become of him. All his life he had known that he would be a great warrior and leader. He would be neither now.

"You needn't be one," the witch replied, "I will teach you to survive."

"Alright," the boy agreed. From the moment he entered her home, a part of him had known he would not leave.