20
The coffin maker's wife had been born brave.
She had been a precocious child, never satisfied with the bare minimum of answers. Her mother often recounted the look of knowing Bella had in her eyes, even as an infant.
You were born knowing too much, her mother had said countless times. Knew everything, 'cept how to be afraid.
Bella wasn't fearless, but her curiosity combined with her need to understand the world had often overridden her fear, allowing her to plunge into the unknown.
It was a quality that the coffin maker had always loved about her.
The coffin maker had been born wise.
He'd had an old soul, his gran had said. He was appropriately cautious, and sometimes when the adults around him were speaking, one could find the boy's head tilted, his toys abandoned as he sat and listened and learned.
He'd made plenty of mistakes in his life, surely, but he learned from those mistakes rather quickly and had grown accordingly.
But without his willful wife, the coffin maker was prone to overthinking and rumination over action.
Likewise, without her husband, the coffin maker's wife was impulsive and impatient, prone to rashness that bordered on the reckless.
They forgot these parts of themselves, the ones that were unbalanced without their other half, because so rarely had they spent any sort of time apart.
It had been days since the coffin maker's wife had seen her husband, and she had been left to her own instinct to get him back.
So rather than surveying the glen of the Dead Witch and proceeding with caution, the coffin maker's wife picked up the heaviest branch she could find and charged forward, like a Viking off to battle.
She was glorious and terrifying, and both the apothecarist's apprentice and the orphaned boy watched her in stunned amazement, left standing in the shadows of the woods.
"Witch!" Bella screamed, her branch brandished over her head. "Deliver my husband to me!"
She took in the small glen, pieces of it clicking into place in her fast mind: the disturbed earth by the river, where a stone ring suggested someone had been tending to a fire in the midst of a camp; the rope tied to a lower branch of a tree on the edge of the glen, where likely stores were kept at night. There was no permanent dwelling. Whatever was happening here was only meant to be for a short while.
Bella made her way to the campsite, her boots kicking at the dirt in frustration.
She knelt by the fire ring, picking up a second stick to prod at the charred pieces of wood. Some of them were still smoldering underneath, and she swallowed hard, realizing that someone had been here, recently.
Her eyes moved up, taking in the woods around her from her lower angle. She frowned when she saw a second rope tucked high into a tree. This one looked to be holding something up.
Bella stood quickly, dropping the smaller stick as she made her way across the small glen to the tree. She prepared herself to climb then realized her boots would hinder her assent. The dress she could deal with—she'd been climbing in dresses all her life—but the boots would have to go.
She bent over to begin unlacing them.
"Mistress?"
She glanced over her shoulder as her fingers worked the knotted cords of her boots.
"There is something in the tree. I'm going to climb up to grab it," she told the boys.
Jasper's eyes widened as he looked up.
"Please, mistress," Seth said, stepping forward. "Lemme gets it for ya. I'm quick as a squirrel," he promised her. She straightened up, surprised but acquiescing.
In a matter of moments, Seth was pulling himself up into the tree, and with the strength and agility of youth, he was scaling the tree until he reached the parcel.
He untied it carefully, and Jasper positioned himself under the tree to catch it. Seth let it fall and Jasper scooped it up, his arms curling around the package protectively. He set it on the ground as Seth scaled back down, and Bella squatted down, her fingers reaching for the thin twine keeping the parcel wrapped.
They worked to loosen the bindings, and by the time Seth's feet were back on the ground, they had pulled the bundle open.
Bella felt the breath leave her body.
This was not the glen of the Dead Witch at all.