Every year, a superstitious village abandons a human child in a nearby forest in exchange for divine protection. In actuality, an old hermit adopts the children and teaches them to ward off intruders. This year, the hermit’s best apprentice happens to locate and escort the abandoned child.
Stupidity that no-one knows is stupidity, that’s repeated often enough to become a habit… that’s what tradition is.
At least, that’s what tradition is here.
The first time was different. The first time was an accident. A child not abandoned, but lost, wandering into the forest on sturdy little legs, too young to be wary. He wandered far enough to be found by… well, he calls them ‘teachers’. What they were, I don’t know. Spirits, perhaps, or beings from another plane, or sorcerers, or mystics. He won’t say. But he swears it was chance that ended the drought after he disappeared. The teachers didn’t do it.
When they brought him back, they found the little bones scattered in the dark wood. Found the lost spirits still calling for mothers and fathers who had abandoned them.
The first, the Hermit, has been here ever since. When his teachers could not make the people stop what they were doing, when children returned to the village were taken out into the woods again, the Hermit settled in the heart of the forest, and began what has become his life’s work.
Every year, another child is abandoned in the woods, left as a sacrifice by superstitious people who think it pleases whatever gods or powers they worship.
Every year, that child does not die.
We know when it will happen – Midsummer’s Day, every year. So it’s not difficult to set watchers in the trees around the village, to see who creeps out and follow. I sit watching, concealed by skill and by spells, as the grey light slowly brightens and Midsummer Day’s dawn approaches. There are other watchers at other gates – it’s almost a small town, this village, big enough to need more than one gate.
I was an infant, I’m told, when I was abandoned. Newly born, and the death of my mother, from the whispers the Hermit’s spies heard during the Choosing Time. Whether my father hated me for killing her, or simply didn’t want the burden of an infant with no woman to tend it, he offered me readily. He was the one to carry me out, leaving me on the outskirts of the Deep Forest, where the sun still showed between the trees and the trees did not move of their own accord, because a babe could hardly find its way back.
The Hermit took me up, of course, and carried me home. Back then, he was still strong enough to be the one who watched and waited. He carried me into the heart of the Deep Forest, and gave me to two of the others who had come before me… Elsa and Rolf, who had grown up in the Heart, and had a babe of their own. They raised me as their own child, brother to their daughter, and so I feel no particular anger toward my father. He did not love me, but he found me parents who would, even if he didn’t know it.
Only the ones who aren’t angry can watch. The ones who don’t remember the village. No-one talks about why, not openly, but I’ve heard whispers of blood on the leaves and brother turning blade against brother for a grudge held too long.
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