roots
It was by a secretive wood that two girls grew up together, and their lives twined together like the dense overlap of roots lining the forest floor, slowly edging forwards year-on-year under the leaf litter in the shadows of the high peaks. Molly was an orphan, sponsored by a distant grandfather who was never seen and rarely heard from, seemingly leading a chaotic life far from the little village nestled into the edge of the forest. Avis was the daughter of the town's weapons smith and played with blunted knives nearly the size of her, sparring with her poor mother's fence posts, chasing imaginary rabbits through the fitful plot of barley behind their house.
The first time Molly was out there, Avis ran straight into her- mercifully the knife wasn't in her hand at the time- and the two scuffed and dizzied children had staggered back to the house, sporting scraped knees and banged heads. Avis' father had patched them both up as the pair gritted their teeth, not crying even when he had to pull a big stone from Avis' palm, or put some cold meat on Molly's bruised knee. Neither wanted to cry in front of the other. The strange child with wild brunette hair and big, ringed eyes muttered something about her "auntie" being able to heal her faster, but she quietened when Avis' mother plyed both girls with a bowl of thick cream and bread. Molly had stayed late and warmed considerably to the family, not least their sole daughter. One neat plait and one tangled mess lent together as they chatted until the dusk descended through the woods and into the village, and Avis' mother walked Molly home.
They visited one another's homes frequently through their entire childhood, playing in the wildflowers in the summer and trekking a large swath of the village in the winter, since Molly lived some way apart from most of the settlement, with an older spinster who wasn't really her Aunt, but who seemed kindly enough and looked after the child when most were too overwhelmed looking after their own. She cultivated a small plot and traded at the market, but they never seemed to run short of anything. When times were good, she was well liked by most, even though she didn't seem to quite fit into the villages usual social regimen, what with her strange orphan and borderline scorn at the idea of marriage. When times got harder, as they often did in cool northern winters in the teeth of the mountains, with only their little sheath of woods for shelter, they mistrusted the woman and her growing protege, and called her "Witch", and avoided her eyes.
Avis' parents never held with any of such talk, and Avis herself was given to tendencies labelled as strange- training with weapons alongside Molly and taking up crafting rather than courting as she turned thirteen. Molly in her teenage years was often observed reading- another altogether odd habit for a young lady- and she was usually doing so no more than a stone's throw from Avis, whom one or the other of them had taken to calling "hers". Whether it had been Molly or Avis who started it, the certainty that their affections lay in one another's hands was so casual that it filled the gaps between sword work and herbs, drawing them together like the resin that held the pages in Avis' books.
Frequently, they would venture into the woods, escaping the oppressive view of the mountains for the relief of a canopy of green with excitable streams and sky-filled clearings on the higher ground. Molly would come armed with a book filled with painstaking drawings of herbs and plants, and stranger things that could sometimes be found in the woods, and Avis would bring along a short, sturdy sword so they could protect themselves, although they rarely really ventured far enough to encounter any real danger- just far enough for no-one to notice Avis admiring the light playing in Molly's rich curls, or Molly holding a lingering glance at her friend's eyelashes brushing her freckled cheeks.
The summers leading up to turning into young women were probably the best, for a long time at least, but it was always marred by the presence of the rest of the village, quietly waiting for the two friends to chose suitors and settle. Reading, they could tolerate, and no-one would deny medicine women were vital for the villages survival, but a forge (they said) was no place at all for a woman, nor the forest. Molly had become more competent with herbs than even her Aunt, having what the old woman described as: "A natural talent for m- for healing," to Avis' mother once. The woman nodded and noted how wonderful it was, for Molly to be blessed with such a gift, and three months later came knocking in the dead of night with Avis to say her husband had been taken ill.
Avis had accompanied him into the woods for a hunting trip but a young buck had gouged a nasty wound in his side, and it had taken Avis days to get them both back home from their camp. Molly and her aunt worked their fingers raw with medicine bags, burning endless twisted sprigs and eventually, in the final desperate hours of the night, in a quiet moment when both Avis and her mother were out of the room, made even arcane bids to save the man's life.
It wasn't enough, and with his passing came the end of Molly and Avis' childhood, a final severing of the splintering, scattering edges. Molly never did tell her- her closest friend, closer than close, in a way neither of them would realise for years- all the secrets she had learned from her Aunt, the magical gifts she possessed and how close it had been in the battle to save her father. The man had been kindly to the orphan, and they mourned him side-by-side, Avis throwing herself into Molly's shoulder and sobbing, sobbing, sobbing into her hair until she fell asleep, exhausted and drained.
Two years later, the lifelong friends went separate ways. Molly stayed in the village, tending to her now elderly Aunt and seeing to the villages health, in whatever small ways she could, whenever it was safe. Avis left with a travelling company that passed through on it's way to a large city to the south, bringing all her smith's tools in hope of being able to make more than hunting knives and arrowheads. They embraced outside Avis' house, and Molly watched with her friend's mother as the group left, fighting the confusion and hurt. Avis didn't let herself look back as she went.
