Ruminating on Sincilla, the witch that lives in a hut in the Orchard.
She’s of Romani descent, but her family was driven out of the Traveler camps way back when her grandmother was still a young woman. Being a witch was decidedly frowned upon, and good old Grandmama was more willing to give up the Traveler life than she was the cauldron.
Her folk maintained a nomadic-ish lifestyle for a time, staying in places for longer than was typically advisable, always at the outskirts of settled colonies. They made friends with the Forest Folk, and as a result became unofficial liasons between humans and creatures of Magick. More often than not this arrangement was manipulated to prefer the Magick creatures, but the world was evolving and changing, and by the time Sincilla came into her own -- and was expected to follow in her mother and grandmother’s footsteps -- she opted to take a much more pragmatic approach to the work: like it or not, regular folk were spreading far, fast and wide, and they had the means to make life decidedly miserable for anyone that got on their bad side. It was best to operate within a safe margin of compatibility.
This didn’t sit well with her family, and it was with regret that Sincilla separated herself from them and went her own way.
That is exactly how she found herself in the position of Head Gardener over the estate (I’m sure there’s a better name for this, but I’ve got to look into it), and chief liason between humanity and the Fae folk.
Despite being human, her enchanted nature means she ages much more slowly than she should. She knew the estate’s prior Mistress when she was still young, and yet Sincilla appears to be a woman in her 40s. She is, of course, much older. She can’t make herself look younger, but she can pause at a particular age for however long she cares to before allowing herself to mature. She’s fairly comfortable where she is.
Sincilla (”Cilla” to those of whom she’s fond) loves her job and is generally content in life. Having been raised in a very tight-knit family group she does miss her family, but she also believes she was right to evolve alongside human society instead of staying perpetually at odds with it.
Her greatest disappointment in life stems from the fact that she never had children, despite desperately wanting them. She’s still coming to terms with that fact, acknowledging that it probably wouldn’t be either easy or advisable for a woman of her age, means, and lifestyle to try and raise a child in the middle of a potentially unstable Fae wood, surrounded by folk that don’t like that sort of thing.
Just the same, she sometimes daydreams that the Faeries will find an abandoned baby and drop it on her doorstep. In that they have not yet done so, she suspects they must be wise to what a bad idea it would be, and she tries not to let it eat at her. But she still dreams.
She is self-possed and with an exceedingly wry sense of humor, and she greatly enjoys teasing Iwen (good-naturedly, she really does think he’s doing the best job he can), particularly when it comes to his half-Faun nature. Despite having an air of being unapproachable or difficult to negotiate with, in reality Sincilla is anything but. She really just enjoys giving him a hard time.
She may or may not be casually fucking the Black Dog spirit that guards the graveyard at the crossroads.