That Villain of Hers

// PROLOGUE //

A quiet girl, the neighbors said. Doesn't talk much. Tended to the farm in floor-length threadbare dresses. Sung to herself while she worked.

Whatever happened to that girl, they don't know.

She comes and goes as she pleases, with little care for whom she might be inconveniencing. She carries a weapon, always. Usually a silver dagger, the length of her forearm. No one who sees that dagger gets a good look at it before the light leaves their eyes, though.

They say she's ruthless. They say she won't spare you a second glance at you before she puts a stake through your heart.

They say she's a goddess, or a princess, or a spy, or a criminal.

She's just a girl, really.

A girl who lost her way.

Now, she hefts a sword above her - a strange weapon for the slight girl who slips in and out of shadows like water through a crack in the pavement. It slices through the air, and the nameless, faceless enemy falls to the ground. She throws the sword aside and raises her arms in victory. No one notices that her bottom lip is quivering and the look on her face, is not one of triumph, but one of contempt. At herself, and all she has done.

                                                                                     ___________                                                                                      

The girl's story, like many, starts with a name. Annalise. A fitting name once, for a young girl in the country working on her father's farm. She had a happy childhood, full of playing with the animals on the farm and helping her mother cook dinner. When she was eight, she met a boy from the village of whom she became very fond. The boy and the girl spent every day together, laughing and crying and smiling and singing. The boy was an outcast among the villagers - his father was a strange man, they said. Deals in strange, strange business.

The boy gave the girl her first kiss when she was fifteen. He laughed at her jokes and they laid on their backs in the fields, looking at the stars or the clouds. He told her she was a star, bright and lovely because that's what fifteen-year-old boys think is romantic.

Then he died.

His death was not a normal one, the villagers say. One day his mother and father stopped letting him leave their house, and his only visitor was the girl. She walked in solemnly, head down, as though she was dreading what she was about to see. Then he died. It is assumed the boy died of a disease. They're not uncommon in villages like these, after all, where cleanliness was never a priority. Yes, a disease. They said. A perfectly plausible explanation.

The girl left home, at sixteen-and-a-half years old, and no one knows what became of her. Her story was set in stone, some say. A lover lost sent her on a path of regrets and mistakes, which became crimes, which became this killer of a girl. She knew a knight in shining armor would not come for her, so she became the evil queen.