At Greenwood's Edge

Chapter 1

The crowing of the neighbor's roosters was a blessing and a curse.

Orella quietly groaned in her bed, shifting away from her window onto her left shoulder, though she knew without having to open her eyes that the curtains were drawn. She didn't allow herself to react when the vile birds screeched again. Reacting led to annoyance, and annoyance led to thinking, and thinking led to more annoyance, and then she was out of her warm, hard-won fur blanket and facing the chill of mid-spring.

In the Greenwood, mid-spring was the lowland folk's peak of winter.

The roosters crowed again, insistent, and Orella, in an act of futile defiance, squeezed her eyes shut even tighter. And that- reacting- was her mistake, as the effort simply brought her conscious further into awareness.

Another muffled crow sounded, and this time an outrageously loud snore from her sister joined in chorus, scaring her out of her wits and sending her lurching out of the covers into the cool air, stifling a shriek. She whipped her head across the room, and shot a glare at Valera's shifting form.

But it melted in an instant. It wasn't like she'd have been able to sleep in. Danswen had been making such a mess of the apothecary lately, it was either wake up an hour before dawn and have some time to clean, or roll out of bed late and deal with the stench.

She stretched her bony arms up to the ceiling and silently yawned, calloused fingers brushing the slanted ceiling of her alcove. She twisted, still seated, to peel open the curtains ever so slightly. The sky was lightening in the east, and most stars had faded; but the flowering meadow, and the pine forest beyond it, were still dark.

Orella let the curtains close with a sigh, and shifted so her legs were off the low bed and brushing against the dusty wooden floor. Her searching feet, still clothed in yesterday's wooly socks, found her leather boots, and she slipped them on and stood, pulling her fur blanket back over her pillow. Then she knelt to pull out the drawers under bed and grabbed a random gray dress that was most likely stained from work in the apothecary, as most of her outfits were. The cold hastened her movements as she removed her thin nightgown and put it on.

She walked out of the little room she and Valera had shared since birth, wishing that her lithe body didn't keep her silent by default so that she could not put any effort into softening the falling of her feet. But though the idea of the slight revenge pleased her, she didn't want to purposefully make her feet fall flat. That wasn't passive-aggressive, that was just obnoxious.

And as Orella passed the doorless way in, she figured it probably wouldn't rouse her sister anyway. The girl slept like a rock.

It was a small cottage, what the Graybarks lived in. But it was all they needed. A kitchen, square table, and fireplace took up almost the entire first floor, save for a broomcloset tucked under the creaky staircase that Orella crept down. Upstairs, past her and her sister's room, was her mother's slightly-larger bedroom and an incredibly small "bathroom". At least, that's what the men who had sold them the cottage had called it. Orella thought that they'd probably just wound up with the tiny room taking a desolate corner of the second floor by accident, and made the best of the situation.

There weren't any bathrooms in her village. Not real ones, ayway. Though she'd heard from the rare traveler of the capital's experiments in what they called "plumbing", no such advancements had made their way here, to the outermost edge of Neahwe. Truthfully, it was a wonder anyone came here at all. All that lay beyond their village was the Greenwood, and if you dared go through that, it was just desolate mountains, as far as she knew. And the village was so out-of-the-way of everything, it couldn't be used as a waypoint to even the northernmost coastal port.