Spells in Silence

Chapter 14: Misadventure

Hazel slept in for a short time the following day, opening her eyes only after the sun had fully risen and all the adults who worked for a living were already gone. She rose from the cot she had been loaned by Simone, one of the younger women of the commune. Talking with Simone the previous night, she had learned that apparently another woman had lived in this cottage with her, but something had happened and that woman left the commune to join another group of werewolves. It left her with extra space and a spare bed, which Hazel appreciated.

Stretching for several seconds, she blinked blearily before her plans for today pushed their way into the front of her brain and a wide smile broke out on her face. That was right, they were going to teach her how to make magic potions! She jumped out of bed and hastily pulled some of her new clothes out of her satchel and changed. Waves of blue magic cleaned the shirt and soft cotton pajama pants she had worn to sleep in, then they were stuffed into the bag. Pulling the curtain over the doorway aside, she stepped outside and breathed in the cool air of the morning.

Few werewolves in the commune ate breakfast, and after the big dinner she had partaken in the night before, she could understand why. She therefore made her way out of the cottage and around one of the dead and cold fire pits, nearly skipping as she did, on her way to a ring of tables and fires and big copper pots off to one side of the clearing. This, she had been told, was where the three younger werewolves had their classes, and today she was going to join them. Not all lessons were like the one today; some were instead about reading and maths, and those lessons she planned on skipping. But lessons about magic she was definitely going to be present for.

She waved to the other people who were already gathered there. Of the now-four kids here, she was actually not the youngest. The oldest was a fifteen-year-old boy with dark hair and eyes and deeply tanned skin named Claude. Next came twelve-year-old Chantal, all blonde and pale skin to set herself apart from Claude. Serge was the last of the three and younger even than her at seven. Standing next to the ring of tables and impromptu cauldrons were two women, one who looked middle-aged with prematurely greying hair and the other younger with a bright smile. Elise and Amorette, or at least she thought that was the younger woman's name.

"Good morning, 'Azel!" Amorette said.

Unlike Jean Luc or Grégorie, Hazel had noticed that most of the werewolves here had trouble with the first part of her name. It was something about how French worked that Jean Luc had tried to explain but just made her more confused. She had instead decided just to accept that they were going to call her 'Azel' for the entirety of her time here and roll with it. She pulled out two notebooks, the first with lines on the pages meant for actually taking notes and the other without lines which she used for communication. Writing on the latter for a minute with a few checks of her dictionary, she finally held it up for the adults to see. 'Good morning. When do we start?'

"Eager, are you?" asked Elise. Hazel gave her a nod, to which the woman laughed. "Good. I am glad one of the young ones is interested. Amorette will work with you and Serge today. Chantal, I'll be teaching you myself and keeping you from staring at Claude the whole time. How he has not noticed your crush, I will never understand. Claude..." She sighed and shook her head. "I honestly do not know why you keep turning the tanning solution to sludge, but work on it again, and please get it right this time. We still have some left, but it will only last another month or two."

Hazel had to work to keep her scowl to herself. The first day she was here, when she had gone walking and talking with Grégorie, they found two dead deer and brought them back to butcher. That part had been gross enough, but it paled in comparison to the smell that came out of a jar of nasty yellow-brown paste he had pulled off a shelf. Even after he had finished coating the hides in and they walked away from his tannery shack, the smell still lingered in her nose for hours.