The girl from the mist

Chapter One

"Did you hear about the monster?"
Cassandra looked up from the cauldron she was scrubbing, brushing a lock of auburn hair out of her eyes. She did so with the back of her hand: The dregs left in the bottom of the large vessel was vile, and liable to turn her into something unpleasant. She eyed the youth in the doorway with some skepticism.
"What monster?"
Vance shrugged, nonchalantly picking his nails with a thin dagger his father had given him. It was a silly thing to do: A stick would have been better, and at any rate, the spoiled fellow never got his hands dirty. He only did it because that rogue that had been passing through last year had done it.
"It's some sort of dragonspawn, apparently," he said, with feigned calm. "A wyrm, Father says."
Cassandra snorted, and went back to her cauldron.
"Wyrms come in every shape and size. The farmers have probably just seen a slightly larger serpent or something."
The youth got offended.
"If he says its a monster, it's a monster" he said, flatly. Cassandra rolled her eyes, which he did not see.
"Sure, sure..."
"It is!"
Cassandra straightened her back, and drying her hands on her apron, turned to look at him. They were standing in the smaller scullery, kept separate from the larger scullery since you really didn't want to mix alchemy and cooking. Or potion making, for that matter. The smooth, stone floor stretched a long way between the soapstone sink where she was washing and to the sunlit doorway where the Weapons Master's son stood.
He probably wasn't all that bad to look at: Tall, with a smooth head of black hair and brown eyes. His body was muscular with years of practising a variety of weapons, and he liked to show it off, wearing brown leather pants and sleeveless vests. A girl might fall for him, if she didn't know he was such a prat.
She nodded at his fingers.
"You're still pretty dirty" she remarked. "Are you sure you don't want to borrow one of my hairpins?"
He guiltily lowered the knife for a fraction of a second, then straightened up, offended.
"Girls don't know the first thing about monsters" he said haughtily, and removed himself from the doorway. Cassandra turned back to her cauldron, scrubbing industriously for a little while, then stopped to listen.
There was a satisfying yelp, such as might be caused by a young man pushing a blade too far underneath his fingernails in an effort to get the dirt out. Smiling slightly to herself, Cassandra kept cleaning.