Cloak as Red as Blood

Chapter 3: To Grandmother's House we Go

After my chilling encounter with Humphrey, and the save from the Loxley brothers, I continued 

on my way to Granny Gothle's cottage. She lived out of town on a hill  overlooking the town of 

Thorne. She lived alone and didn't get much visitors, because most of  the villagers were afraid 

of her. Those that did visit her, often asked to have their fortunes told, as my grandmother was 

the town fortune teller. When I was a girl I asked my mother if Granny could actually peer into 

the future. She would tell me not to be ridiculous, and that only the gods could predict the 

future. "Your grandmother has to make a living, just like we all do. There's no such thing as 

magic my dear, just hard work to keep oneself alive." I tried to heed my mother's words yet still 

some of the things my grandmother had predicted had come to pass. 

A girl I knew from the Warren, named Wendy, went to my grandmother asking who she would 

marry. Granny predicted that she would marry the son of a Slummer. Needless to say Wendy 

was displeased with this reading and came back to the village in tears. However she and a friend

 of mine ,named Tom, met at the market one day and fell in love. Within the year she left her 

home of riches to become a Slummer and marry Tom. It was a beautiful wedding, well as 

beautiful as Slummers could make it. 

One year Granny predicted that a horrible storm of death and destruction would ravage the 

fields, and leave us all hungry for the winter. Many of the townsfolk just laughed her warning off,

 but sure enough swarms of locusts appeared that summer, killing our crops and effectively 

starving our livestock. It was the hungriest year of my life. 

Mother was partially right, not all of Granny's predictions had come true, but she couldn't deny 

that her mysterious intuition was right on occasion. I always figured that one of the reasons 

Mother and Granny didn't get along was because of her profession. It was one of the things the 

two would always argue about during our visits. Granny believed in the things she saw and felt 

she was helping people. Mother thought she was just a senile old woman and that she was 

scamming people out of their money. I guess Mother had thought she could put an end to what 

she called "false prophecies", by urging  Granny to come live with us. She felt that time with her 

family and distance from the lonely hills would bring comfort to her "troubled mind".   

Mother would always pressed the issue when I was little, but Granny would always refuse each 

time she asked. Another thing the two would argue about; Granny said she liked her 

independence and wouldn't move. Mother had warned her that the woods behind her cottage 

were crawling with beasts, but Granny just scoffed and waved her off. "I've lived in this cottage 

for over twenty years. I'm not about to leave the home I built just because of some big scary