Gold And Shadow - The Books Of Beginning

2. Meaning In Dreams

Lillian Bradshaw was seven years old when she received her first glimpse of the future.

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Little Lillian lived in a tiny town in Northern England, the kind of town where they tried their best to grow enough crops for everyone but didn't always succeed. The kind of town where everyone knew everyone and where it was expected that you would grow up and join the scramble for food and shelter and life. The kind of town that no one ever came to, and that people rarely left, because where would they go, when this was the only life they knew?

Like many people, Lillian had a family. She had a mother, Eleanor (Nellie), and a grandmother, Matilda (Mattie). She had a father, once, a man named Allan Bradshaw, who had worked on the farms and lived in their cottage and had been married to her mother. Until he did the unthinkable and ran off to London to make a new life with a new woman. That was three years ago, and no one in the village had heard from him since.

Now it was only Nellie and Mattie and Lillian in their tiny cottage, with two small rooms inside of it, making ends meet any way they could. Nellie worked the gardens and picked berries and apples when they were ripe. She even took on what farm-work she could get during the harvest, though it wasn't good for her back. Mattie cooked and baked and sewed and did everything she could to keep their house, and the village in general from falling apart. And both of them, as well as their neighbor, Agnes, the widow next door, scolded the wild Lillian as she darted around, flowers woven in her black hair, feet bare and dirt coated, leaving chaos in her path.

"Lillian Bradshaw! You stay out of my daffodils, you hear!" Agnes would yell from her front step, and Lillian would promptly ignore her.

Still, they cared, and while they might have showed it through well intentioned scoldings and pieces of old fashioned advice just as much as hugs and kisses, it was only because they wanted to protect her. Agnes from becoming like "that no good irresponsible tramp of a father" or so Lillian had overheard her telling Nellie one day. As for the women raising Lillian, they did want to instill in her the sense of responsibility Allan never had, yes, but they had an even more important reason to protect the young girl.

The woman of Lillian's lineage were quite unique (the men less so, though now and then an exception to that statement arrived) and the reason for that uniqueness was the natural magic they possessed, magic tied to their soul and wielded by their will. Both Mattie and Nellie were witches with moderate gifts. Mattie was skilled at household magic, infusing the things she cooked and sewed with her power to increase their quality. Nellie was a gifted potion maker and herb grower. Both women expected to see signs of Lillian developing her own gift soon, and while the thought made them proud, it also made them afraid.

Neither witch was a fool, and both knew that tensions between magical beings and humans had been rising in the more urban parts of this country and others. They had no doubt that the same hatred could spread to the village if they ever revealed just what they were. So the women hid their gifts, under the guise of "family recipes", "green thumbs", and "a knack for healing". Their neighbors accepted this, able to overlook the strange things that sometimes occurred with strategic ease, keeping all of them safe. 

Still, it was a delicate balance, and if the day came when their neighbors could no longer think of their oddities as "god working in mysterious ways", they would be in grave danger. For all their fellow villagers embraced their bible, the idea of "loving thy neighbor" would only extend so far. 

It was for this reason, this fear, that Mattie and Nellie were so strict with Lillian. They would rather stifle her wildness and have her alive then let her run free and watch her die.

Of course, being a rambunctious seven year old, Lillian didn't understand any of this. And, even more annoying to her than her mother's strict attitude was the fact that no one seemed to have any good answers to the things she didn't understand. Like why no one ever left the village to become anything other than a farmer. Or why Agnes and everyone else were always going on about bibles and prayer (neither Mattie nor Nellie was religiously inclined, so Lillian didn't grow up with a faith, unlike most of the other children in her village). She didn't understand why she had to keep quiet, and why she couldn't tell anyone she was a witch, though that was one rule she didn't dare to test. She didn't understand why her father had left them. She didn't understand why humans hated magic and anything else that was different.