Days Go By.

Chapter 5: From petals to people.

The sun shone like a cat's golden eye as it began to kiss the horizon. I sat in the grass with my sister Ingrid as we wove daisies into long, looping chains.  Grandmother was not far away, sewing the shoulder of Peter's shirt. He was trying to hold his arm perfect you Still while at the same time, jerking his head away as she occasionally stopped sewing to pick at a knot in his shaggy red hair. Tonight is the full May moon. Tonight I get married. As tradition dictates we will get married under the full moon and sleep under the stars. Tomorrow my family will help us clear an area of the forest and build our house, where my new life will start. We will not offer a sacrifice of our best food and Young saplings to the Green god in order to bless the land. I'll be grown and married by the age of fifteen. I'll leave my mother and my father. My sister Ingrid is  twelve years old, it won't be long before she is betrothed and gets Married. Then my parents and grandmother will be all alone, but so goes life. To be honest I can't wait to establish  my new life as a grown member of the coven. This will be a great adventure, and it will only get better as I share it with someone I love. I may be young but I am sure I will spend a long life with Peter, a life that will age like wine and only get better with time. I leave Ingrid with her flowers and go inside the dugout to retrieve my deer antler comb. I kiss my mother on the cheek while she pulls fresh bread from the fire and I go back outside. Taking a seat in front of Peter, I begin to comb the few stray knots in his hair. "Finished" said grandmother, contently as she cuts the thread and placed the needle back in the apron of her blue dress. Before she stood to go help my mother she tightened the bottom of her long white braid. I drop the comb and turn around in the grass, gracefully tucking the fancy white skirts of my new dress beneath me. Mother and I spent two weeks sewing it. 

"Peter can you braid my hair?" I ask sweetly. He nods and tries to untangle himself from the web of thread that was left over from grandmother's mending. I laugh softly as I watch him over my shoulder. He tries to roll it back onto the spool and after three tries he finally does so without dropping the spool and unwinding more than he was trying to put away in the first place.
He sits behind me and I look straight ahead as he very slowly braids my hair. Something doesn't feel right. My hair feels like he's pulling it in five different directions and tying a knot. He makes a huffing noise.

"Sabilla how do I braid hair?"

"Exactly the Same way that we braided those lavender stalks that we were drying yesterday." He makes a rather nasal noise of recognition.

"Ooooh" he quickly begins to braid my hair properly. He finishes as my mother runs out of the dugout wearing her  blue dress skirts which are the same beautiful blue as grandmothers good dress, they make her blonde hair stick out.  They are balled up in her hands as she runs, shouting to us.

"Sabilla! Ingrid! Mother!?" She See's us and rushes over, kneeling beside Ingrid who still sits just a few feet away. Grandmother comes around the dugouts corner with a fresh bucket of well water which he places on a milking stool before go goes to comfort my mother.

"Elena? What is it child?" She asked soothingly as she rubs my mother's arm.

"I have a terrible feeling that something is coming, something awful." My mother listens closely to her intuitions. She is very good with runes and used them to predict the weather often. Unlike grandmother and myself, she doesn't think of a premonition as an accurate way to predict the future. She doesn't have the ability to get premonitions, so every time grandmother or I have one she simply sighs and tells us to read the runes, it's the one thing about Mother that truly annoys me. "I was reading the runes to see if there would be a storm tonight and as soon as they hit the bowl a shudder went through my spine and I began to fear that something bad was coming." Grandmother continued to try and calm her daughter, mother has been very on edge lately. It began when we were told we couldn't go to the market to resupply this month. An elder of our coven said that things in the village were getting g worse all the time and that it was not safe to travel there. Not that it would matter whether or not we went into town because there is no longer any market to speak of. The sickness has spread to the whole village and no new traders are traveling there to sell their goods. Mothers and fathers are turning against each other, against their own children. People are blaming each other for the infection and killing whomever they blame. On the horizon I see a glow. The setting sun bathed the land in an orange glow but this thin line was different, it was a darker orange, more like a red. Ingrid jumps to her feet and stands beside my mother.