I am one of six children. None of us were born to the same mothers or abandoned by the same fathers, but we are family nonetheless.
I am the oldest. The cottage was dusty and cold and empty when she brought me to it. She looked as if she hadn’t realized it until then, as if she were just looking at it then through my eyes. She sat me in the only chair at the rickety table and swept and cleaned the cottage from roof to cellar, and I was too small to know anything except that I wasn’t with my mother and didn’t know how to get back to her, and was too afraid of the woods to run away and try.
She brought the others when they were younger. She said she didn’t particularly like babies, but it seemed better for them that way, to never know any parent but her.
She might have been right. I might have been different if I hadn’t been old enough, just, to remember my mother, and to know she gave me away.
What for? Riches? Love? The woman who is not my mother but is a better mother to me now won’t tell me. She says it wouldn’t do me any good to know.
Just like it wouldn’t do any of the others any good. There are seven chairs around a strong new table now. She planted a seed in the moonlight one night, and, a week later, there it was, waiting for the two of us to carry it inside.
As the oldest, I do everything I can to help her and learn from her. She looks at me sadly sometimes when I ask about potions or curses. She says it won’t do me any good to go looking for revenge, either. She teaches me to heal instead, and to grow things that would normally take a mortar and pestle, she says, or a saw to make. The most important thing, she says, is to know how to ask the woods for anything. They’re kind and loving, and will give it.
Maybe I’ll ask the woods for revenge. Maybe, if the witch who is better than my mother had taken me away, the promised firstborn, when I was a babe, I might not have wanted it. But somewhere out there is a woman, and maybe a man, too, who are rich or powerful or in love because she gave me up. And since I paid for it, it only seems fair if I take it back.
